[off-topic] The thrill has gone ....

[Garry]

On 3/03/14 4:22 AM, Richard Meyer wrote:
> On Sun, 2014-03-02 at 20:44 +0800, Gavin Chester wrote:
>> On 02/03/14 14:43, Richard Meyer wrote:
>>> Y'know, ten years ago a topic like this would have had people climbing
>>> up the wall.
>>>
>>> OK, it's the middle day of a long weekend in Perth, but I expected more
>>> heat than this .....
>> So, you've outed yourself as a troll now then, eh Richard ;-)
>>
> No, I was wondering whether anyone else had the same feelings.
>
> Take a look at the traffic on the Plug main list - 12 years ago it was
> really busy, full of questions, opinions and success stories, now I get
> maybe 5 emails a week.
>
> And I realise you're TTP, but we do seem to be a LOT less bleeding edge
> than we were. Whether that is due to everything just working, or due to
> some other reason, I cannot say.
>
I vividly remember being introduced to this Linux thing by Nick in the 
90s. I *think* it was around 1995 but I'm not sure.
RH was at version 5 (I bought a tome that was about 2" thick), and 
getting X working properly on my Toshiba laptop involved script editing, 
kernel compilation, a full moon and a goat sacrifice. With a full moon 
only once a month or so, a kernel taking most of the day on a 486 and 
cooperative goats pretty rare, this early X stuff is not fondly remembered!!

I'm so glad that getting even Debian working is easy. I've never tried 
using LFS or Arch or Gentoo in a self flagellating mission to squeeze 
that last drop of performance out of the hardware, computer horsepower 
is just so cheap and has been for ages. Maybe one day if I try bittcoin 
mining I'll need to go for the Nth degree..

The Debian derivatives have taken the challenge that remains - as little 
that it is - and I enjoy Mint usually.

I must admit to stepping into the shadows a little though. I bought a 
Mac Book Air because I was impressed by the quality of the hardware. 
Very light, great screen, great sound. I use it at work for 
entertainment. Yes, on a 12hr night shift VLC often gets a run! Most of 
OSX is a pain in comparison, the available free software pales in 
comparison to Linux imho. I could use a virtual machine within but it 
only has a 128GB SSD.

I recently discovered you can script unrar to expand all the directories 
of rar files beneath without having to sit around and load up a gui for 
each movie/episode. This is simple enough for Those Who Know, but as a 
first time user of bash's "for" function I love it.. There is no easy 
off-the-shelf command line equivalent to unrar for osx that I've found. 
Or a good equivalent to ripperx (I refuse to get sucked into the itunes 
vortex) that I've seen.

Maybe the time is up for osx and it's time for a linuxified MBA... 
Anyone done a bare metal installation of Linux (say Mint or Ubuntu) on a 
MB Air?

Garry