Memories from 2008

Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS (Hardy Heron) :slight_smile:

Bring back any memories for you?

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Yes it does. It was my first Ubuntu LTS. I remember it as one of the best Ubuntu LTS releases. Of course if a release is good or not is often depending on what hardware you have. Just looking at the picture it looks simple but nice. It had a fantastic background too. :+1:

This was a time when I thought Ubuntu and Canonical would take over the world. Sadly it didn’t happen this way. Ubuntu 8.10 was when problems started by introducing half-baked Pulseaudio as default. Many casual users couldn’t deal with it. Skype stopped working etc. It took a very long time for Canonical to get Pulseaudio to an acceptable level. Playing an MP3 file with 20-30 % CPU usage is not OK. Pulseaudio was a hard dependency from Ubuntu 9.10. It eventually got better, but it was the biggest problem in those days.

Windows 7 was released the same time as Ubuntu 9.10 and provided a sane sound experience out of the box. I think this was when a lot of the initial Ubuntu momentum was lost. Making Pulseaudio a hard dependency was just an insane decision for the adoption of Ubuntu. Yes, I’m still a little bit angry about this. :grimacing: :wink:

Anyway, I have nothing but love for the Ubuntu 8.04 release (Pulseaudio was present, but not default).

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Yep. Between Pulseaudio and NetworkManager, 8.04 had issues I remember well. And here was Vista, probably the biggest vulnerability Microsoft ever had, and Ubuntu just wasn’t stable.

But alas, that background is memorable. :slight_smile:

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Hardy Heron brings back fond memories. The simplicity of the Gnome GUI was a perfect fit for me. It was just the right blend of being able preform basic task from the GUI, while still challenging me to learn more about Linux when I need to do more than the GUI provided. I have very much the same affection for Ubuntu Mate today.

A few more screenshots for you :slight_smile:

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When I found Ubuntu it was a little magical. I liked Windows XP, but with Ubuntu I felt so much more in control. I also really liked the theming and still think it looks pleasant for something basic. It looks a little unpolished 9 years later.

Mark Shuttleworth was my hero for making Linux accessible to the masses (including myself). I don’t think I would have tried Linux without Ubuntu.

Yes, MATE is a perfect successor to Gnome 2. I never liked GTK 3 (goes for any DE), but what I miss most after the transition is being able to put a different background/colour in Caja. It is possible to manually edit a theme, but when I did so I ended up affecting other areas as well.

What I miss most from those days (2008) is the feeling that the sky is the limit. In those days Ubuntu felt like a revolution, a freedom revolution if you will. A peace project. We didn’t see those crazy terrorist attacks on a weekly basis which made my belief in the world stronger in those days.

Technology is more mature today. Intel and Nvidia say Moore’s Law is dead. Wayland feels more like a regression than a proper replacement for Xorg. I just don’t feel the same optimism I once felt. I guess I’m getting old(er)… I never believed in convergence, but a FOSS phone would be cool.

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I'm right there with you, and I can prove it...

My first OS :slight_smile:

Name intentionally not mentioned to keep the youngsters guessing :wink:

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I started with Windows 95 so this is beyond my experience. Windows 3.1 would be my best bet. I think this was before Windows had a registry and you could tweak the system just by editing text-files. So Windows was more Unix-like in those days. :thinking:

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[quote=“steven, post:6, topic:13601”]My first OS[/quote]If that’s your first, you’re quite young. I’d been using PCs for years when Windows 3.1 finally found its way into the household.

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Before GUI … there was DOS, CP/M, Multiplan, Wordstar, diskettes with 180 KB storage.

I’m old …

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Yes it is Windows 3.1, which is a GUI that runs on top of DOS, very much in the same way as Mate runs on top of Ubuntu Linux.

