Hacker News Reader

It seems notable that trying to run a modern computer without Google is about as quixotic as was trying to run a '90s-era computer without Microsoft.

View on HN

Apple seems to have done fine in both examples.

Apple almost went bankrupt and had to be rescued by Microsoft during that period.

PCs were for boring suit types in the 90s. Windows 3.1, ugh. Lots of people ran Amigas or Macs at home and RISC workstations at university or work. Then Linux happened and you could run something nice even on a PC. It involved tinkering but advancing by leaps and bounds, certainly not quixotic.

You forgot to turn off your hipster vision.

Running something nice on Linux is still challenging today, in 2014. It was no picnic in the 90's.

Credentials: I was running Linux before Linux was cool, it was called Minix.

When I first started there was no automount for CD/DVD drives!

That made it pretty unusable for all but the most tech savvy.

When I first started there were no CD/DVD drives :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com