Same, I heard about Digg but never went there. Usenet->Slashdot->Reddit.
I still have a low 4-digit Slashdot account I never use. I felt sad when it got sour. In the the beginning when people announced passion projects on Slashdot the comments were “That’s so cool, it’ll be interesting to see how it turns out. Not something I’ll be needing but I wish them the best of luck.”. In late stage Slashdot it would be “Why! What a waste of time. They should all focus on what I use”. Unfortunately that self centered type of negativity is everywhere these days.
It was not a joke, I’ve worked on Windows and Linux for decades and I’ve worked on Symbian OS and Android as an OS engineer. With the right hardware and stable drivers neither crash. Anecdotally (which admittedly proves nothing) my gaming PC’s only ever crashed because I had bad RAM, which i diagnosed with memtest86.
It’s not the operating system. This is the weakness of Windows/Linux - the many many vendors of PC components and badly written drivers. It’s not the operating system’s fault as such, unless you count the OS’ fault for not running a microkernel with drivers in a less privileged ring like Symbian OS did.
Now, the UI freezing and having weird random slowdown that’s another thing and one of the reasons I prefer Linux. I’m very grateful for Valve/Proton that I have been able to ditch Windows completely now.
I use it too, it’s great. I’ve been using Linux for decades and I know it intimately but why waste time fiddling with installing when Endeavour OS can do it with sane defaults while I brew a coffee ‽ I recently got a new laptop and I was ready to play Baldur’s Gate 3 from the old SSD in 20 min.
I did spend a minute installing btrfs-assistant and btrfsmaintenance though, it’s nice being able to boot a snapshot from grub just in case. I could probably have grabbed Garuda Linux instead but I’m happy with Endeavour.
And much time is saved from debugging. It makes a lot of sense that we let the computer/compiler keep an eye on lifetimes, allocations and access so the code is much more correct once it compiles.
I feel like my old colleagues and I have spent a far too large part of the last 20 years chasing memory issues in C++. We are all fallible, let the compiler do more.
We get tribal over everything. Countries, gangs, skin color, sexuality, religion, even bloody brand of smartphone makes us bicker or call the other person dumb. And the budding optimistic globalism that was happening have totally reversed in the last few years, it was an illusion.
I’ve stopped watching/reading news. I can’t take it anymore. I lost hope.
Maybe in the extreme future but right now we’ve just barely started as a species, will we exist long enough to grow up?
Same, it’s basically installing Arch while I make a coffee and then I come back to a nice desktop with sane defaults. And I don’t have to mess around afterwards installing NV driver or codecs, it’s all done.