I feel like you missed out on the best part of Napster - finding someone's stash of music you like surrounded by things you've never heard of and then exploring it. My memory swears you could leave someone a message but that's a lifetime ago, but I know I connected with a few people who helped me absolutely get into metal music and that's changed my life for the good forever.
Other than that you'd go to a LAN party and find someone's file share of goodies, find again the things you were into and now you had a new friend who probably liked things you never knew of and now you two are sharing new things to each other on top of that.
It was really an age of connecting people and exploring the world for me, even as a young kid.
Oh I do remember Napster, but that was way after 1993 as well ;)
Either way, that still took ages to download, etc, so, it was less immediate. And somehow, I remember it more as a source for stuff that's already well-known ...
I had two faster (Pentium 3) machines but firing up my dad's old Pentium 90 running redhat that I installed to use KDE to write C was just a beautiful feeling and really got me coding for a few years.
Even games were at least partially open (quake) or easily moddable (command and conquer, tribes, etc.) so I went down that rabbit hole soon after.
Funny I feel the same about gnome. I haven't played with others enough to comment I suppose but all are missing some basic creature comfort stuff like a full tcp/up config dialog or a real fluid working app store out of the box. Distros add these but what is going on here.
The thing with GNOME is having to stack a bunch of extensions (most of which will only somewhat meet your needs) to get desired features, half of which will break periodically because there’s no stable extension API.
GNOME and KDE sit on extreme opposite ends of the minimalist/maximalist spectrum.
I agree to an extent. I have some problems with it but I appreciate the way it approached new users. Instead of instantly trying to accommodate them it instead presented itself to the user in ways that let the user learn, sometimes the hard way.
The thing I noticed and is not talked about is used books on Amazon. There was a golden time when they were effectively a buck each due to companies processing so many systematically and now you can't find a used book there that isn't a few dollars off new at best.
How's your experience with that? It's on the top of my dream laptop list but it's expensive and the second gen is more so....looks like they killed off the line right before it got to the sweet spot (ryzen ai max line) just like the surface laptop which makes me sad.
There were a lot of reports about those things having power or heat firmware problems?
It's the best laptop I have ever used. I have it since it newly came out in 2023 and it never let me down, is quick (I have the 7840u), quiet (passive in power-saver platform profile, unless pushed, but even then it's manageable), can do USB4 so I can use it with a EGPU, which works fantastically. Sleep (S0) works as expected with updated EC FW under Debian stable.
It's incredibly portable, when you take it out of the box you wonder if it's not too small (it's not, it's a perfect size :)).
Battery endurance is good, at least for me. You won't make 10h flights while compiling Chromium though. Get the LCD instead of the OLED if you can, the OLED looks good but uses way more battery I hear.
If you can find it in the max config (64GB, 7840u, 2TB) it's going to make you happy for a long, long time I think.
I don't know what I will use after it dies. There's nothing comparable in portability, power and build quality (which is really, really amazing).
I agree with you: this thing, a few mm thicker and heavier due to beefier heatsink, with a Ryzen 395+ and 128GB would be so incredible. I'd dump so much money into that...
I have one for work; I was excited to receive it, I’ve never been more disappointed with a laptop bearing the ThinkPad brand. Lots of intermittent issues with graphics, BT audio, and performance.
I guess I don't get why all of these don't target better user experience goals - one login / trust plane and full distribution for decentralization.
The way I'd look at it is more like Bitcoin where everyone can decide how much compute to give to the pool to verify people or posts and maybe everyone shares chunks of the whole pie with copies like freenet.
Maybe I'm (likely) too dumb to get why this isn't what things in the fediverse is but they all are an awful experience and having so many hosts makes critical mass non existent so I can't be bothered to participate.
I got the game with the condition I would never enable the adult mode from my parents. And I never did, at home.
One day my parents dragged me to a dinner party they were going to, and I brought along the game disc. Me and one of the other parents kids loaded the game and started playing. At some point the other kid wanted to see the adult mode and I relented.
Later on, to troll this kids brother I threw the dollars so the speak… and this little kid just lost his mind. He ran into the other room where the adults were enjoying tea and dinner and totally ratted us out.
My parents immediately bust in, drag me out and we drive home. They don’t let me use the computer again for a month over some pixelated bewbies. Good lord things were different in the 90s.
Other than that you'd go to a LAN party and find someone's file share of goodies, find again the things you were into and now you had a new friend who probably liked things you never knew of and now you two are sharing new things to each other on top of that.
It was really an age of connecting people and exploring the world for me, even as a young kid.