Have I got a D9 Cat waiting for you! Drive with those twin brake levers 10 to 14 hours a day! You will get to dig ditches and level whole mountains!

Edit to add: And drink Red Bull and eat Honey Buns while doing it too!

I grew up a poor farm boy, so we never had a VCR when I was a kid. And they really weren’t a thing anyway when I was young. And according to my Father, us kids were the remote!

Did you ever peer into the back of the TV when a tube would burn out and your Dad would pull the cabinet out, then remove the back and try to see which tube didn’t light up when the set was powered up? It was a marvelous sight! It often took us a few days before we would get to town before we could stop into the local drug store that had a tube tester and had a selection of the common tubes to buy.

That’s what I love about mine. Automatic lid raise and lower as you walk in, heated ring and water, (both adjustable temp), air dry, (again heated), and charcoal filtered air filtration to minimize the stench from that drive through burrito.

It’s the posh life. Very nearly the equal to having your own chamberlain.

You need to use the power washer setting. Takes the paint right off the wall…

I was thinking of even older things.

The feel of the keys and staccato sounds of a mechanical typewriter.

The sound of a wringer/washer machine

The muffled sound of my am band 9 transistor pocket radio “hiding” under my pillow late at night for as long as the 9V battery would last (I loved the Mystery Radio Theater show that started at 10pm)

The soft crackling sound of a tube black and white TV as all the tubes warmed up. (And the time it took to do so)

The sound and smell of the percolator coffee pot in the morning

The sound of a wooden screen slamming shut

The smell and sound of a mimeograph machine printing copies in the school/church office (And the slight buzz you could get from copy fluid-- Petroleum aromatics Yum!)

Doing my math homework with a slide rule.

The smell of a fresh fired paper hull shotgun shell on a cold crisp late fall morning

And so much more that no longer exists.

A perfect zero. I have done all of those things and more that the creator of that list can’t even imagine. Things that were everyday common but have faded beyond memory, (and aren’t missed at all).

Nah, Tarballs are delicious!

Compiling is only needed to solve dependencies when you get caught in rpm hell.

Yep. When buying a product, it ain’t about the packaging, color of the paint, or the sticker/badge hung on it. It’s all about the service when things go sideways. And at some point something will go wrong, it always does. That’s when you learn just how good or bad a company is.

So you want to take agency away from every adult so they conform to your views only?

Oh no, I haven’t forgotten SuSe. But it’s not an OG distro. It’s based off of Red Hat. Though I thought it was always a better version of Mandrake than Mandrake ever was. (I wonder what TexStar is doing these days…)

I’ve installed and used it several times over the years and thought it was a fine distro. I have never understood why it’s not more to the forefront with it’s rolling release. If you like RPM based distros, SuSe is one to check out for sure.

Not so sure about the jokes. I use Arch BTW…

Disclaimer: I actually don’t. I’m too lazy these days.

It’s not even that. It’s a path to madness.

If you want to name them all, Red Hat, Debian, and Slackware where the OG popular distros that became the foundations of all the distros we have today. I ran them all back then.

Unless you’ve worn the sackcloth and ashes of Slack, don’t even at me and my son…

The flash backs to config files. Sooo many config files everywhere. But tarball are Yum!

Ahhh, I knew it. A Man of Culture! Or something else, I’m not sure what though. I have threatened to get an old laptop and install slack on it for fun, but I seem to be too lazy to get it done…

You mirror my travels through the Linux distros. Red Hat and Mandrake, Slack, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Suse, even Mint and now Fedora yet again. I’ve never bothered with setting up a server though, I just don’t have the need or desire.

And as repeatedly told and retold every year…

And I’m using, let’s see, (Goes into Settings to check): Fedora KDE Plasma 41. Meh, it works OK I guess. It’s getting hard to tell the difference between distros anymore. And I’ve been doing this long enough that I just something that doesn’t bother me for attention anymore.

You started in the 90’s and you didn’t don the sackcloth and ashes of Slack? At least for a little bit? Ah, the joys of writing config files!

Still got to have the money. And police departments need to have budget to replace equipment.

I have been elected to a city council several times and have gone over police budgets and it was no easier for the police to get money replace a squad car or get any of the “goodies” you think are so easy to them to get. There is only so much money to be had in any city budget.

Let me introduce you to ‘We ain’t got no money to buy anything’ trick.

Replaced by who? And where is the profit in selling something to someone who has no money to buy?