I’ve been thinking a lot of my early Linux days. I suddenly remembered TUX Magazine. I used to buy this down the local news agent. A quick search for “tux magazine download” revealed an archive site archive.org which can be used to view the magazines, You can even download them as PDFs. This is worth a look for anyone who used to read this, any one curious about the state of Linux in the past and anyone just missing the old days when Mango Parfait used to criticise Gnome. Issue 3 has a wonderful Mango quote “If you like GNOME better than KDE, don’t bother calling me for a date”.
I am ashamed to say that I never actually read Tux Magazine. I also haven’t heard of Mango Parfait and now I feel like I really missed out on a whole dynamic of the early days of Linux and that saddens me quite a lot. However, I am happy to know that I can read old issues. KDE was my initial desktop of choice and my curiosity got the better of me to know to what Mango thought of it. I think she is right, still.
Thanks for introducing me to an old periodical that is a great snapshot of Linux history.
Loved the Mepis articles, in issue 3, Mepis is what really got me into Linux, not my first distro, but the one which I ran for a long time exclusively on my old laptop.
That is another one I have never actually seen in print but only heard. I actually prefer PDFs at this point. I find that I have accumulated too many things and don’t need actual magazines. I do admit, I love the tactile nature of magazines tho… choices…
I love these old publications. There is something whimsical about the writing style.
Oh, I LOVE Computer Chronicles. My absolutely favorite moment was when they had Al Shugart on and he made the statement that the 5¼ drive isn’t going anywhere because the world’s programs are written on them. I love the shortsightedness of it, I just laughed real hard. Besides as a chronology of computer technology, I super enjoyed looking at the speculation of the “experts” and how wrong many things are and, by contrast, what they got right. It’s so much fun to watch.
More than once, guest came on and beat on the C64 a bit, yet that is a platform that seems to have persisted in some form over the ages. Truly, so much fun and I am glad you brought it up.
Well the experts were clearly correct that we would never need any more than 640k of RAM. I also don’t need these 20TB of hard drive space! Two 5¼ is all that is needed to run a program and store files! Not sure where to put all my .flac and .mkv files though!
Expertise only lasts as long at the current set of data. If that data changes so the level of expertise in it changes as well, unless reaffirmed. Take Mango out of time and ask her about Fedora 35. Or ask any one of us about Fedora 87? I find this fascinating in tech the process has accelarated to a point their are maybe no experts in everything current as it would have moved on before they got to the “end”. (If there were an end).
It’s best to always laugh. I personally choose not to take myself too seriously. It was not so long ago I built a server with 5.5TIB of storage, thinking, I won’t fill this thing up in a LONG time. I’m still some time before filling it up but that time is approaching more rapidly than I thought. Being humble about your expertise is probably best. I would never claim to be an expert in anything. The best I can give anyone about anything that of a “seasoned novice.”
