Episode: 4095
Title: HPR4095: Twenty seven years of Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4095/hpr4095.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:34:44

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4195 for Friday the 12th of April 2024.
Today's show is entitled, 27 Years of Linux.
It is hosted by Delta Ray and is about 45 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is Delta Ray rambles on for 45 minutes and over exaggerates about how awesome
it is to use Linux.
Hello Hacker Public Radio.
So this is going to be an episode as a follow-up to Daniel Persons episode on one year of
Linux when you're using Linux as his desktop environment.
And first of all, I applaud him for having the courage to try doing that for a year.
It can be a daunting task to move from one operating system to another.
And so while you've been using Linux for one year, I've been using Linux as my desktop
for probably around 24, 25 years somewhere around there.
And I've been using Linux overall for about 27 years.
So this is mostly an episode that's about a different perspective and maybe somebody
who's seeing things from down in the weeds and maybe looking up at the sky and wondering,
was it all worth it?
Is it the right thing to be doing?
But mostly, I feel that people should use whatever tools works for them.
Like I'm not somebody who advocates hard core for somebody to switch to one editor or
the other or one operating system or the other.
Everybody has different needs and interests, so use what works for you.
And in fact, being able to have the freedom to use what works for you is one of the reasons
that drew me to, it was called free software at the time to begin with because I always
feel like, you know, when you buy a computer and when you buy software, you should have
the right to do with it what you want as long as it's legal.
But there shouldn't be somebody that's like controlling you through it or something like
that.
And so this is one of the fundamental things that keeps me in the open source world
because I feel like I have that freedom, not just to view and modify the source code,
but to be able to choose my own destiny.
And I think that Mac users, you know, had that in mind too when they choose to go with
Mac operating system and so on.
So even though things might be different now, the landscape has changed definitely, but,
people have fundamental feelings about how they should be able to use their stuff.
When I started using Linux, it was in 1997, about the same time of year, so I think it
was like at the end of March or beginning of April or so.
So it's really been 27, 27 years and it took effort, you know, a lot of effort to actually
get it just to run, to figure out what kind of hardware you'd want to use or be able
to use to begin with.
And I found out about Linux first from a girl who is in my computer science class.
We just started talking and she was like, oh yeah, Linux, we should try installing it
on some computer where it would work because I had like a PINX Pentium system at the time
that didn't really have the best hardware and maybe wasn't compatible.
This was also at a time when virtual machines weren't available on PC class hardware yet
or generally at all on, you know, desktop computing hardware like micro computers, virtual
machines and been around on mainframes and stuff like that for a couple of decades.
But VMware didn't become a thing until 1998.
So the possibility of running something at virtual machine wasn't really realistic until
probably the end of 1998, 1999, but it was expensive to do so when it first came out.
So generally, you'd either have to dedicate a computer to running Linux and not have
windows on it at all or use this concept of dual booting.
And dual booting isn't, I don't know how much people do that nowadays, but it used to
be a much bigger thing.
People used to try to see how many operating systems they could fit on their computer.
And there's this YouTuber named Cathode Raydude, I think is his name, and he recently discovered
this piece of software called System Commander, which is like a dual booting menu, like
a multi-boot menu, kind of like grub or but like on drugs.
You know, it was like, it was a, it was a very, it was kind of a graphically impressive bootloader,
you know, that lets you do a lot of configuration and everything like that.
And so, you know, you could have like seven different operating systems on your computer or
something like that once, why just for fun, I guess.
But for the most part, if people wanted to experiment with Linux, they'd have to make
some space on their Windows partition, make a new partition, or two, and then install Linux,
and boot back and forth, because it was definitely the case that you couldn't do everything
that you might need to for a business environment or for a job in Linux, or maybe just for fun.
And you probably want to be able to reboot into Windows to play the latest games and stuff
like that.
I feel like all that has changed drastically now, and I have been full-time in Linux since
about, you know, 99, 2000 time period, but I usually kept a Windows PC around to do some
things, but I haven't had to really use Windows probably in about 15 years, you know, it's
like I've been able to be away from it for a long time now.
