It was a struggle. You went to buy some device and you had to check it was not one of those windows-only ones. Modems were particularly bad, for example.

You had to read the how-tos and figure things out. Mailing lists and newsgroups were the only places to find some help.

You had to find the shop willing to honour warranty on the parts and not on the whole system, as they had no knowledge of Linux at all. But once you found them, you were a recurring customer so they were actually happy. You might even have ended up showing them memtest86!

You would still be able to configure the kernel and be able to actually know some of those names, compilation would take several hours but it was a learning experience.

You could interact with very helpful kernel developers and get fixes to test.

You could have been the laughing stock of your circles of friends, but within you, you knew who’d have had the last laugh.

And yes, Loki games had some titles working on Linux natively, Railroad Tycoon was one. Too bad they were ahead of the times and didn’t last much.

You can choose KDE as desktop environment during Debian installation, or replace whatever DE you installed at any time.

Oh, come on, did you really have to pull emacs into this crossfire? Leave us weirdos alone!

It is very usable, provided you pay attention to major upcoming changes. To give you a very recent example, during May they switched the time libraries to use 64 bits, and like others said, it was dependency hell until the tide of all the packages being recompiled passed. In those cases, unless you know EXACTLY what to do, it’s better to wait for updates to come in, let apt sort out what could be updated and what had to wait, and just make sure it doesn’t propose you to delete things. After 2 weeks it was all business as usual. Side note: aptitude (my package manager of choice) was unusable, while apt threaded on and pulled me out of the tangle.

I tried once. Could not figure it out. I’ll leave that to the young people.

Clean install on a new computer. Then upgrades until the computer gets retired. Debian at home, Ubuntu server at work.

I like playing with distros and other OSes in VMs, if the thing doesn’t have a well defined upgrade procedure it gets ditched pretty soon.

Yes, when you are for example checking if the permissions in the directory are correct, or if you want to check if your nfs export is working. It’s one of those commands that once you know it exists, you WILL find a way to use it.

I told my would-be boss that if he wanted me to be productive I’d better have a Linux machine

Is there a particular reason you can’t just open 2 xterm and run each command in its own ?

Are you using it via WiFi or usb? Are you able to see both the printer and the scanner in the printer configuration panel?

What printer do you have?

You might be able to reset the root password by booting to single user, or using a rescue usb.

That said, you could take the chance to try one of the BSDs.

And don’t forget to defrag, while you are at it.

I had something like this and if I remember correctly it had to do with antialiasing. Try changing that settings

Check if you have some accessibility options enabled, disable everything if you don’t need it. I have xfce on 2 older laptops and it doesn’t do that.

xterm. Simple. Gets the job done.

sorry, I should have replied as top comment. I meant that on plain debian you can put executables in /etc/update-motd.d. That should do, otherwise have a look at libpam-motd , or steal the systemd scripts from an ubuntu install

I did, maybe 2 debian releases ago, though.

you should be able to drop an executable in /etc/update-motd.d/

also have a look at libpam-motd or at the systemd scripts that ubuntu uses

I miss “lp1 on fire” :-(