Complete with cow-print box?

I think my lowest was a 33 MHz 486sx (maybe DX) with 8MB of RAM.

I wouldn’t want to try it today though.

When it was first developed it was too heavyweight and too customisable. The effort needed to theme it was huge and a lot of the popular themes were poor from a UX point of view.

Still E16 was usable, and then the development of E17 started about 24 years ago. People are still on E16 you say?

The Linux Unplugged podcast did something similar to an old Arch based server. Only one year out of date, but they had a similar experience.

https://linuxunplugged.com/537

Your problem isn’t Arch. It’s the fact that the Weyland experience is still under development and so not stable release to release.

This will be true on any distro.

If your solution is to freeze your distro in a certain point in time, don’t type pacman anymore.

mascot is a furry face in a black leather mask

That’s what you see?

I think a few Rorschach tests might be in your future.

Depends on two things

1. What performance counters your CPU has.
2. What you consider to be a memory load.

Tools like perf on Linux can get you access to your processors performance counters and you’ll be able to see how many “events” occur while a process is running.

What’s an event? Well they can be configured to monitor all sorts of things in the CPU. Instructions executed, Interrupts, page table misses, and on some loads / stores.

Memory systems on a CPU aren’t straightforward though. They contain multiple levels of cache, each of which reduces the number of accesses which go to the next layer. So depending on which level you measure, you’ll get different numbers.

https://github.com/Umio-Yasuno/amdgpu_top

So more like a charity status?

I agree with what you’re saying, that the attack didn’t require any data breach to take place, but I do have one slightly pedantic point.

Codeberg being non-profit does not make the employees “volunteers”. They are normal employees and take a wage like working for any other company. What’s different is that any excess revenue over costs must be used to continue the company’s objectives and is not able to be taken by the company owners as profit.

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Or emacs

Network transparency

I knew as I wrote it that somebody would come along and say “Wine/Proton is not an emulator” but I didn’t want to get into the detail.

Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?

A lot of stuff runs with windows emulation as if it’s native. It’s the same method the steam deck uses and so Valve actively do work to keep it working. The main problem is games with heavy anti-cheat.

Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

Generally, yes. I think so.

If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?

See above.

Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?

There’s .NET libraries for Linux, but things have to be recompiled to use them.

How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?

The distribution maintainer will issue updates on a regular basis. Update procedure is different for different distros, but all have a push-button update scheme. It’s pretty solid these days.

How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

Keep your system up to date with security updates, and you’ll tend to be fine. Smaller user base tends to mean that there’s far less malware. Antivirus isn’t necessary.

Obviously phishing scams don’t care what OS you’re on, so mind what you click.

Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?

AMD ones are very solid.

Nvidia ones can be a pain from what I hear, but I don’t buy green.

Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?

No.

That said… You can always wipe a disk when you install an OS.

And also, what distro might be best for me?

Download a few Live-USB images and try them out. You don’t need to install them to get a desktop and a browser up. You can see if there’s any compatibility issues with your hardware.

Whichever works for you, go with it.

I’ve put on a bit of weight since then, but I wouldn’t say that I’m giant.

You spent a few evenings downloading a hundred or so 1.44MB floppy imges over a 56kbps modem. You then booted the installer off one of those floppies, selected what software you wanted installed and started feeding your machine the stack of floppies one by one.

Once that was complete you needed to install the Linux boot loader “LiLo” to allow you the boot it (or your other OS) at power on.

All of that would get you to the point where you had a text mode login prompt. To get anything more you needed to gather together a lot of detailed information about your hardware and start configuring software to tell it about it. For example, to get XFree86 running you needed to know

• what graphics chip you had
• how much memory it had
• which clock generator it used
• which RAMDAC was on the board
• what video timings your monitor supported
• the polarity of the sync signals for each graphics mode

This level of detail was needed with every little thing

• how many heads and cylinders do your hard drives have
• which ports and irqs did your soundcard use
• was it sound blaster compatible or some other protocol
• what speeds did your modem support
• does it need any special setup codes
• what protocol did your ISP use over the phone line
• what was the procedure to setup an tear down a network link over it

The advent of PCI and USB made things a lot better. Now things were discoverable, and software could auto-configure itself a lot of the time because there were standard ways to ask for information about what was connected.

No, it’s rage harvesting nonsense.

This aspect of pipewire, the possibilities of routing audio and video between applications and devices, should be amazing. It’s not, because most apps try to do it themselves.

Give me an OBS where everything is a pipewire sink, and the result is a pipewire source. Give me Firefox that doesn’t talk to cameras and microphones, but opens pipewire sinks for inputs and sources for outputs (this bit is already ok). At that point I’ve got a full studio setup with remote interview capability perfect for podcasts, audio or video.

Maybe this is all coming together slowly and I’m out of date, but last time I tried it was so frustratingly close but not possible.

It’s more than a hobby. That’s kinda the point.