This is not all perfect, but it's pretty good.
And I think that the move to cloud applications, you know, that started to happen in about
2010, 2011, and brought us things like Google Docs and Office 365 and various applications,
you know, production applications that people are looking to do to make documents that
they want to share and stuff like that, has made it definitely easier for Linux users
to co-exist in work environments and stuff like that.
So that's been very helpful.
But at the beginning, it wasn't like that.
Somebody might want to share a Word document with you, and you just have to say either,
well, hold on, let me boot into Windows and I'll use, you know, my copy of Office to load
it.
Or, you know, you might have WordPerfect was an early Word processing program that was
commercial and provided a version for Linux that you might have.
There was also Sun Office, which became Open Office and now is Libra Office.
And so that was another option that you might have.
But in the early days, they might not read the whole format properly, and there might
be like little formatting glitches and stuff like that.
Those, a lot of those have been fixed, although they're still not a harm percent perfect,
but they're pretty good.
Usually you run to problems with like macros and things that people add into documents
that maybe don't fully function under the free Office alternatives.
But you could still kind of co-exist and just make the excuse that, you know, well, I'm
a Linux user, I don't have those kind of tools.
And Microsoft could have, you know, the argument is always, well, Microsoft could have made
Office for Linux, you know, they could have actually written it, so it works with it.
But they probably didn't have much of a reason to, because the market was small.
And in my experience, free software users don't really like to buy much, so they probably
wouldn't have bought Office anyways or something.
And people were working on free Office alternatives and stuff like that, so they probably just
wait for that rather than spend, you know, the $300 or whatever it cost to get Office
at the time or 200, something like that.
Thinking about why I use Linux, initially it was the, you know, just the interest in doing
something different and trying something that was Unix because in the early, you know,
when I first started using the internet, we were always logging into Unix servers.
This was in 93, 94.
We were always like telnetting into Unix servers to run links like to access web pages.
Links was like the first web browser that was all text-based and stuff like that.
So you didn't have that on your computer.
You actually used a telnet client to access a, a mainframe computer server to be able
to run that program to access web pages.
And then basically if you wanted to see an image, you'd have links download the image and
then copy it to your computer using FTP or something like that and then view it locally.
So it was quite a process just to view an image on a web page.
And you know, Unix always seemed like this glorious operating system that was out of
the hands of normal consumers.
So being able to run it on your own PC was very attractive.
And I remember the first time I opened up Pine, the email client that you would usually
run through telnet session.
When I first ran Pine on the raw console on my own Linux system, it was really cool.
You know, I was like, wow, I'm running Pine directly on my own console or something like
that.
It just seemed very surrealistic, like seeing a total eclipse for the first time or something
like that.
So that was one of the, you know, main attractions.
Once I finally got X Windows working on Linux, which was quite an endeavor because a lot
of video cards wouldn't work with it.
And so I either had to wait for the drivers to become available for the video card I had.
I think that's what I ended up doing was I waited about six months or something from
the time that I got Linux working on a computer to the time that I actually could run X because
the video card had finally been supported.
The drivers had finally been written.
And so you would use a different, you know, window managers were kind of all the rage,
like which window manager did you want to try using and the de facto window manager
that a lot of people would use back then was called FVWM.
And there was an initial FVWM version one, but I started using it with version two.
And FVWM is like the ultimate configuration nightmare or whatever you want to call it.
It's going to take up a lot of your time.
It's going to, you're going to want to customize it to your heart's content.
And this led to a lot of people having opinions about how they want to actually use a desktop.
One of the things that FVWM offered and wasn't available on, you know, Mac or Windows
was the ability to have these things called virtual desktops.
Basically, being able to have one desktop and then move to another desktop to the left
or right or up or down and keep the windows in place on each of those desktops was a very
powerful paradigm, you know, you could kind of keep yourself organized and you could run
multiple programs at once, maybe multiple web browsers and applications and stuff like
that on various desktops and then move around between them so you wouldn't have to like
click on different applications in the start bar and kind of switch between your configurations.
