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I really, honestly, am getting annoyed when someone tells me that "Linux is user-friendly". Some people seem to think that because they themselves can install Linux, that anyone can, and because I still use Windows I'm some sort of a noob.
So let me tell you why I don't use Linux: because it never actually "just works". I have tried, at the very least two dozen times, to install one distro or another on a machine that I owned. Never, not even once, not even *close*, has it installed and worked without failing on some part of my hardware.
My last experience was with Ubuntu 17.04, supposed to have great hardware and software support. I have a popular Dell Alienware machine with extremely common hardware (please don't hate me, I had a great deal through work with an interest-free loan to buy it!), and I thought for just one moment that maybe Ubuntu had reached the point where it just, y'know, fucking worked when installing it... but no. Not a chance.
It started with my monitors. My secondary monitor that worked fine on Windows and never once failed to display anything, simply didn't work. It wasn't detected, it didn't turn on, it just failed. After hours of toiling with bash commands and fucking around in x conf files, I finally figured out that for some reason, it didn't like my two IDENTICAL monitors on IDENTICAL cables on the SAME video card. I fixed it by using a DVI to HDMI adapter....
Then was my sound card. It appeared to be detected and working, but it was playing at like 0.01% volume. The system volume was fine, the speaker volume was fine, everything appeared great except I literally had no fucking sound. I tried everything from using the front output to checking if it was going to my display through HDMI to "switching the audio sublayer from alsa to whatever the hell other thing exists" but nothing worked. I gave up.
My mouse? Hell. It's a Corsair Gaming mouse, nothing fancy, it only has a couple extra buttons - none of those worked, not even the goddamn scrollwheel. I didn't expect the *lights* to work, but the "back" and "Forward" buttons? COME ON. After an hour, I just gave up.
My media keyboard that's like 15 years old and is of IBM brand obviously wasn't recognized. Didn't even bother with that one.
Of my 3 different network adapters (2 connectors, one wifi), only one physical card was detected. Bluetooth didn't work. At this point I was so tired of finding things that didn't work that I tried something else.
My work VPN... holy shit have you ever tried configuring a corporate VPN on Linux? Goddamn. On windows it's "next next next finish then enter your username/password" and on Linux it's "get this specific format TLS certificate from your IT with a private key and put it in this network conf and then run this whatever command to...." yeah no.
And don't get me started on even attempting to play GAMES on this fucking OS. I mean, even installing the graphic drivers? Never in my life have I had to *exit the GUI layer of an OS* to install a graphic driver. That would be like dropping down to MS-DOS on Windows to install Nvidia drivers. Holy shit what the fuck guys. And don't get me started on WINE, I ain't touching this "not an emulator emulator" with a 10-foot pole.
And then, you start reading online for all these problems and it's a mix of "here are 9038245 steps to fix your problem in the terminal" and "fucking noob go back to Windows if you can't deal with it" posts.
It's SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING, I spent a whole day trying to get a BASIC system up and running, where it takes a half-hour AT MOST with any version of Windows. I'm just... done.
I will give Ubuntu one redeeming quality, however. On the Live USB, you can use the `dd` command to mirror a whole drive in a few minutes. And when you're doing fucking around with this piece of shit OS that refuses to do simple things like "playing audio", `dd` will restore Windows right back to where it was as if Ubuntu never existed in the first place.
Thanks, `dd`. I wish you were on Windows. Your OS is the LEAST user friendly thing I've ever had to deal with.31 -
It were around 1997~1998, I was on middle school. It was a technical course, so we had programing languages classes, IT etc.
The IT guy of our computer lab had been replaced and the new one had blocked completely the access on the computers. We had to make everything on floppy disks, because he didn't trusted us to use the local hard disk. Our class asked him to remove some of the restrictions, but he just ignored us. Nobody liked that guy. Not us, not the teachers, not the trainees at the lab.
Someday a friend and me arrived a little bit early at the school. We gone to the lab and another friend that was a trainee on the lab (that is registered here, on DevRant) allowed us to come inside. We had already memorized all the commands. We crawled in the dark lab to the server. Put a ms dos 5.3 boot disk with a program to open ntfs partitions and without turn on the computer monitor, we booted the server.
At that time, Windows stored all passwords in an encrypted file. We knew the exact path and copied the file into the floppy disk.
To avoid any problems with the floppy disk, we asked the director of the school to get out just to get a homework we theorically forgot at our friends house that was on the same block at school. We were not lying at all. He really lived there and he had the best computer of us.
