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Stefano Marinelli

25 years ago today, Google was founded.
On the same day, I wiped Windows 98 off my computer, believing that Debian Linux (which I had been using for a while but still kept Windows on another partition) could do everything I had been doing with Windows until then.

Since that day, many installations of Linux, *BSD, MacOS have graced my computers, but Windows has remained, on a few occasions, only an occasional (unwelcome) guest.

In the spirit of a typical support group phrase, I can joyfully say:
'Hello, I'm Stefano, and I haven't been using Windows as my primary operating system for 25 years.'

Please boost and share your experience!

#Linux #OpenSource #OperatingSystems #TechJourney #GoogleAnniversary #Debian #MacOS #BSD #WindowsJourney #Mastodon #TechLife #GeekLife #Google #Windows

4 Sep 2023 at 10:07 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
62 comments
nameisnotimportant

@stefano

I'm glad that worked well for you, can I ask you how do you edit your PDFs?

4 Sep 2023 at 10:26 | Open on mastodon.online
DELETED
Stefano Marinelli

@nameisnotimportant I'm using a Mac as main computer for my daily tasks, so I'm using native Apple tools

4 Sep 2023 at 18:42 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
Jeremi M Gosney :verified:

@nameisnotimportant @stefano Master PDF Editor works great on Linux, it's not FOSS but the license is much more reasonable than paying Adobe

4 Sep 2023 at 19:41 | Open on infosec.exchange
Juan CamΓ³s

@stefano

Hi,

I'm Juan and I've been a non-windows user for (not so many years as you @stefano πŸ˜†) 15+ years. Now (after a nice period of #Linux) proudly with more years using #FreeBSD as my main OS.

woot woot!

4 Sep 2023 at 10:28 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
Stefano Marinelli

@jcamos Thank you for sharing your experience!

4 Sep 2023 at 18:42 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
Juan CamΓ³s

@stefano

Now that I think of it (I'm giggling), this thread looks like a support group for people recovering from Windows (not meant to be offensive):

- "Hi, I'm Juan and I haven't been drinking windows for 15 years now!"

*** support group clapping ***

πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚

4 Sep 2023 at 21:58 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
Stefano Marinelli

@jcamos yes, that was the exact idea I had when I wrote that sentence πŸ˜†

4 Sep 2023 at 21:59 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
DELETED

@stefano 23 years since the days of Linux Slackware and SUSE :)
Those were interesting times, when people thought Windows 2000 would save them from the Novelll Netware license extortion, and few knew who the BSA was.
Today, I still have a physical disk with a duly licensed copy of Windows, only for Steam.

4 Sep 2023 at 11:32 | Open on mastodon.social
Stefano Marinelli

@fluxwatcher You're an "old" adopter, just like me!

4 Sep 2023 at 18:43 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
DELETED

@stefano I bet I can send shivers down your spine if I mention Hercules cards and XFree86 in one sentence πŸ˜‚

4 Sep 2023 at 18:48 | Open on mastodon.social
Stefano Marinelli

@fluxwatcher It does! As does when I think I was using XFree86 with my Matrox Mystique πŸ™‚

4 Sep 2023 at 18:50 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
DELETED
Stefano Marinelli

@fluxwatcher Beautiful gif! Quite appropriate! πŸ™‚

4 Sep 2023 at 18:59 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
DELETED

@stefano Good thing that age is a state of mind πŸ˜‰

4 Sep 2023 at 19:00 | Open on mastodon.social
Stefano Marinelli
Graham Perrin

@fluxwatcher a few days ago, I couldn't understand why MATE Calculator was responding strangely to numerical input.

After a few failed attempts: I stopped trying to use KCharSelect as a calculator.

Then, I couldn't understand why the true calculator was responding strangely to numerical input.

After a few failed attempts – including random clicks on things that I had not previously noticed in MATE Calculator: I stopped trying to use KCalc as if it was my MATE.

11 May at 8:52 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
chimay

@stefano I discovered the linux world in '95 : barebones X11, sparse doc (no arch or gentoo wiki, didn't even know about the handbook), internet was young. Back then, dependency-aware packages manager didn't exist, at least on linux. IIRC, Debian changed that a few years later with apt, then Mandrake (ancestor of Mageia) developed urpmi, and now you couldn't imagine a distro without this feature.

I heard of Freebsd in 2006, but unfortunetly didn't had the opportunity to use it as much.

4 Sep 2023 at 12:18 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
Stefano Marinelli

@chimay I remember those time (I started with Linux in 1996). The main problem was the lack of documentation. When Gentoo came out, I learnt a lot of things, but the FreeBSD handbook has been my manual for Unix and Unix like systems as many things could apply to any of them.