It increased productivity, you know, I thought.
And then another feature that was useful was being able to have sticky windows, sticky
windows are basically where you can keep a window on each of the virtual desktops so
that when you move between them, the sticky window will stay on that on the same screen.
Like you'll keep seeing it when you move around and you can still use these things.
The other big one was Focus Follows Mouse.
It's also called Sloppy Focus, well Sloppy Focus is a form of Focus Follows Mouse but this
is something that Windows has only recently implemented but basically the way it works
is when you move your mouse pointer over a window, it instantly gets focused and you
don't have to like click on and stuff like that.
This allows for interesting ways of working with Windows where you can actually keep a
window over top of another window and you don't have to worry about clicking on the window
below it and having that window pop up above the window that's behind it.
So you know, if you're typing in a window below in just a small area of it but you want
to keep a big browser window or something like that over top of that window that's below,
you can move back to the browser window and do something in that browser window like
scroll or something like that without it affecting the other window and then when you need
to type in the other window like a command or something maybe on a tutorial or something
like that, you don't have to like bring that window up above the browser window or something
like that.
So that's what Focus Follows Mouse allows for.
As it can be very confusing for a new user and so people who are new to Linux was like,
I clicked on the wrong window or I'm in the wrong window typing in the wrong window
and then they find they do something wrong so it's not for the faint of heart but Windows
actually allows for this feature now decades after it was available on Linux and the feature
virtual desktops is available on Mac for maybe the last 10 years or so but again 15 years
after it was available on Linux they finally saw the light but Mac's virtual desktop feature
only goes left and right whereas on Linux it goes in a direction.
So in a way Linux X Windows and the different window managers that you could use had more
features than the you know stereotypical GUI's that you think of when you think of a GUI
and so that you know that ability to control your environment and have advanced features
that weren't available on Mac or Windows kept me on Linux for a long time and have continued
to keep me on Linux because they still haven't you know been well implemented on Windows
or Mac and I always whenever I try one of those other operating systems I'm just like
missing this feature or whatever or you know popups are coming up in the way or advertising
or something like that and it just becomes frustrating so if you're interested in what kind of
applications I actually use under Linux both GUI and command line based I use Firefox as my
web browser and I don't make excuses about that I feel strongly about Firefox being used as a
web browser under open source software and that's perhaps something saved best for another
episode but anyways and whenever I come across a website that doesn't support Firefox well or
something I usually write to the webmaster and then probably get an ear load of well nobody's
using it or something like that well they were for a long time and it's the free open source
alternative to all the other stuff that's out there that's spying on you so of course I use
terminal emulator I have switched between a few different ones right now I'm using XFCE terminal
and also kitty kitty is another terminal emulator that's pretty good there's also a cool retro
term that I occasionally fire up if I want like that retro nostalgic feeling of running on old
terminal or something like that and then I have like a big menu that's up in my XFCE panel
I use XFCE as my window manager because it aligns with my preferences the best and so I have this
big menu that has a bunch of applications that I use frequently the first one on the list is always
gimp I do a fair amount of image editing and photo editing and and stuff like that because
I am kind of a visual person I end up you know taking pictures of stuff and and then you know
playing with the the the photo and gimp in some way or something like that recently I've also
gotten into selling stuff on eBay and so I'm often using gimp for quickly process put doing post
production of the the images before they go up and on the the sale the next one is a numeric
numeric is was part of the it was part of the gnome office suite there used to be this project to
create an office suite for gnome that was all open source software and so I forget what the other
applications were for it but numeric was the spreadsheet one and I like numeric a lot
because it's it's fairly lightweight so it starts up really fast it it's pretty functional you
know it's like I I've never run to a case really where something didn't work in it and it supports
all the normal excel functionality and stuff like that it also supports pearl plugins and regular
expressions and stuff like that so yeah it's a pretty full featured one that's spelled G-N-U-M-E-R-I-C
and it's it's still maintained after all these years and there's pretty good following of it
the next thing I have set up is a quick script to actually open up the Thunar I think it's pronounced
