palordrolap

Black and white 80x25 BIOS text screen with the IBM PC ROM font, not unlike the MS-DOS it sought to replace.

Everything else is fluff on top of that, possibly occupying different graphics planes available in whatever hardware is available.

Yes, technically modern PCs and Linux have moved beyond that 80x25 screen for the most part, but its immediate descendant is still in use, often during boot, but also on Ctrl-Alt-F[1-6] on many distros.

I caught trouble the other day for saying this. Apparently there are themes for GNOME (even GTK4) that can mitigate the limited colour palette(s). Locked-in window layout choices are a different matter entirely, of course, but we can do something about the colour of them.

$ yes n
n
n
n
n
n
n
...

I kind of want to go back in time and make it so that the original yes always printed the first letter of the name it was called by. That way you could symlink any name you like to it and it would do the right thing. Called as no it would print ns, etc. The optional parameter would still be there for longer strings or alternate uses.

The reason time travel would be needed is that there’s bound to be, or have been, someone who has done something weird regarding symlinking yes that relies on it always printing y when it has no parameter, and the name trick would be a breaking change.

Do mine eyes deceive me? Some of those don’t even have the address bar merged with the menu bar and hamburger menu icon… although I can’t tell whether those are just the apps insisting on doing things the tried and tested way.

Nonetheless, I’ll add a note to my original comment.

Edit: The situation is more nuanced than I had been led to believe. This stays for posterity.

Irony. In GTK4 there literally are only two genders: Dark Mode and Light Mode.

Earlier GNOME was much more accepting of alternative window styles.

Note for second (or more) language speakers of English (and maybe a few first language folks as well): The plural ‘s’ is omitted when a sentence fragment is turned into an adjective. It’s supposed to have hyphens in it as well, though these are often left out.

So, for example, “My PC is ten years old and runs Linux” becomes “My ten-year-old PC runs Linux”.

In the case of this meme, it should be “My 10-year-old PC”.

If the day ever comes that I end up in possession of a healthy late 20th century laptop, I’d genuinely consider putting FreeDOS on it. Not least because I threw away my customised MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 floppies years ago (a regrettable decision).

For later hardware, I think I’ll stick with Linux.

For a middle ground, I seem to remember Puppy Linux, which is designed to run on more limited hardware, runs most things as root. (Though maybe they’ve changed that in the intervening years. Correction welcome).

It’s kind of amazing that this is only anachronistic by four months. Both Bliss and (that image of) Tux are both from 1996, and Tux is younger.

Thirty years ago. Please excuse me while I turn to dust.

~/bin is the old-school location from before .local became a thing, and some of us have stuck to that ancient habit.

I’ve always just used gio trash (formerly gvfs-trash). KDE-based systems have something similar (but with syntax that’s perfectly logical but completely unsuitable, in my opinion).

The third party trash package works in places the GUI and the aforementioned GUI-related command line tools may not. I can’t tell whether this is a bug in trash or in the system tools, TBH.

For example, /tmp is one such directory where trash works but gio trash refuses.

Either way, the GUI Rubbish Bin won’t keep track if things are deleted from such places by trash.

If I’m about to run an rm with a slash in it, alarm bells go off in my head. I prefer to cd to the parent and then rm whatever without slashes in the name.

That didn’t save me the other day when I accidentally put a space before an asterisk, but thankfully that wasn’t in a place that was overly important.

Gotta retrain myself to look out for extra nothing now.

I dunno, ~/bin is a fairly common thing in my experience, not that it ends up containing many actual binaries. (The system started it, miss, honest. A quarter of the things in my system’s /bin are text based.)

~/etc is seriously weird though. Never seen that before. On Debians, most of the user copies of things in /etc usually end up under ~/.local/ or at ~/.filenamehere

In LMDE4, 5 and 6, I pretty much had to install the OEM NVIDIA driver because the open source Nouveau driver didn’t quite cut it, but for AMD, the stock driver that comes with LMDE7 has worked fine for my purposes so far.

