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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • spauldo@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlWhy Are Arch Linux Users So TOXIC?
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    8 months ago

    I’ve never talked to an Arch user about Linux, so I dunno how toxic their community is. But I do read Arch documentation, and it’s fantastic. Arch’s documentation has (for me, anyway) taken the place that used to be held by the old HOWTOs back in the early days.

    The kind of cooperation required to accomplish this doesn’t speak of a toxic community to me. I didn’t watch the video since I don’t watch YouTube on my phone, but I’m guessing it’s not the Arch community that has issues but annoying teenage “I’m more 1337 than you” jackwads that are the turd in the Linux punchbowl. Those little cretins are drawn to distros like Arch because they like feeling superior to the “normie” users.

    I should know, I used to be like that thirty years ago. Most of us grow out of it after we start getting laid.










  • I don’t believe so - the docs mention several ways to boot a pi but most only work for newer models.

    An option might be to boot an SD card read-only and run everything over NFS. It’s trivial to do that sort of thing with some UNIX clones (OpenBSD, for instance), but I don’t know about a modern Linux.



  • It might be too outdated to do major services, but it’s still fine for its original use - interfacing with electronic components.

    You could build a weather station, monitor temperature and humidity in your attic and crawlspace, automatically water plants, etc. You don’t need much electronics knowledge for that sort of thing.




  • If I remember right, it was sponsored by DARPA. It was in the early 80s, so it would have been on VAX. It wasn’t the first implementation (there were several prototypes), but it’s the design that stuck; all the major OS implementations of TCP/IP today use the sockets API (if not the source code directly; several identical network vulnerabilities on different OSs are due to the fact that BSD code was free to use and copy).


  • Ah, DEC. Some really cool stuff came out of Maynard, MA.

    A few notable things about DEC:

    • They made computers that were affordable by smaller businesses and universities.
    • The PDP-10 - one of DEC’s only mainframes - was where the bulk of early Lisp development occurred, mostly for AI research.
    • UNIX originated on DEC hardware (before VMS).
    • The team that developed the Alpha (the successor to the VAX) was hired by AMD to develop the 64-bit Athlon architecture (what became X86_64 - i.e. what your computer is probably based on).
    • Intel chose a little-endian architecture for the 8086 because that’s what the VAX used.
    • TCP/IP was developed on UNIX running on a VAX.
    • After the minicomputer market crashed, DEC was bought by Compaq, taken out behind the woodshed, and shot like a dog.