Thunar that's the way I pronounce it the file manager for xfce is called Thunar and so basically
I have a script to open up like a local directory and my phone directory so I can quickly transfer
files from my phone to like a drive that I have for doing backups of phones and stuff like that
the next one I have which is kind of unique is hypnotics hypnotics is a program for actually
watching TV online there's a few of these types of applications but hypnotics is like an easy one
I don't actually run that very much but I just play around with it once why to see what's going
on on TV around the world and stuff like that and then a recent one that I've discovered and
enjoy is flame shot I like to take screenshots of web pages whenever there's something on it that
I know won't be able to be captured by like saving the page or pring it out or something like that
so I'll take screenshots and stuff or I'll take screenshots of error messages or for
demonstrations and stuff so flame shot is a nice gooey screenshot program that kind of gets out of
the way I also use another command line based a screenshot tool called Scrot CROT and that works
pretty well too but flame shot allows you to do annotations very quickly instead of having to like
fire up gimp and you know mess with all that flame shots a lot better at that then I have
mouse pad even though I'm a vim user I do have mouse pad sometimes it's kind of nice for being
able to just paste in text or something like that also since it's not a terminal window I don't
have to worry as much if I paste something in there if it has like escape codes or whatever that's
going to mess something up so I kind of use mouse pad as like a you know a notepad type of application
and stuff like that inkscape this this is like Adobe Illustrator you know it's a vector graphics
program I use that sometimes for making like posters or flyers or something and it works really
well it's it's come along ways it's also good for you know making like icons or diagrams or
or something like that and I've been doing some of that recently for like a class I'm teaching
and stuff then the next one I have which I haven't really opened up and while because I have a
need to is the pulse audio volume control it's like PA VU CTL is the name of the program I think
and it's for you know it opens up that pulse audio application that you you can usually access by
just clicking on the volume icon and clicking on audio mixer so this is just in our place where it
and then key pass x which is actually key pass xc which is what I use now but that's a password
manager database program that's local and keeps your passwords in encrypted database locally which
I highly recommend you do for security purposes the next one below that is the KVM virtual machine
manager this is just a way of wearing virtual machines under Linux and this is the management
interface to it so I can quickly open that up and you probably notice by now there's really not a
good categorization to how I have these organized they're not an alphabetical order or anything
it's kind of just like I laid them out this way or I added them to the menu this way and haven't really
looks back and try to organize them better the next one below that is Blender I've been a blender
user since 1998 and I've been into 3D modeling since I had an Amiga back in 1990 so I've been doing
3D modeling an animation for a long time and it's just a hobby of mine I'm not great at it or whatever
but it's fun for me and it you know brings back fun memories and stuff like that but
so I have Blender in the menu here and instead of installing Blender from a package management
system it's one that I actually download and put it into like a bin directory manually because
it's being updated so frequently that waiting for you know a package to come through the
package management system you're going to be running a very old version so yeah and then below
that free CAD free CAD is like a free CAD program as the name implies and it's pretty good it there's
a pretty you know there's kind of an intense learning curve to it but once you figure it out you can
make precisely modeled models or draft you know drawings and I use that for making 3D printed stuff
when I need to have exact measurements so that's what free CAD is good for below that simple screen
recorder this is an application for being able to take videos of your screen and it works pretty
well it's it's pretty lightweight and everything has a lot of features so if you ever need to like
demonstrate the use of some application or your desktop or something like that it's it's good for
that below that I have the the printer the flash forge printer control software for my 3D printer
below that I have virtual box which I've moved away from oracles virtual box and the main
reason I moved away from it is because the the virtual box extensions are something that you
need to get a license for and pay for but the minimum charge for actually getting one of those
licenses is that you have to buy like 50 of them something like that you have to buy a crazy
number of them and they cost I don't know 200 bucks each or something like that and you end up
having to pay $6,000 just to get one license because you have to buy 50 of them or something like
that which is just so stupid oracle if you're listening to this which probably you aren't but
come on can we do this a little bit better below that I have rhythm box which is like a you know
music playing software which I don't really use that much I probably could remove this from
