I don’t really care about all these different things, as long as none of them become a crazy confusing mess, like Windows DLLs.

I think I’m gonna grab an old external USB drive and live boot from there and test things out

Just keep in mind, in such a case, that your performance will be quite reduced due to limits on I/O. When you have Linux on a real drive - especially a striped RAID, the system is blazing fast. It’s a substantial difference you should keep in mind when evaluating.

The “fun” aspect was what drew me to BeOS when it was near its heyday. What that thing would do in comparison to Winbloze at the time and the user experience in general was astonishingly more pleasant.

I remember their simple web server called Diner I had a website hosted on an older machine running Diner in my lab and it was just always on and when my office got DSL I felt like a king having that site up and accessible from anywhere, knowing it was on a box in my office and running Diner on BeOS.

I’m not Linux-savvy enough to understand everything you said lol. But I’m glad at least that I don’t have to rely on CUPS I just have two printers with static IPs so it’s easy-breezy George and 'Weezy.

Wow. Ok so regarding Feist I was only ever able to get through Magician Apprentice and Master. Reading issues, not important. But I didn’t know he was really not involved. Did be base Serpent War or Rift War saga on the game? Don’t remember what was what this many years later.

I have been thinking of getting my ass in gear and setting up a retro system. I have several units just waiting to be configured it’s just other stuff always taking priority.

So would a Pentium machine let’s say either with DOS/3.11 be good or maybe Win 95. I think maybe I’ll setup one of each since I have a few units available. This way I can play some things that need one and other stuff that is better with the other. I recall Crusader: No Remorse, and Crusader: No Regret won’t run on '95 but it will reboot into DOS mode for it lol. There are quite a few other games I’m eager to play again.

Oddly I’ve found that some stuff is ok under emulation but for whatever reasons - speculatively I’d say access to hardware via real-mode drivers that the abstraction layer in NT and forward prohibits - even the best systems like VMWare and VirtualBox seem to not handle more sophisticated game engines, only the simpler stuff. I imagine maybe it can be made to work better with tweaking and supplementary tools but after all the work that requires to get it to cooperate I think just having a real system with older hardware is probably just easier and more reliable.

I want to play the graphical Zork games again, Return to Zork, Zork: Nemesis and Zork: Grand Inquisitor. Those were so much fun. Nemesis was a huge departure from the Zorkverse it was probably a shelved project in need of an easily marketable title? I dunno but Activision et al did an awesome job with it. I tried it not long ago on my Linux laptop and even with tools like PlayOnLinux/WINE, the animation was far too fast and rendered it not controllable.

There’s so much more stuff I would love to dive into again. Lands of Lore, some more of the Sierra titles like King’s Quest, Space Quest, Gabriel Knight, just all their stuff. Between Sierra, Apogee, Activision, Interplay and a few others, the landscape of 1990s gaming is an absolute treasure!

Wow I have really rambled! If you made it all the way here thanks for patiently reading my verbosity.

I have been fine with both Canon and Lexmark and also a Brother unit that someone in my family owns that their new Win11 machine refused to talk to; I opened up my ASUS t-pad with Ubuntu and printed in five seconds.

But yeah CUPS has actually caused many a headache to the point that I’ve disabled it on some units.

This has been a real issue yeah.

Yeeeeah! I haven’t played these in forever but Hero’s Quest was my first Sierra adventure and holy shit was it magic. And Krondor - Raymond freakin Feist writing games!!

Both absolutely epic! Although in my case we’d be playing fast and loose with the term “youth” this was stuff I played after college but still.

More like being molested.

Is the coming of age ceremony when he loads Doom?

Isn’t that the employee who was found dead like a week later? You know, the one Boeing killed?

And make sure you know where your towel is.

As someone who started with nothing but command line - Timex Sinclair, Apple IIe, DOS, I can’t even relate to the concept of being scared of command line.

I don’t think I’d want something larger than like 9" at most for something like that. Unless maybe you have it most of the time in screensaver with a photo slideshow. Then it would be pretty cool. Like a photo frame but when you tap it becomes an interface for smart home controls.

I also have a single Windows machine remaining but it’s specifically because I have tons of services and stuff on there and it’s fine. It’s Windows 7 Pro and does its job. No need to fix what ain’t broke. All my other systems I changed over to Linux many years ago.

Nowadays when I see someone have trouble in Windows I just shake my head and express sadness. What a shame you gotta be using that sewage.

Ohhh. I C. Also I realized it’s not functional on recent versions.

Elementary OS is beautiful, polished and easy. Maybe also check out Ubuntu Studio Edition since you do a good deal of editing? I like Pop! as well and have it on a couple of systems, but it’s nothing extremely special over others, it’s just very well-curated with regard to features and updates. They’ve tweaked a bit of stuff that’s sloppy in the main Ubuntu.

The best thing to do really is learn as you go, but definitely put some real effort into reading about the basics. The file system and the settings are both to look at first.

For good customization of your desktop if you enjoy that, go with KDE/Plasma.

You can also change later if you learn enough that you’d like to go to a more bare base system. Personally I’m on Kubuntu on my main machine but that’s only because it’s a pretty new laptop - or was when I got it - and raw Debian didn’t have the drivers yet for some of it. I’m sure by now it’s all supported and I eventually want to set aside a day to reformat and go to raw Debian. It’s my favorite distro and in the most recent version they did away with their draconic restrictions of drivers so it’s quite more accessible now.

But for a very easy and comfortable, eye-pleasing start, I’d really suggest something like ElementaryOS. It’s possibly the most beautiful looking one I’ve seen, and just jump right in and start kind of setup.

That’s my contribution to suggestions for you. Hope you make the journey easily. Linux really is phenomenal and a massive change from the disease-infested world of Windows.

Karma firewall?

Different strokes for different folks. I replied to the guy who replied to you and raised a couple of ideas that I think may distinguish the options to answer your question.

He’s just asking as in, maybe someone can share their perspective on why there may be an advantage to tab groups over windows. And to that end… isn’t there a certain amount of system resources that are increased more with a whole new window as opposed to just more tabs in groups? I would think it would consume more resources, albeit perhaps not to any severe degree. —?

And to the actual question I think visually tab groups are easier to navigate than swapping back through windows. Task managers don’t really tend to present windows in a fashion where you could refer to them in context of one-another. Maybe some custom views that you can install in Linux but even then, ones I’ve tried still don’t quite give you a quick easy overview that shows enough detail. You pretty much see what program you’re swapping to, but not laid out in ways you can compare and choose on the fly the way you want when it’s the same application but different content. That’s my experience, anyhow.