Natanox

I remember the funny lines on the back when I accidentally bumped into the tower or had the subwoofer on as it was burning.

Also holding down on the close-pin on a discman (so it would keep spinning the disc) and differently coloured sharpies were a great way to colourize your collection.

During some practical school training (basically two weeks where pupils are send to work in companies full-time without pay) at an electronics shop, someone brought in a Windows XP machine that caused problems. Heard that sound so often...

Turned out they still ran it without any Service Packs. Windows Update also refused to work… and it was registered to those fine people called "Skidrow" (the cracking group). 😅

At that time those registration cracks already supported Windows Update, they should've updated that one!

Congrats! Be aware that Windows loves to wipe foreign bootloaders though. If your computer suddenly can't boot Mint anymore but goes right into Windows, that's another way of MS screwing with you.

Look, an insult to life.

Boomer don't know how to do shit 'cause computers were so rare. Zoomers don't know how to do shit 'cause big companies profit from people who can't help themselves and have low standards.

There was only a small timeframe where computers were available, accessible yet not enshittificated for profit like today.

That sounds like Debian with extra steps (and a fancy kernel).

Do they have a choice but to suffer?

There are two different "efficiency" and "simplicity" perspectives clashing here. If you already are proficient with the CLI it's arguably more efficient and/or simple than GUI solutions. If you are not then there's literally a steep learning cliff in front of you, something many in the first group apparently either forget or otherwise want to ignore. It just sucks, some people in the community do have a lot of knowledge but a complete lack of understanding for people outside of their tech bubble.

Think this is more of a accessibility thing. No one denies the CLI is really efficient to use if you're a professional, it shouldn't be the norm that you have to be proficient with it to use your computer to the fullest though. Nor to receive help if you don't feel comfortable using it.

It would be nice if everyone could enjoy free and trustworthy computing, including people who either can't or won't learn many dozens text commands and paradigms.

That's a good argument for Snaps & Flatpaks, not for putting an alias in place so "apt install Firefox" gets translated to "snap install org.mozilla.firefox" (or whatever the exact app name is). Corporate clients manage their systems as a fleet anyway, if the IT department sets it up a certain way their employees don't fiddle with this stuff. There's no good argument to redirect a users' CLI commands to whatever Canonical believes is better.

Email apps.

I find it absolutely baffling how an equal amount of people voting on this comment seem to honestly believe that it would've been a realistic option for the majority of people (or even everyone) to get one of those Linux books and read hundreds of sites to fully understand everything necessary to manually setup a LAN party in a reasonable time. On 4 to 16 computers. Are all gamers expected to also be interested in IT enough to read such books? Are they supposed to magically know the existence of manpages? Of course not, 90% of private LANs in the early 2000's would've simply not happened without easily navigable GUIs. At least not with computers.

The ignorance by so many in the Linux community regarding GUI is both baffling and infuriating.