The decrypt program stayed running for one week until it finds the password we did want: the root.
We came back to the lab at the class. Logged in with the root account. We just created another account with a generic name but the same privileges as root. First, we looked for any hidden backup at network and deleted. Second, we were lucky: all the computers of the school were on the same network. If you were the admin, you could connect anywhere. So we connected to a "finance" computer that was really the finances and we could get lists of all the students with debits, who had any discount etc. We copied it to us case we were discovered and had to use anything to bargain.
Now the fun part: we removed the privileges of all accounts that were higher than the trainee accounts. They had no access to hard disks anymore. They had just the students privileges now.
After that, we changed the root password. Neither we knew it. And last, but not least, we changed the students login, giving them trainee privileges.
We just deleted our account with root powers, logged in as student and pretended everything was normal.
End of class, we went home. Next day, the lab was closed. The entire school (that was school, mid school and college at the same place) was frozen. Classes were normal, but nothing more worked. Library, finances, labs, nothing. They had no access anymore.
We celebrated it as it were new years eve. One of our teachers came to us saying congratulations, as he knew it had been us. We answered with a "I don't know what are you talking about". He laughed and gone to his class.
We really have fun remembering this "adventure". :)
PS: the admin formatted all the servers to fix the mess. They had plenty of servers.4 -
My dad's old MS-DOS computer (can't remember specs) when I was 5 or 6 years old. This got me into gaming. I always had to ask him to execute the games I wanted to play cause I didn't know how to do it. One of the first games I ever played was Wolfenstein 3D. Was so scary I didn't want to exit the first room :D
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Microsoft are getting a lot of pats on the back today for open sourcing MS-DOS. It might have meant something before FreeDOS was so well established and mature, but now... really, who gives a shit? Even more significant, they already "open sourced" it before, just not hosted on GitHub.
Here's the thing. Going open source is like losing your virginity. You only get to do it once, you can't take it back, and you certainly can't claim to be doing it again just because you're using a different host.
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I seriously do not understand the rants against Windows.
I love Windows 10 (got as free upgrade from MS), and have no issues with MacOS or Linux OS. I use them as well but do all serious work on Windows.
All my life, I have worked on business / commercial side and picked up Web development in last couple of years. I started using computers on DOS in 1992, and shifted to Windows 3.0 in 1995. There was no Mac or MacOS back then.
For serious work, I purchased a old Dell Precision M4700 workstation grade laptop with quad-core i7, at throwaway price, got 32GB RAM, 2.4TB (1x2 TB + 400gb) of SSD on super sale online, and installed it myself. It easily supports dual 4k monitors.
Git-bash on windows allows all the necessary linux command line on windows. Though not tried, Windows 10 allows embedded Ubunutu with linux terminal. Web development tools like - VSCode, git, github / bitbucket clients, NVM/Node, React / Redux / Webpack / Gatsby / Jest, REST clients, GraphQL client and server, Graph Server, Chrome PWA / Chrome Dev Tools, http/Websocket/WebRTC interception, Google Firebase SDKs, AWS sdks, cloud utilities, CI/CD tools work flawlessly. Windows even has its own package manager for applications.31 -
Oh look MS-DOS on GitHub?!
Time to run through more code I don't understand and see what I can learn and potentially port :-D1 -
The initial version of DOS was called QDOS – Quick and Dirty Operating System. The bullshit they tel you about DiSk oPeRaTinG sYsTeM is a lie. It was renamed when MS acquired it.7
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90's programmer used to code in turbo
C and ms-dos. Nowadays ide also make us frustrated sometimes.
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That moment when you realize you're using a Hackintosh with VirtualBox and a CF card to install a Beta version of MS-DOS with DOS SHELL that your brother found on an old BBS forum; on an IBM 5150 from 1981.
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What if I told you : you can use whatever the fuck OS you want, whatever the fuck stack you want ?
And IF you take a job in a certain stack, don't like it ? Quit your job !
Stop beeing whining bitches. Don't like current job ? Find a new one.
You think your app is revolutionary ? TRY and push it (And fail)
You think that at 16 you know better than people who are 30+yo ? prove it by actions.
It's easy. You have full control of what you can do.
Stop bitching, start coding.
windows, linux, mac, MS-DOS. Noone cares what you use. As long as you do the job.20 -
finally got TI to cough up their SDK and I noticed there's no compiler or linker or anything. Turns out I need to use TASM.