4 Sep 2023 at 18:45 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
chimay

@stefano we have now plenty of good docs and wiki !

From what I've seen so far on freebsd doc & man pages, examples are often available, which is a good starting point when you discover sthg new.

4 Sep 2023 at 18:56 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
Stefano Marinelli

@chimay FreeBSD (and the other BSDs) is full of documentation, OpenBSD has some perfect documentation. Linux has the great Arch Wiki (and others).

It's much much easier today. Maybe less fun? πŸ˜‰

4 Sep 2023 at 18:59 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
DELETED

@stefano Yggdrasil in 1993 (Linux kernel 0.99). After that SUSE, mostly because you could buy it as an offline 6 a 7 CD box set (ComputerCollecfief in Amsterdam!) so I could take it with me to Africa where I worked at the time and internet access was…challenging. These days Kali in a VM on a Mac Studio. Reluctantly a (licensed) copy of Win11 in a VM just because old electronics test equipment only come with, mostly terrible, windows software.

4 Sep 2023 at 12:48 | Open on mastodon.social
Stefano Marinelli

@Bleijswijk Keeping a copy of Windows around for some, specific uses is more or less normal. My home alarm system software can be programmed only from Windows (Wine doesn't work with it). So I have to keep a Windows installation for this. And, I must admit, for the few times per year I have time to play some games. πŸ™‚

4 Sep 2023 at 18:47 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
Adrian Cochrane

@stefano I think its about a decade now for me...

I grew up in an Apple family, and had been dabbling in Linux-based systems before then. But when I found elementary OS I loved it & didn't look back. Especially now.

Professionally I still use Macs (or occasionally Windows) some, but I've got elementary OS there too.

4 Sep 2023 at 19:19 | Open on floss.social
Stefano Marinelli

@alcinnz On my workstation, I use MacOS daily as it fits my needs. But there are always both a FreeBSD and Linux VMs ready to go πŸ™‚

4 Sep 2023 at 19:21 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
Arne Babenhauserheide

@stefano 18 years ago I decided that Apple had gone too far with TPM and replaced it with Gentoo GNU Linux.

I fell back once β€” after a month, because of audio-problems. But January 2006 my CD writer broke and the seller said that’s not a product problem (more than 1 year old). Instead of buying a new one, I spent twice that and my flatmate helped me build my own computer. And iMac got Linux again.

It would take until 2008 with KDE 4 that I felt at home.
There’s a blog: basis.draketo.de/wordpress/

@stefano 18 years ago I decided that Apple had gone too far with TPM and replaced it with Gentoo GNU Linux.

I fell back once β€” after a month, because of audio-problems. But January 2006 my CD writer broke and the seller said that’s not a product problem (more than 1 year old). Instead of buying a new one, I spent twice that and my flatmate helped me build my own computer. And iMac got Linux again.

4 Sep 2023 at 19:24 | Open on rollenspiel.social
Stefano Marinelli
Arne Babenhauserheide

@stefano don’t get fooled by the "wordpress" in the URL: this is a static copy, because I didn’t want to keep wordpress updated with security updates (that’s some serious upkeep otherwise). Also broken encoding …

4 Sep 2023 at 19:27 | Open on rollenspiel.social
Stefano Marinelli

@ArneBab It's perfectly readable. I'm going to read (a translation, of course) it when at bed. I love those vintage blog posts, my blog started in 2006 so I have some of them, too (this became quite famous in those years, but it's in Italian: dragas.net/posts/gli-informati)

4 Sep 2023 at 19:29 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
Arne Babenhauserheide

@stefano wow, nice ☺

You can also look at my even older website … (I set myself a policy not to break my links, so I preserve all the old versions I can) β†’ draketo.de/index1.html (this goes back to around 2003, if I can trust the news on it)

I actually had a starting banner page for the battles of those days back then: draketo.de/indexalt.html

Totally outdated battles against software patents, DRM, and wars of aggression …

… written in an editor that provided realtime online collaboration …

@stefano wow, nice ☺

You can also look at my even older website … (I set myself a policy not to break my links, so I preserve all the old versions I can) β†’ draketo.de/index1.html (this goes back to around 2003, if I can trust the news on it)

I actually had a starting banner page for the battles of those days back then: draketo.de/indexalt.html

4 Sep 2023 at 19:52 | Open on rollenspiel.social
Stefano Marinelli

@ArneBab thank you for the link, I'll surely read it!

