The last time I maintained my own windows dev and reverse engineering box was Win 98 with the Borland C++ compiler and SoftICE resident debugger. Also did some casual gaming and had a nice 5.1 surround audio setup.
Rebuilds were an absolute trial. I had a specific order of drivers, packages and so on that had to be followed to avoid an unusable system.
I also used to do on call PC engineer work for a medium sized employment agent corporation. Network drivers and printer driver installers world conflict and fuck up systems. Training machines needed hardware dongles which cost 1000s and we’re horribly unreliable. In short it was a massive pain in the dick.
Against this backdrop I started mucking about with a SuSE 5 cd I got off a magazine cover. It was also a pain in many ways (xf86config anyone?), but it was a breath of fresh air compared to Windows because with a little persistence it could always be figured out. Nothing hidden. Nothing proprietary.
I am truly astonished at how windows has continued to be as bad as ever, and equally amazed at how good the Linux desktop experience has become.
Over the years, corporate work helped me understand how quality slips and repairing the culture to improve that is borderline impossible. I see little hope for windows ever getting better. Microsoft have enough money to last for many years, but they long ago traded what technical soul they had for MBA wank.
Linux treads a tightrope - there’s a lot of corporate pressure - both helpful and a hindrance. Keep supporting the fringe - diversity is our best guard against the darkness!
I still have my driver boxes from back then. Hard drive boxes with the name of the machine in marker on the front, and install directions folded inside. 3.5" discs and CDs
Windows now is easier, Linux is easiest, especially for a dev environment
The last time I maintained my own windows dev and reverse engineering box was Win 98 with the Borland C++ compiler and SoftICE resident debugger. Also did some casual gaming and had a nice 5.1 surround audio setup.
Rebuilds were an absolute trial. I had a specific order of drivers, packages and so on that had to be followed to avoid an unusable system.
I also used to do on call PC engineer work for a medium sized employment agent corporation. Network drivers and printer driver installers world conflict and fuck up systems. Training machines needed hardware dongles which cost 1000s and we’re horribly unreliable. In short it was a massive pain in the dick.
Against this backdrop I started mucking about with a SuSE 5 cd I got off a magazine cover. It was also a pain in many ways (xf86config anyone?), but it was a breath of fresh air compared to Windows because with a little persistence it could always be figured out. Nothing hidden. Nothing proprietary.
I am truly astonished at how windows has continued to be as bad as ever, and equally amazed at how good the Linux desktop experience has become.
Over the years, corporate work helped me understand how quality slips and repairing the culture to improve that is borderline impossible. I see little hope for windows ever getting better. Microsoft have enough money to last for many years, but they long ago traded what technical soul they had for MBA wank.
Linux treads a tightrope - there’s a lot of corporate pressure - both helpful and a hindrance. Keep supporting the fringe - diversity is our best guard against the darkness!
I still have my driver boxes from back then. Hard drive boxes with the name of the machine in marker on the front, and install directions folded inside. 3.5" discs and CDs
Windows now is easier, Linux is easiest, especially for a dev environment