Edit: Amazingly, it runs quite well in VirtualBox :slight_smile:

Got you all beat. :wink:

I may have started a bit late in life, but I’ll take that as a compliment. :slight_smile:

Our first computer was a Acer i386 with a 5.25 and a 3.5 floppy disk drive, and a 14.4 dial-up modem that took forever to load a web page. We bought it used, and paid more for it than the laptop I’m typing this post from today. Wish I would have kept it. :slight_smile:

You’ve got my attention. Care to share any details?

[quote=“SantaFe, post:11, topic:13601, full:true”]Got you all beat.[/quote]Only by about a year. The Timex Sinclair 1000 was released in '83 and the first time I used a PC or similar device was in 84, iirc.

Competition? :joy: I can’t count the IBM mainframe at college so here is the first computer I personally owned:

I still have it but salvaged the 6502 processor for a VIC20 long ago.

Just that the Timex was the first computer I bought. Pretty sad when I visited a local liquidation store the other day & they had dozens of complete Timex Sinclair sets with 16K ram & two cassettes for $10. :wink: Probably all gone now.

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OK, so it started with memories from 2008 and now we are back in 1976! That’s great actually!

I feel that computers (especially the desktop) has come full circle. I started with Windows 95 so that’s when I feel the modern desktop was born. Others may disagree. There was a steady evolution to Windows 7. Gnome 2 no doubt had Windows as source of inspiration. At that time Gnome developers wanted to cater to common users…

iPhone introduced the touch-UI. Gnome 3 took inspiration from that. Windows 8 tried the same thing but the backlash was too hard so Windows 10 tried to balance touch and mouse/keyboard use in a better way.

So, here we are in 2017. The desktop feels like a mature product. There is always room for improvements, but it’s hard to imagine a desktop feature we haven’t seen before in some shape or form.

Likewise, the evolution of touch-based UIs seems to have slowed considerably. iOS and Android are mature products.

There was a skeuomorphic UI trend and then a flat UI trend. Icons have gone from monochrome to playful and colourful to monochrome again.

Has the evolution of personal computing reached an end? To some extent I think so. I would like someone to prove me wrong. What’s next for visual interfaces?

A better question would be: how would you like personal computing to evolve?

What I don’t want to see is that Gnome, KDE and Wayland turn desktop Linux into a (root-less) Facebook-machine. If you want a system that was engineered from the ground up with security in mind then there is Chrome OS (integrity check every boot, minimal OS, updates installed to a second partition, no local apps - the perfect sandbox!). Of course you need to trust Google to feel secure on this system. But to be honest you always have to trust someone when using software. :thinking:

This is true but I long for the day the average person gasps at the thought of running ANY proprietary software written in someone else’s interest. It is arguably already too late, the average person has no idea what’s going on. :cry:

[quote=“Bill_MI, post:15, topic:13601”]here is the first computer I personally owned:[/quote]Direct quote from that wikipedia page:

The hard part was loading the BASIC from cassette tape—a 15-minute, error-prone ordeal.

Oh my… sounds like a hoot. :wink:

That day won’t come tomorrow. Even people who call for sand-boxing are willing to use the Nvidia proprietary driver which is full of telemetry on Windows. There was a time (back in 2008) when the Nvidia driver was required to run Compiz etc. Today both Intel and AMD FOSS drivers handle all things 3D without any problems. Even Google insists on FOSS drivers for their Chrome OS devices.

I can install a FOSS application from a PPA on Launchpad and feel reasonably safe about it. Having low-level proprietary code running 100 % of the time on my system is a different story. I wonder if Gnome and KDE are going to blacklist this driver in their quest for security. :thinking: :wink: Oh, wait, wasn’t this driver going to be ported to Wayland? So it’s not OK to log in as root, but the Nvidia driver is OK. I guess bs is to be expected in this day and age…

When it’s more important to protect the system from the user than from big corporations, you know something fishy is going on… I don’t trust Gnome, KDE and Wayland. MATE and XFCE on X is still a sane experience. The freedom I experienced in 2008 is still alive.