this menu this quick access menu I tend to use like MPV or MPG123 from the command line just
because I don't know I like doing it better that way playing my music and stuff like that
if I was going to use a GUI thing I'd probably use like XMMS2 or you know one of the things that
looks like old win amp or whatever because that's you know when I think of playing music on the
computer I think of it that way and below that is zoom I am often in video conferences where I
have to you know talk to colleagues and stuff like that I've been a zoom user since like two years
before the pandemic and because we used it at work a lot and it works pretty well and then below
that is Gramps Gramps is a genealogy program that's pretty good it's it's pretty full featured it
it has you know the ability to store everything in the JEDCOM format and all that which is like
a universal format for genealogy and other formats too and then you know you can put in like
pictures and media and stuff like that so if you're into genealogy check out Gramps it's just like
GRAMPS below that I have the QTV for L2 test utility which yeah that's a mouthful but this is a QT
widget set GUI application for controlling your webcam and this is you know you can control like
the contrast brightness zoom and stuff like that like how you know how much it's zoomed in and all
that and this is something that you can't easily do under Windows and Mac and when I when I was doing
when I was using this once on a zoom call people are like how are you doing them like well I have
this test utility that's free and stuff and then below that is GADO GADO is a game making engine
that I've gotten into because my son and I have you know tried to make some games together and
stuff like that and so he's really gotten into it and so that's a free open source
game making engine that works really well when Blender I discovered it when Blender dropped their
game engine a lot of people were disappointed but Blender was like hey there's better game engines
out there or something like that that are free even and they weren't talking about you know
the big commercial ones that now have weird licensing but GADO is one that's lightweight
does 3d and 2d and stuff and and works pretty well it has a learning curve like any of them
but people have used them to make commercial games even so check that out spell GODOT and then
below that which probably should be much higher up in the list is CRETA CRETA is a graphics it's a
raster graphics program like GIMP but the focus is on drawing there's a program that was called
sketcher fractal design sketcher back in the day that was all about drawing on the computer not
about photo manipulation necessarily but provide you with a bunch of different features
but CRETA is basically an open source version of that and really is awesome it's in my opinion
it's actually surpassed GIMP in many ways in its functionality and everything and sometimes I
actually use CRETA instead of GIMP for doing photo manipulation especially when it comes to like
adding text GIMP and and inkscape could really do a better job with text manipulation I think
I don't know it's kind of a pain sometimes and then below that art Arduino I get into circuit design
and and Arduino programming Arduino is like the microcontroller that you know the microcontroller
module that you can use for doing like fun circuits and stuff like that and making little projects
and so that's the IDE for it so that you can actually upload your projects to an Arduino
and then below that is a speech to text program that's called speech to text
oh it's called nerd dictation so nerd dictation was this nice open source software where you didn't
have to send off your you know your speech to the cloud to have it turned into something you
all the learning data was kept on your own computer that way you're kept things a bit more private
I discovered this after I actually smashed my this kind of trigger some people but after I smashed
my finger in the corridor twice I did twice and I ended up having to have my right hand in like a
cast type of thing and that made it really hard to type of course so I discovered this nerd dictation
software so I could actually say stuff and and like write out an email and stuff like that pretty
quickly so check out nerd-dictation if your answers and that kind of thing and I made like a little
toggling script so that I could just press like f nine or something like that and I could turn on
or off really easily so that's that and those are you know most of the programs I use I also use
audacity I've gotten into audio production a bit and there's a bunch there Yoshimi is a really
cool software synthesizer it's called Yoshimi after Yoshimi battles the pink robots by the flaming
lips it spelled Y-O-S-H-I-M-I if you're if you like midi and and synthesis and stuff like that check
that out there's also a free audio synthesis euro rack simulator that's called vcv rack 2 it's not
well it's not I don't think it's open source but it's freely downloadable and that allows you to
do interesting things with like waveform development and stuff and that can be a lot fun to just play
with hydrogen is a drum machine you can hook up and audio production and Linux has really come
along ways if you really get into it there's a whole bunch of cool stuff that you can do around
using pipe wire pipe wires like a replacement for pulse audio and it allows you to like