...TASM is for MS-DOS or compatible. I'm on Linux.
Well, it went poorly, as usual, specifically like this:
- tried to automate building with DOSBox config and Python script: output binary always corrupted. Manually repeated, TASM mangles output on DOSBox every time. No PCem or 86box, and i'm on a Ryzen, so no KVM DOS. Out of luck there.
- TASM Linux build or wrapper? No build, but there is a wrapper! ...wait, it needs... 4 things written by random people to be made from source. I mean, that's not actually that bad... oh, after setting all of them up (and struggling through some autoconf/automake bullshit, one of the programs only had source for a 2.x kernel and autoconf/automake were not happy about it) it fails because one project's been worked on a lot more and dropped support for working with the other 3... goddammit.
- Community SDK? Several options for this... but all of them need .NET 2 to run on Win9x, don't work in Wine, or require... hey look, TASM! GODDAMMIT!
- DOS on a real machine? It's a massive bitch to shuttle files to and from a real DOS machine quickly and I can't take 30 minutes between builds that take me 4 minutes to change enough to need tested again.
why must i suffer like this22 -
I saw a rant about some department still using win98, and it reminded me, when I was in school the school library used MS-fucking-DOS, windows 10 was already out by that time...
The librarian lady was really surprised I even knew what it was, which meant she knew it was fucking ancient2 -
Instead of asking how old people are, how about this:
Post the specs of the first computer you regularly used. I will start.
Tandy 1000 SX. Not one, but TWO 5 1/4" floppy drives. An 8088 CPU and 640K of RAM. The operating system was MS-DOS 3.2, which was always in the A: drive.
We used it to make papers for school in Wordstar, and my parents made spreadsheets in Lotus 1-2-3. We learned to type on it. We played Space Quest, King's Quest, Carmen Sandiego, and Lords of Conquest on it. We transcribed BASIC programs from the, "BASIC Training" column in 3-2-1 Contact magazine.
We LOVED that computer.8 -
Taught myself assembler at 13 (this was the mid 1980s) and wondered how the hell people could stand to do this. Then I found out there were more abstract languages like BASIC or COBOL. So I taught myself BASIC and MS-DOS batch scripting. Various other languages came later (PROLOG, Pascal, C, Smalltalk, C++, VisualBasic, etc). But it’s never been easy for me because I suck at math and complicated logic structures. Especially not good with OOP. My brain was ruined by learning procedural coding first. It refuses to incorporate OOP.
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beginning to learn QBASIC as i'm looking to port my demoscene stuff from TI-BASIC (based on QB) to MS-DOS. Graphics are weird here and i can't just drop in Assembly snippets so scrollers are gonna be a bitch. However...
Screen mode 13's kinda nice, ngl.5 -
Wow, I would have to write a book to describe all of the positive ways coding and a long career in technology have impacted my life.
In short, it has provided me with a great life, career, passion and so many friends I can 'talk shop' with.
A great journey from punch cards to PC's to LAN's to a global network. From 8" platters to 10mb Bernoulli boxes to 5 1/4 to 3 1/2 to terabytes in your pocket!
From Brick size 'mobile' phones and 35 lb Compaq and Osborne 1 'laptops' (I know some of you remember those) to today's amazing miniaturization.
From MS DOS and Dr. DOS to lots of OS's. I had better stop as it seems I am writing a book in a rant 😀
Best of all... my son went into the family business and now we 'talk shop'!
It has been an amazing ride!1 -
On a 8088 Acer 500+ with a whopping 640KB RAM with Clipper and dBase III+ on MS-DOS 3.30 back in 1988.
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my new rig is more and more causing me issues:
- Ryzens fucking kill 9x and MS-DOS applications and the OSes themselves when they run unemulated, so they can't be run in a KVM. This makes them slow as shit, and in qemu-TCG's case, buggy as shit too. VMs can't reboot successfully, they have to be totally forced down and brought back up on TCG or they hang during the reboot. It also performs poorly. VERY poorly. The "shit runs full-speed like 65% of the time and it feels slow as fuck as video output is a stuttery blurry mess" type. This makes 2 projects problematic to complete and I have to remake 17 VMs in virt-manager now as vbox doesn't work with any virtualization method for a 9x/DOS guest now!
- For some reason my new RX 5500xt has an issue when it hits about 80% usage, the fans spin to 100% on it at 80% and taper off to like 5% when idle. Pretty standard stuff... except it's erroneously tied to... current load, not temperature. Hmm.
