cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/44849946
Now when trying to activate the OS by attempting to call the phone number for Microsoft Product Activation, an automated voice response says the following: "Support for product activation has moved online.
Linux is this way, guys.
Windows has sucked for a while, and watching them keep making mistakes like this is fun to watch.
20 years ago internet was the main pro-Windows argument, actually. Windows was completely comfortable without the internet, while Linux was barely usable offline without access to online repositories and forums to keep the system working.
I remember when Linux was a bear to install. While the pro-Linux people were kinda assholes and not cool with helping complete noobs. Things have changed.
They have? I don’t know – I’m still an ashhole.
haha, good point. In my personal experience tho, the linux community has been super helpful for a while now. lol
now now, 20 years ago was 2005. cable internet, xDSL and some fiber were around and semi common. distrowatch.com was just starting but plenty of distros had complete ISOs with full environments. source forge, freshmeat and ibiblio were all big on hosting ISOs.
now in 1996/97 redhat 5.x series had the anaconda installer that installed all components without touching anything Internet related (though it could)
94 had slackwares release and it was as you say
So? Yes, we had CDs with packages.
point was many flavors of Linux did not need internet for functionality 20 years ago.
Formally? No, they didn’t need the Internet. De facto – you weren’t able to actively use it without the Internet.
whaaat? I don’t understand your de facto to argument if it pertains to 2005. I incidicated there were some difficulties in the mid 90s but not mid 00’s. Just boot up knoppix CDs? they were very popular at that time and perfectly usable without internet. usermodelinux could run Linux within Linux without network stack as a poor man’s docker back then.
people post about the old QNX bootable floppy that had a browser and desktop environment.
TL;DR there were tons of usable mediums of *nix 20 years ago that did not require internet connectivity.
I had a winmodem at the time, which of course wasn’t supported. 😓
EDIT: I say “at the time” but I mean late 90s, not 20 years ago.
I had one up until about 2003 probably. We were out in the country and couldn’t get cable or dsl. I remember trying out linux and fighting with the wintel modem and gpu drivers, writing down the errors, rebooting the machine back into windows, going online and researching the errors online, writing down the commands I needed to use to fix it, or downloading the rpm packages (red hat or fedora can’t remember which) I might have needed, rebooting, trying again in linux, failing, etc.
When i finally tried ubuntu on my laptop around 2007, it was amazing that the WiFi and graphics “just worked”.