Hell if I remember so long ago, redhat was in the mix, then mandrake… I ran Gentoo for years on a server, until I got bitten by some upgrade woes, then switched to Debian, then arch, now truenas. Meanwhile on my desktop I bounced around even more… Ubuntu until the stupid wannabe metro UI, then switched to mint, which I used exclusively (as in without dual-booting windows) for a while… Meanwhile my laptop dual boots Manjaro alongside windows 11…

Mine was slackware in I think 1997?

runs in a web browser.

Or its an electron app.

Something something something history repeating

Not at all. OS should just be core functionality, all bells and whistles should be add-ons so they can be added, replaced, or done without if not needed.

if you’re just trying them out, there is virtualbox…

What even is plain text anymore? If you mean ASCII, ok, but that leaves out a lot. Should it include a minimal utf-8 detector? Utf-16? The latest goofy encoding? Should zcat duplicate the functionality of file? Generally, unix-like commands do one thing, and do it well, combining multiple functions is frowned upon.

How do you propose zcat tell the difference between an uncompressed file and a corrupted compressed file? Or are you saying if it doesn’t recognize it as compressed, just dump the source file regardless? Because that could be annoying.

I have this vague memory of one of the CSIs showing a list of IP addresses with 4-digit octets… I get not wanting to risk using real IP addresses, but at least use 10.x.x.x or 192.168.x x

If you want to confuse people… I pronounce /etc as “ets”, but one of my coworkers recently called it “slash e t c” and I had to ask him to repeat it a couple times before I figured out what he meant…

Have you ever tried catching flies? Vinegar works better than honey, after all, flies eat shit.

You could, but then we wouldn’t be talking about a carbon paper roller thingy…

Knuckle-buster was the industry term, and they were already obsolete 20 years ago…

Not sure how much good that’ll be… A lot of banks are giving out cards where the numbers are only printed, I haven’t had one with raised numbers in years.

Why not?