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Comment by fit2rule | Hacker News Reader

I was there. Man, how things have changed. I'll never forget the feeling of getting Linux booted on my old 386 the day Linus posted about it to the minix-list .. what a rocket-ride its been!

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If only that ride was towards better personal desktop computers where people have control over instead of towards data farms controlled by a handful of multinational corporations meant to be accessed by locked down mobile consumption terminals masquerading as social devices through supposedly open standards which are so complex as to only be implementable by said multinational corporations... it'd be nice.

Strange comment for a video about the 1999 LinuxWorld.

The comment is for the comment i replied to, not the linked video. If it was for the video i'd post it as a top level comment.

(though if anything around 1999 things were most likely looking towards desktop use, it wouldn't be until a few years later that computing would turn away from desktop and towards the web and later towards mobiles)

The ideal desktop is out there, you can find it and use it - there are certainly Linux distributions that fill your requirements.

Then again: systemd. Grrumphh! :P

I think you missed the point of my comment a bit :-P.

It was about how mainstream technology today focuses on web-based stuff, data harvesting, mobile phones (and how they are way more locked down than your typical desktop computer - even when taking Windows into account), complexity of all these things, etc and desktop computers have fallen to the wayside (ironically everything mentioned is power by Linux).

FWIW i think desktop peaked around Windows 2000 and on Linux around GNOME 2 and KDE 3.5, since then everything has becoming progressively worse. But -IMO- that is a consequence of the lack of focus on the desktop in general.

Yes, I think the OS vendors are asleep at the wheel, or they're drunk/high on the moolah to be made by putting the user out there in the data-harvesting markets.

If we had still real OS vendors, there wouldn't be Dropbox or Facebook - these services would've just been folded in as user-controllable, user-centric services that the local OS manages .. I think the general public have been betrayed by those who should have been building better user-controlled operating systems, rather than exposing it all ..

Remember the original Dropbox post [1]? "You can do it with rsync!". The general public seem to want this. Companies just seem to do what people want. I guess those things are ease of use, zero friction, and minimum learning curve. To do all that in Linux for example, you have to invest in learning, which might not be what people want.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

People want that because all they know is the positive aspects that are advertised to them, not the negative aspects that are kept hidden and downplayed.

> FWIW i think desktop peaked around Windows 2000 and on Linux around GNOME 2 and KDE 3.5

IMO the peak of KDE was version 2.2... 3.0 was already a step backwards, although it did become quite good again by the time it reached 3.5. Then with 4.0 everything was reset once more (how many times can you break the ecosystem until application developers and users have had enough of it?)

TBH i never used 2.x, after KDE1.x i mainly used Window Maker (and still use that when on Linux) with the exception of a couple of years when i used Ubuntu as my main OS back when it had GNOME 2. I used KDE 3.x (not sure if 3.5 or earlier though) as a secondary system via a tiny Knoppix CD.

Me too. I remember sitting there up front(in the room @ the stage) waiting for the doors to open... and then seeing all the folks flood in. I had never been able to see what it looked like outside until now.

That show, and the times surrounding it was probably some of the best of my life. It's such a shame I didn't appreciate it as much at the time as I should have.... I took it all for granted. I remember after that show, I think we went back to Larry's house and Linus and family were there with all the kids... Such an amazing time.

my favorite memory from that event was a panel with larry wall, and a few others who i don't remember, hosted by eric raymond.

so many people attended the panel that i think it was moved to la larger hall. at the start ESR commented on the size of the audience saying something like: "[i was expecting a quiet chat but] you guys turned it into a rock concert"

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