• cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    Tell me you don’t know that much about computers without telling me. MAC stands for Media Access Control, it’s a networking term, every device has a MAC address.

    Mac is a computer made by Apple. It doesn’t stand for anything. It’s short for Macintosh. But there hasn’t been an “Apple Macintosh” in a long time. They’ve just been Macs. Oh, and macOS is certified UNIX, whatever that means, so stuff your elitism. We’re both using *nix. Mine just works without issues.

    But in the interests of transparency, no, I haven’t actually tried to use Linux, like gave it a shot as a daily driver, in like 15-20 years. I’ve dabbled off and on but I think we can agree dicking around in a VM doesn’t count. More recently than that, I put Ubuntu on my mother-in-law’s computer and supported it for about a year, but then she went back to Windows — that was like a decade ago. I have used Linux off and on since the 90s. But what really stopped me — I got married. Settled down. Now, my wife doesn’t give a shit what the thing runs as long as Firefox works, but any weirdness with the OS, I gotta deal with it. That kept me on Windows, until I switched. If I were still on a regular PC, given all Microsoft’s bullshit, I’d probably be on Linux, most likely Ubuntu. But I had a hardware failure and I always wanted to try Mac, so I did.

    Oh — just saw, “using it inside Windows”. Weird that you don’t know what that means since you’ve been using it for so long, but maybe that’s the reason. So, I’m not sure if they still do, but when I did this, Ubuntu had a thing, you’d download the distro, burn it to DVD, and run it, and it would run inside Windows as an app (in a VM, I assume). You then had the option to install it, because if you didn’t, nothing would survive a reboot. (Why it didn’t just save a config file to disk, I don’t know. Maybe that was an option.) So you install it, and while you use it, it partitions the drive and installs itself, in the background, then it copies its configuration/whatever you’ve downloaded to the install. Then it reboots into that, and then you’re dual booting. You can also delete the Windows partition. Not sure what you mean about a round peg and a square hole. Are you saying a computer built using off-the-shelf parts should only be used for Windows, and specific hardware needs to be used for Linux? Because I’ve literally never heard that before and you really sound like you don’t know what you’re talking about by saying that. So maybe clarify?

    • rarsamx@lemmy.ca
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      10 hours ago

      Oh. Smart and pedantic about an autoincorrect. I’m not going to say I know more about computers than you because… One never knows. I just started in 1982 and have only worked in IT my whole life in pretty much every role, in more than 30 languages and many different platforms plus contributing as a developer in a small distribution around 2006-2010 and ending up as a lead entreprise architect providing advise on the technological direction of 300+ systems. But again, maybe I don’t know much.

      Your answer confirmed my original comment. You are commenting without fundament. “I used it 15 years ago” qualifies for speaking about Linux in past tense. Not in present tense.

      By the way, I don’t know if you used virtualisation or WSL to run Ubuntu inside windows (I remember the Ubuntu cd had that executable) but it’s not the same as running a proper installation and back then WSL was lacking.

      For me talking about WSL also qualifies as past tense as I haven’t used Windows at all since 2019.

      Good for you that you like Apple. It doesn’t mean that Linux is not stable or is lacking though.