- Debian got an update that renames my ethernet device mid-boot. Up until just before the login screen, it's named "eth0". After that, it's named "enp8s0". This was hell to work around and idk why it does this.4 -
My dad bought a computer when i was 6 or 7. Trying to launch games via ms-dos.
But we also had the “minitel” a french thing that connected you to a network. I played games on that too.1 -
I was at school. Should be around 7 years old. They bought some new computers: XTs with green monitors.
I saw it as asked: how can I use one of there? They answered it was just to mid school to students, so I asked to have some typewriter classes.
A few years after, when I was finishing the typewriter classes, I used a IBM 286 for the first time at a friend's house. I've been using and studying it since that day. I just loved to use MS-DOS and the 5" disks. -
Recently started computer science course at college. Linux user since 3 years.
Started to learn MS-DOS yesterday.
Teacher: To create a file use 'copy con <filename>'
Me (thinking): WTF, DOS doesn't have a seperate create command like 'touch'5 -
so i need a utility written in C because MS-DOS but i can't figure out how MS-DOS APIs work and there's no docs available so if anyone has used Borland C i'd be grateful if you could help me out on how the hell anything works7
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Dad brought home a i386 based desktop with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 back in 1993.
Learned how to use basic command line to run video games like Commander Keen, Jazz Jackrabbit, Kilo Blaster, Wolfenstein, Doom, Raptor. All the classics. Good times.
I think we still have the computer somewhere. -
Why so many people complain about Vim? Just drink Nuka Cola.
Anyway, my first scripts were done with edit, in MS-Dos...
Anyone who can't learn how to use a tool... Well there are so many IDEs...
Just use something else1 -
So... My brother got his computer when I was 6 years old... It was a 286 with the new 64mb HD and the screen had 16 gray scale color...
Latter it was given to me when my brother got his 486dx2 and I did a course in ms-dos and batch scripting.
That's it, lots of sfigher, puzzle bubble, Dina blast, wolfeinstein 3D...1 -
My first experience with a computer was when I was about 7-8 years approx. I came back from school and dad told me he got me enrolled with a teacher who lived around 5 kms away. Me and my dad walked in the warm summer afternoon (one of my most fond memories tbh), cut through a meadow that had freshly cut grass and reached his place. He lived in the third floor, and there was a stray dog that used to stay in the second. The stench was horrible, but over time I got used to it.
He opened the door and showed me how to boot up a computer, then asked me to open LOGO (it ran on MS-DOS at the time). Taught me the fd 40 rt 90 stuff and I loved it - he noticed and asked me to go to town. I started drawing on the screen and remember being delighted at how it ran what I asked it to run.
We then did some theory, and every grade I finished my syllabus in like 2-3 days. Too bad we didn't have coding until I was like 14, but that's another story and deserves another post :)
Sorry for the long post, got carried away -
I was probably about 7 and my parents just bought their first computer.
It was on our living room table for at least a couple of weeks and the main attraction of the whole family.
I learned how to install MS DOS, some software and even games. -
Tried to install MS-DOS 6.22. Was not fun at all. Tried 3 iso flashers in total. The closest that happened to DOS was unetbootin getting bootlooped on the 10 second countdown to automatic system start. I gave up on it eventually.
:\7 -
My first interaction with Computers started in 1996/1997 and it was Dangerous Dave, PacMan, Mario, Pre that pulled me in so deep. We had multiple Floppy Disks and each of them used to go awry after a few months of use. Had to keep deleting stuff to fit all my Favourite Games
A year later I learnt the basics of MS-DOS and GWBasic. Looking at seniors do C Programming on Borland Turbo made me feel scared and one of them said it is the real language to make Games, and all types of Animation stuff. I was very intrigued but only for a while. I kept playing Games which was what I was fit for at that time -
Alright, so i'm making an MS-DOS 6.22 box on a modern laptop: 80GB HDD (SATA 2), 2GB RAM (rip 9x, smallest stick I got,) AMD x64 CPU (they stuck a single-core 1GHz CPU in a laptop meant for Win8.0, with age it's slowed to around 600MHz effective, so it's more suited to being an XP box but I have no XP drivers...)
I'm not strapped for space at all (I could make 4 2GB partitions with no issue) but should I use DRVSPACE? I've never used DOS-era disc compression (and won't fucking touch DoubleSpace, for those that remember that and its issues) and i'm wanting to fuck with it some.
EDIT: fuck CSM, gotta use GRUB to load DOS...2
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