connect applications together and like use the output from sound from one application going into
another application stuff and this stuff just wasn't available like 15 years ago when I was doing
audio production before when I was using programs like reason and stuff like that under windows and so
yeah if you're if you like audio production and you just haven't tried it on Linux look around
there's a whole bunch of cool stuff
Carla is a is a program for like setting up a audio production rack and connecting these
applications together and stuff like that audacity has always been a great program for doing you
know waveform editing and stuff like that and that's open source rose garden is is good for
audio production and stuff there's a bunch of them so check it out there's a cool youtuber named
unfi unfi and he goes over a lot of these applications that you can check out
and as far as games go I play you know my favorite game to play is stardew valley that's this
uh farming game that was really really well produced by one person like the the music the
dialogue the the programming and the graphics were all made by one person Eric Barone
over a four-year period and he did a really great job and then Minecraft you know I play Minecraft
with my son uh steam works under Linux so that allows for a whole bunch of games to work natively
under Linux or makes it easier to actually get programs uh games that work under wine to work
using a program called proton so a whole bunch of games work under Linux now folks if you haven't
been paying attention and you just have got now games because you got discouraged by not working
on Linux guess what a lot of games work under Linux now so so check it out and then warzone 2100
sim city 2000 sim city 3000 flight gear which is like a flight simulator next year's which is like
an open source first person shooter terraria which is a closed source 2d game kind of like
Minecraft but is fun to play and super tux cart which has come along ways as well super tux 2 which
is like a you know mario type of platformer ony which is like a first person shooter from about
20 24 years ago or so that I like to play beam ng which is this cool closed source driving simulator
that works from steam and so on so yeah there's a whole bunch of really cool stuff out there
check it out and then those are all like the big ones that I probably use on a regular basis
the other thing I do that's related to Firefox is I try to keep you know work and different
different things separate from each other so I use Firefox profiles to basically have like a
personal data a you know work data which now I've moved into a virtual machine completely
so it's completely isolated and then also one for CLI magic because I run the CLI magic
twitter and mastodon accounts and so I have it like a separate profile for that I have a separate
one for various different you know things that I do and stuff like that so there's all kinds of
cool things that you can do when you have control I remember when gimp the GNU image manipulation
program came out or at least when it was begun starting to become noticed like through a slashed
op post or something like that it had a the way the gimp interface was set up was that like every
every function or menu in gimp had a separate window so like the toolbar was a separate window
from the actual image display and that was a separate window from the layers toolbox and
various toolbox had their own windows and people would complain about you know gimp being
difficult to use especially once they made gimp for windows and they had the same kind of a
windowing paradigm and stuff like that and people would often you know who were used to using Photoshop
and and stuff they would say why can't gimp just have one window and everything like that but
those people didn't really understand that the the way people used x windows and everything was
to use these sticky windows and to put windows on other monitors and stuff like that because
it was pretty likely that a you know a linux desktop user would have multiple monitors and be able
to put them across to you know two bars and air monitors do interesting windowing tricks to the
to the various windows so there's quite a powerful way to use gimp by having those multiple windows
and everything kind of broken out but it's also useful to be able to keep everything in one
window so it's also good that they added the single window mode later but it's not to go without
saying that there was no use to having the multiple window paradigm to it the concept of window
managers in general led to a lot of people having strong opinions about which one that they would
like and and so linux you know as a desktop is all about choice you know it's all about having
those choices of being able to do what you want there's people who like gnome there's people
like kde there's people who like x you know i use xfce because it's probably the most lightweight
thing that's very much like fvwm but then there's people you know who like to use was it called
nomad or awesome or something like that or iswm you know there's all these different window
managers that you can use that will work with the windows and provide panels in a different way
and that's a great thing but of course this leads to support issues when commercial software wants to
make linux applications or even when various you know open source applications want to make something
they have to think about all the different window paradigms that there are out there and