4 Sep 2023 at 20:12 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
Arne Babenhauserheide

@stefano the top comic in your blog is fun β€” got me a happy laugh ☺

(but we don’t speak gibberish at all! All I say is perfectly understandable … last week a colleague who mostly works with customers said β€œOK, that was too much alien language right now”. I said something about spring with pebble templates and maybe flexbox or so, all totally understandable words … 😬 )

4 Sep 2023 at 19:54 | Open on rollenspiel.social
Arne Babenhauserheide

@stefano reading it after google translate is also super fun, because it almost consistently translates windows with fenster (window) ☺

4 Sep 2023 at 20:03 | Open on rollenspiel.social
Arne Babenhauserheide

@stefano Now read through that and I have to say I only ever gave Windows support to my wife’s family. Though for one tool I actually said β€œlet’s get an external disk that runs Linux”. Which was Ubuntu and promptly installed itself on the main drive instead of the external disk (3 weeks of panic followed until I had recovered most of the data). I only installed Gentoo since then, because there I type everything that happens …

4 Sep 2023 at 20:11 | Open on rollenspiel.social
Arne Babenhauserheide

@stefano … and now she has Linux on an external drive, with KDE and an on-desktop tutorial what to click to do what she wants.

Which is actually pretty cool: with KDE plasma you can build appliances where people have instructions in sticky notes and icons they can click to run exactly what they need, and on-desktop folder-views so they can see the effects without ever having to worry about what lies where.

4 Sep 2023 at 20:12 | Open on rollenspiel.social
Stefano Marinelli

@ArneBab similar for me. My parents' PC runs FreeBSD and they're happy with it. My father in law can't abandon Windows, and it's the only Windows client I have to deal with. Fortunately, it's stable enough

4 Sep 2023 at 20:17 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
Stefano Marinelli

@ArneBab PS: I've been using KDE for many, many years. Now I'm also using xfce and mate but KDE has been my favourite and only DE for many years, when on Linux and FreeBSD

4 Sep 2023 at 19:27 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
Arne Babenhauserheide

@stefano KDE is still my favorite DE, but it makes problems with my xmodmap (M-x doesn’t work β€” that’s a killer with Emacs … it started with their switch to libxcb but no one managed to track down the problem in the past years) so I’m in LXDE at the moment β€” and for work I actually use exwm now.

4 Sep 2023 at 19:28 | Open on rollenspiel.social
dsp

@stefano "Hi i'm spiros and i haven't used windows since 1997" ;) After coming back home from school one day in 1996 i found that my mom had decided to pay _someone_ to reinstall my computer with windows 95 and a thing called drivespace that "increased the available space" by compressing all the data in the partition. As you can imagine this made everything slow af. I then spent one year typing things i had no idea about until i got linux, x11 and pppd working and have been happy ever since.

4 Sep 2023 at 19:24 | Open on social.sdf.org
Stefano Marinelli

@dsp Well, if you haven't used Windows at all since 1997, you've gone much much better than me :-) Congratulations!

4 Sep 2023 at 19:26 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
dsp

@stefano if you had to use it for your work and you know how to use something that i don't, i would turn around that statement to you. I wouldn't mind knowing how to use their stuff (would make my current line of work in security easier too). So congrats to you stefano for being a proper professional when you had to :)

4 Sep 2023 at 19:35 | Open on social.sdf.org
Stefano Marinelli

@dsp I don't understand your last message, I hope I haven't offended you in any way. I just wanted to be positive, it was an appreciation, not any kind of negative statement. If you found it offensive, I beg your pardon as I didn't intend to.

4 Sep 2023 at 19:41 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
dsp

@stefano No man absolutely not!!!! i am just saying that i don't think i deserve congrats for not knowing how to use something!πŸ˜‚ Now i'm sorry if my message reads wrong!

4 Sep 2023 at 19:42 | Open on social.sdf.org
Stefano Marinelli

@dsp oh ok! Now it's all clear. Sorry but English is not my first language and I strive to be always positive. All right then! (Virtual coffee for you from the BSD Cafe) β˜•

4 Sep 2023 at 19:44 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
jhx

@stefano
I started my #Linux and #BSD journey in 2009 - beginning of the year.
It was fresh, new, and all around a good time - fond memories πŸ™‚
I still use #Windows to.
But I can say one thing:
Without #Linux #BSD and #FOSS I would have never grown as a person!
I owe so much to them... so much

I'm jhx (Julian) and I'm still loving #FOSS above everything else - since now almost 15 years 😎

Use #Linux and #BSD :linux: :freebsd: :openbsd:

Fun fact: First #BSD was #OpenBSD 4.5 (Games)

@stefano
I started my #Linux and #BSD journey in 2009 - beginning of the year.
It was fresh, new, and all around a good time - fond memories πŸ™‚
I still use #Windows to.
But I can say one thing:
Without #Linux #BSD and #FOSS I would have never grown as a person!
I owe so much to them... so much

I'm jhx (Julian) and I'm still loving #FOSS above everything else - since now almost 15 years 😎

4 Sep 2023 at 19:38 | Open on fosstodon.org
Stefano Marinelli

@jhx Hi Julian, thank you for sharing your experience!

