• 21 Posts
  • 415 Comments
Joined 2 年前
cake
Cake day: 2023年8月14日

help-circle






  • A lot of it is momentum / inertia? (I can’t think of the right word).

    Basically, Ubuntu was the distro for years. It was the one that just worked and was easy for new users. It built on Debian’s stability and made everything easier. All the beginner guides and how to guides were written with Ubuntu in mind, so lots of new users switched to it too.

    Mint built on Ubuntu’s success, and made things even easier for people switching from Windows, by doing things like putting the start menu in the same place, and making everything look familiar. Because it’s based on Ubuntu, the guides all still work too. As Canonical started making unpopular decisions with Ubuntu, Mint took the lead as the distro to switch to.

    Now, other distros like Fedora, and DEs like KDE have caught up, and even passed Mint for ease of use, that history is hard to overcome :)









  • About 20 years ago, I lived in a shared house in the city. I worked nights, so if I left a download running when I went to bed, it would affect the others in the house. I saw a post online where someone was giving away a cable modem, and not knowing much about how they worked, I had an idea that I wanted to try.

    The cable internet came into the house through a coax cable, rather than the phone line, and was split with a dumb splitter between the router and the TV. I used a spare splitter to run a cable to my room and plugged my modem in.

    I tried it first on my day off so that I could check with my housemates if it caused any problems. It connected and everything worked with no issues, except that it only connected at about dial up speeds. We were going out for the night so I left it connected with some downloads running to see if it would stay connected. When we got home, the downloads that should have taken a few days were done. A speed test showed that I was getting around 35Mbps, when the fastest speed we could pay for was 4Mbps.

    We later found out that apparently the street was sharing a connection (to the cabinet I think, it’s been a while), and because my modem wasn’t registered, it was just getting whatever was left over. At night, when everyone was in bed and their devices were off, it was going a lot faster. It didn’t last long, only a few months, but we took advantage of it while we could :)