Episode: 1967
Title: HPR1967: How I saw the Linux Light at the end of the Windows tunnel
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1967/hpr1967.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 12:39:21

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This is HPR Episode 1967 entitled, How I Saw the LiHux I Tatly End on the Windows Tunnel.
It is posted by first time post at www.chowjordid.com and is about 14 minutes long.
The summary is, My personal story on Discovery on LiHux.
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Hi there, everybody. My name is Nat Jojordid and I'm a long-time listener.
First time podcaster at the Hacker Public Radio.
First of all, I'd like to apologize for the background noise and recording in the street.
I hope it's not a big deal because in other episodes I heard people recording things in a park or as they work by.
The slow down in the Hacker Public Radio site says any soundtrack is better than no soundtrack so I hope it's not a big deal.
Okay, in my first podcast I'd like to tell the typical story of how I came to LiHux.
How I became a regular LiHux user which I've been since 2009 and no wish whatsoever of going back to Microsoft or Apple.
My beginnings with computing started in the 80s as I was a teenager then.
And my first computer was a British computer, the set X Spectrum.
I had a bit of a machine. At that time the computer didn't have a drive.
You started the information in cassettes which took like three to five minutes to load into RAM.
Sometimes they failed and you had to find different tweaks with the tape recorder until you got the tapes to work.
In the computer I'm very fond of it in spite of its flaws. It was a legendary computer.
I made my first programs in their first in basic and a time when I did some assembler to mostly games.
I think the games were the most big thing, the biggest thing with that computer was a huge market.
I fancied myself a programmer and made some games.
I usually ripped off the graphics from another games.
It was also my first attempt as a hacker because I took the graphics from the code because I don't have many graphics skills.
Sometimes my brother who was an arts student makes some graphics for me too.
After the spectrum in the 80s I followed the usual drift.
Windows 3, I think it was called Windows 3 right before the 95 was Windows 3.
I'm not sure. I remember I was tassled with work perfect to the extent that I started to write a novel just for the pleasure of using the work processor.
I might be a writer in addition to computers.
I got to write 40 pages or something like that.
Maybe it was the first time I wrote something that long just for the pleasure.
It was the first time I was moving from a typewriter to the possibilities of a work processor.
I have to say probably like most of the population in the world when work came I shamelessly moved into work.
I don't know what that program had but a lot of people rushed into work and that story is very known.
That's why work perfect moved from hero to hero at some point because work stole old market.
I don't know now I'm curious I would like to get to use work perfect again.
Maybe someday I'll do a wine thing or the OS box thing.
Okay so then like most of the human beings I went to Windows 95 then came 98 and then Windows XP.
From that age I remember very fondly apogee games which were coming from the times of the spectrum where like spectrum games on steroids.
I mean the platform games now had sprawling and a lot of add-ons and I spent a lot of funds hours with those games.
At some point games became too complicated for me I guess I'm a classic guy because of my background and when games become too realistic I'm too 3D.
I found them a bit creepy I like two dimensions platform games.
I'm not good at stuff until like everybody I guess Doom came and it was like a revolution.
I think everybody remembers the first time he jumped to a side of the computer because one monster of Doom was getting too close.
Yeah I've been playing Doom since then now I play of course the open source version of freedom with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different levels.
I love it never get tired of it and also well the other way blood of all that school of first person shooters it probably has modern as I get in video games.
When it starts to have too many controls gets a bit dizzy for me.
But anyways in that time as I moved from an operating system to other I noticed that my computer was getting more and more bloated and I was getting far and far from the guts of the thing
because there was a lot of intermediate stuff and that's why I got a bit alienated from computing.
Even with the little use I gave to my computer I noticed that it was running slower and slower and slower.
The problem it turned out at a certain point was not a computer it was Microsoft Windows and the things they do so that you have to move to their next version which is even more bloated and even more difficult to use etc.
So at a certain point I got fed up and tried to find an alternative.
My laptop by the way as I wasn't very interested in computers at that time was for a long time a compact press I owe 150 but it's a tiny tiny computer.
And I neglected it because I wasn't interested in losing my time closing error screens as would you have the time with Windows really.
So I remember my first active step in upgrading my computer was repairing the CD drive and I remember it was funny because I had the repair shop started to laugh when I was running Windows XP in that laptop.
I think because I think the press area 150 has like 64 megabytes of RAM or something like that and it took like 5 or 7 minutes to boot.
I usually started it and went to have a shower and had breakfast and then went back to use the computer.
Well then the next thing I did was vast extending the press area memory and then I started my distro hoping.
Along the years I've tried several times it's like my learning curve and the development of Linux have taken some time to meet each other.
Many of my attempts at that point I didn't know that most of them didn't work just because my computer was so tiny even for Linux system.
So the first operative systems I tried in Linux were Wadalinex which was a Debian based distro created by a Spanish regional government.
I got to the desktop there but never got to use it because they come to the froze all the time.
Then I tried Suce same story. I tried several versions of Suce and finally I got a CD version from a magazine.
I don't remember the Suce version. It was like 2008-2009 the year and it didn't work either.
It froze but in that magazine in one page it mentioned a distro for small old computers. One of them was Papilinux.
Then I went to the Papilinux site and finally got Papi version 2.16 running.
I settled there. Papi takes very short time to install once you know what the first time it took me longer but it can be done in 5 minutes.
And since I started with Papi, Papi is like a distro of distros in itself. It has different flavors called paplets.
From that Papi I've been distro hopping within Papi.
I'm currently running a Papi Slacko 55 and I have other Papis because being so small a distro you can have several.
It's very easy to have different distro running.
I'm very happy with Papi or people don't like it because people are afraid of a distro that runs as root.
I find it some advantage because of the way the Papi files are structured it's very difficult to have security issues.
The thing is it's grown into me and when I have to use other distros now I find very annoying having to type the pseudo with every command.
So that's where I'm now. I'm a happy Linux user and I'm never going back to slavery.
Of course I'm not saying Linux is perfect for everybody because when something doesn't work in a Linux you are on your own basically.
But it's the operating system that better fits me, suits me.
Let's see what the future brings with Linux.
I don't think I moved from Papi Linux. I'm very happy, very confident.
My operating system is very, very customized. If I would have run by a bus people would have difficulties to navigate through my computer because of how customized I have it.
The Windows Manager is like Poisson and I'm left handed, everything is configured for Alejandro etc. etc.
Also I prefer to use key bindings before better than mouse.
So that's a lot of hours of research and development in my Linux box. That's another thing I love about Linux.
I think when Rigik likes to customize their computer I've moved from the PreSario 150 of course I created.
This is my Linux story so far. I thought it would be good for a good podcast. I don't like to weld in the past too much.
But it's a story of liberation like most of Linux use HR and I hope it didn't get too grandaddy.
In other podcasts I intend to speak more about the future, about projects, small projects. I'm a power user no more than that.
I have small projects I'm involved in. So for this time, thank you for listening and hope you enjoyed. Bye!
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