and sometimes they get frustrated with it and stuff with this choice comes the cost of support
recently i've noticed that and there was a there's a youtube video about this about how software is
getting worse uh generally because it takes a lot of effort to make GUI applications and software
in general and so people are kind of getting worse at making it because it's probably no longer
as sexy to actually make software as it once was and maybe the people who are really good at it
have moved on to other things and now we're stuck with people who don't know as well how to make
good software and they're not making as good of choices when they make software and they're also
not testing it as well so you end up with lots more errors than you did before and as somebody who
uses google docs and also office 365 in a browser for for work purposes i can say that you know
those programs really kind of suck you know they they just trying to use them for general
document creation is a pain and i'm finding that labor office is actually ahead of the game
now in terms of usability and maybe open source has a big opportunity here to actually leap ahead
as far as providing people with a great interface for application software because the people who
make open source software are doing it with a passion right blender is a great example of this
blender was this you know 3d modeling application that originally it was kind of a you know
daunting thing to learn and and everything was in a weird place and it was it was hard to understand
but that kind of went along with 3d modeling and animation software in general because that kind
of stuff is hard to do and hard to represent in a normal window gooey paradigm that you commonly
see so they have to make all kinds of special functions and stuff but the passion that people have
had behind blender have just greatly improved it over the past 30 years it's gone from this
you know obtuse hard to use program to something that is much easier to use and much more like
its commercial competitors and maybe even leaping ahead of the commercial options a bit in some ways
but it's definitely become a lot easier to use in the past five years you know just it's
grown by leaps and bounds and i hope that some of the other gooey application developers can see
the kind of model that the the blender team is used and maybe learn from that and get better
themselves so yeah that's that's my thoughts on using linux over the past 27 years and how things
have changed gotten easier you know you can play games in linux now um i remember when i used to
play diablo 2 you know in back in 2000 it was this game that you know it was very popular and you
couldn't play that on linux until later when wine started supporting it and you could actually
play diablo 2 under links but that wasn't until like maybe I don't know six seven eight years later
after it had been released but diablo 3 was supported under wine on day one and i was able to play it
all the way through inside of linux from you know from the the release day without any problems
you know it worked completely and that just blew me away one of the other advantages to playing
games on our linux is that speed is one some people have reported and i've seen personally faster
frame rates under linux than our windows by just you know maybe a couple more frames per second
that can mean a lot to a hardcore gamer but this is because linux has better memory management
and maybe a little bit less overhead than windows does you can also do interesting things with
the windows wine allows you to run applications in their own virtual desktop windows so it's like
having a virtual machine window and and it dedicates it to it but that allows you to do things like
have a a window that's not full screen under linux but is still containing the full screen game
inside of a window that's on the linux desktop that's almost the size of the full desktop so you
can kind of get that full screen effect without completely taking up the whole screen and still being
able to see like your desktop panel or whatever else or maybe some other application or something like
that and being able to move between virtual desktops so like i can i was back when i was playing
world of work craft under linux you know i could keep that running in its own dedicated window
and be able to move away from it without like alt tabbing and stuff like that like i could move
to another desktop go to my browser real quick and then go back to world of work craft and world
of work craft was fine whereas on a windows system using alt tab to get out of out of get the game
would cause problems or make it so that the the application might quit or they might say well
you're cheating or something like that so use you know playing games under links can actually be
a more pleasant experience and more flexible okay well i probably rambled on enough i'm curious
you know what what your thoughts are about using links as a desktop as well so please share
them in the comments and i'll talk to you later bye
you have been listening to hacker public radio at hacker public radio does work today show was
contributed by a hbr listener like yourself if you ever thought of recording podcast and click
on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is posting for hbr has been kindly provided
by an onsthost.com the internet archive and rsync.net on the sadois status today show is released
on their creative commons attribution 4.0 international license
