Nobody had this, it was way too expensive for what it was. Everybody just kept saving for a msx or Commodore and skipped this.

Oh, you sweet summer child…

Up to the 90s my friend. Then 3.5 floppy"s took over (1.44 MEGAbyte!) then came zip (100MB) but only for rich people, then it became the era of CD and later dvd burning. Internet was not measured in mbits back then and most of the time not even in kbits. The internet was not a valid delivery system. It was slow and very expensive. Also the first memory cards (CF) around the millennium and from there it went on to the 10s and around there you got the pivot to what we have now.

Tape is still around in computing; its cheap, it’s cheerful, dependable and has quite a throughput. Seeking on it is still horrible though. But anyway, watching a real mechanised tapelibrary do it’s thing backing up computer systems is still mesmerizing.

I use Windows because

My pc does not tell a story. It’s a thing I use for work and play. I can’t be bothered, it doesn’t interest me, what niri, alacritty cosmic de is. Why should I care? Why should I invest that time? My pc works already. My framerates are high, it’s stable and all the stuff I need for work, works. Out of the box.

Every single time I tried linux for the desktop the system failed within weeks. Dependency error after an automatic upgrade. Grub killing itself. Again. X refuses to start. So many config files littered all over the place just waiting for you to fuck something up. Gpu driver bullshittery. Printer hell. Other peripheral shit. (Flightsim gear)

And honestly, the last time i seriously tried was more then 5 years ago. In IT terms that’s a lifetime. So surely it will be much better now.

But after the umpteenth fail to start X, I just thought: wtf am I doing? I could also next next finish my ass through a Windows installation, insert a pihole in my network to block the most obnoxious stuff and just do my thing.

Which is what I did.

Now, I do use linux. A lot. Just not for my desktop.