4 Sep 2023 at 19:42 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
Klaus Zimmermann :unverified:

@stefano very inspiring! I'm nowhere near as close to 25, but have been Windows-free (except work machine) for almost 14 years now. I started with some dual-booting training wheels, but in an accident wiped out the Windows partition a month later, leaving me solely with Linux and no tech support.

I've never looked back. My journey took me to Debian, Arch, Alpine, FreeBSD, and I still wanna try more :D

Written from my Pi4 running #FreeBSD :)

4 Sep 2023 at 19:42 | Open on fosstodon.org
Stefano Marinelli

@kzimmermann writing from a PI running FreeBSD is a very good way to show appreciation for FOSS. Well done!

4 Sep 2023 at 19:45 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
Klaus Zimmermann :unverified:

@stefano yeah, it's the best OS I've found (in terms of performance) for the Pi! Just wish the wifi and sound drivers worked... but with some USB stuff it works very well

4 Sep 2023 at 19:59 | Open on fosstodon.org
Howard Chu @ Symas

@stefano Hi I'm hyc. I only used Windows on my work PC 1995-1999 because that's how that particular company did things. Prior to that I did BSDish kernel hacking on Suns, Vaxes, and Alliant FX. At home I used Atari STs from ~1987 on. In 1999 when we founded Symas I ran a SparcStation 20 at home along with a Linux PC but my primary machine was still the Atari TT I'd been using since 1994.

I've had to run Windows on VMs when porting/testing stuff, but it's never been my primary system.

4 Sep 2023 at 19:52 | Open on mastodon.social
Stefano Marinelli

@hyc windows on a VM is acceptable - many of us need it, from time to time. Unfortunately, I must say πŸ˜†

4 Sep 2023 at 20:13 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
Tony Finch

@stefano when i was a teenager in ~1992 my fantasy computer was an ARM-based unix workstation … not counting raspberry pi (never my daily driver) my wish came true 30 years later with an M1 Mac, which would have been a BIG surprise to teenaged me

in between i have enjoyed using FreeBSD and Debian Linux among other free and open source unixes

and only i used windows in dire circumstances πŸ€“

4 Sep 2023 at 21:57 | Open on mendeddrum.org
Stefano Marinelli

@fanf oh, if we could talk to ourselves, when we were teenagers. I think they'd be completely amazed by the tech advance. At that time, I was dreaming of a portable computer, always on our hands with all the text of all the books. We got there much earlier than expected.
And sometimes I wonder how the world will be 5 or 10 years from today.

4 Sep 2023 at 22:02 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
Mad A. Argon :qurio:

@stefano in June this year I had 10. anniversary of full switch to Linux. I only used Windows on work machine in my previous job (2019-2022) and was shocked how much it enshittified since Windows 7 (my last before switch).

5 Sep 2023 at 21:01 | Open on is-a.cat
Graham Perrin

Hello, I'm Graham.

I don't recall Windows being my primary operating system at any time during my three decades with an organisation where the thousands of staff do, mostly, have Windows as the primary OS.

@stefano

11 May at 8:45 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
Ludovic :Firefox: :FreeBSD:

@stefano so Dos 3.3 and Prodos user until 1991.Then macos7 and atari gem then beos Slackware and os/2. Windows at works. Macosx until 2015 linux fedora since then. Considering switching nomadbsd.

Nsca mosaic on mac, then Netscape then mozilla nightly.

11 May at 8:53 | Open on piaille.fr
Paul Wilde 😺 (snac2 acct)
@stefano@bsd.cafe probably about 20-25 years ago I started looking into using Linux, and tinkered with a few distros (Debian, Fedora, Arch, openSUSE) in dual boot set up or as VMs, to test the waters of having a system I could configure for me, not configure myself for it.
Ultimately I made the absolute switch about 15 or so years ago (Arch...btw, and servers set up with RHEL based, Debian or FreeBSD) and haven't looked back.
I still have a Windows VM which I can spin up for those times I need it, but it's pretty much just 2 uses I have for it, I can do everything else on Linux or BSD.

Of course, I still have to support windows as part of my daily work... But of course I provide solutions via Linux or BSD
@stefano@bsd.cafe probably about 20-25 years ago I started looking into using Linux, and tinkered with a few distros (Debian, Fedora, Arch, openSUSE) in dual boot set up or as VMs, to test the waters of having a system I could configure for me, not configure myself for it.
11 May at 9:59 | Open on snac.notnull.space
Zeki Γ‡atav πŸ€” β˜• πŸ•―οΈπŸŽΆ
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