I may change my tune if I try to run a more modern game*, but that will likely put me back in Frankendebian territory which caused me problems under LMDE6. (As you might surmise, I upgraded to new hardware and tried to do things as I’d always done them when LMDE6 was current.)

* Minecraft notwithstanding, because it both is and isn’t modern. That can get above 1000 FPS if I don’t limit it.

This is true. But then I’m not using the latest version while I still have an active session, and that can lead to weird behaviour or errors after the fact.

Case in point, I once received an Xorg update that I allowed to install, but didn’t restart the computer properly until much, much later.

By then I’d forgotten about the update, so when I restarted and started having graphics problems, I was mystified.

I’ve also forgotten how that all panned out, but in the same situation I’d roll back to a previous Timeshift snapshot and work the system forward again until I find the culprit or things are stable, so I assume that’s what I did back then.

For me, it’s about reducing the amount of time the “update available” icon shows up in the system tray, because its very presence bothers me. Maybe there’s something cool and new. Maybe it fixes a severe security problem. If it’s for programs I’m not using right now, then the update can be applied right now. Otherwise it’s going to have to wait until I’m done. And bother me.

Yes, I could turn updates off and never see it, but that seems like a bad plan in the long run.

An old computer trick / prank / “fun” thing to do was piping random things to /dev/audio, or finding whatever program was available that could take any old file and not complain while translating it to audio by some means or another.

On my distro there are at least three of these programs installed by default: aplay, paplay and pw-play.

Some or all of these will complain if the file or stream they’re given isn’t a recognisable audio file, in which case, there’s a --raw or similar flag where it’ll just shrug and blast whatever through the sound system. If you’re creative, you can set different sample rates and hear it at different speeds.

VLC is just a really fancy way of doing the same thing.

For even more “fun”, try opening a file in Audacity / Tenacity, which will default to raw mode if it can’t tell what a file is, and you get to see the waveform and so on. Just take care not to modify and save over an important file with that.

Yeah, my university had those, but they also had an interface to it accessible from the more modern systems.

I also did a work experience placement with a company that had amber-screen terminals when I was still at school (and the year still started with a 1), so I’m no spring chicken either. They were very early in the process of supplanting them with PCs, which is not something they explicitly told me, but looking back, the evidence was all there.

The “fun” part with those specific terminals was that the admin password for the terminal hardware itself - because they had a rudimentary sort of BIOS on them - was a “fail at the first wrong character” system. With enough tries you could figure it out.

There wasn’t much you could do from there, at least not that I remember, but one of the terminals I used did end up beeping at a slightly different frequency to all the others.

A terminal in the computer sense was originally a screen and keyboard attached to a terminating node on a network. The network didn’t pass through, so it terminated there. This meant the literal, physical hardware. Think old school green- or amber-screen systems attached to a mainframe in the basement somewhere.

A console was a terminal that was serving some kind of purpose and showing some kind of interface for humans to interact with. Without the interface software, a terminal is not a console. Without the hardware, you wouldn’t have either.

It’s easy to see how these things became blurred.

And now it’s worse because we’ve extended the meanings a bit. The program in our fancy GUIs called “Terminal” and which we often just call “a terminal” is actually a terminal emulator.

And to a lesser extent, so is the thing you can access on many distros by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1. This sometimes gets called “the console” because it’s even more like those old terminal interfaces. Full screen. Text only. Largely monochrome. No GUI.

And deeper still, a terminal, console, or terminal emulator doesn’t have to mean “a shell” which is another thing entirely. Shells just happen to be one kind of interface that can run there, and is often the default option in a GUI terminal emulator.

From a console, the default program is generally some flavour of login prompt. And then the system automagically loads whatever is configured as that user’s shell once they log in.

I made sl on my computer a bit more literal. It takes the output of ls -l and reverses every line, including any wrapping within the column width, and pads it to the right of the terminal. One day I might get around to fixing it so that it forces, parses and correctly reverses the ANSI colour codes too.

In /usr/bin, I get lots of lines that “start” with spaces and “end” with things like toor toor 1 x-rx-rxwr-

US English dialects mainly, though there may be pockets in other Anglophone places.