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Linux in a Commodore 64 Emulator and More Operating System Thoughts.
I started out with a Commodore 64 when I was about 4 years old.
I mainly started using it because it had games like the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Gold Box and Sesame Street.
The person who claims to have gotten the VICE emulator to boot Linux says it took a couple hours to get to a state where there were screenshots, and if it could run on (modified) real hardware, maybe a week or so to get it booted.
That seems to be about my assessment of the speed of Windows 11 on a Skylake i7 though, after you “fix” the alleged security and minimum processor requirements by invoking a Command Prompt, calling RegEdit, and changing three settings.
So if there’s people willing to wait a little while, who knows?
It seems like Microsoft has totally lost their patience with Windows 10 holdouts, and is now trying to force them onto their Windows 11 abomination by threatening to withhold hardware like WiFi 7 chips that could have Windows 10 drivers if Intel would allow them to run.
At some point, all PCs became “fast enough” and the only way to sell more of them with Windows was to make the big shitpile even higher and threaten those that didn’t upgrade that no more hardware drivers were coming.
I’ve used a lot of weird computers but the only use I have for a Windows VM is to occasionally start it up, open IE, and deal with a single ActiveX control that Walmart doesn’t appear to have ever replaced. It’s a real mess on their One Walmart site. Parts of it need Chrome, and this part loads and it’s 1999 Internet Explorer 5 all over again, and the control is so poorly designed that it’s flashing at you and it looks like you’re going to DEFCON Alpha or something getting ready to launch a nuclear missile.
Needless to say that by the time I’m done I’m glad I closed the Virtual Machine.
The Commodore 64 and tape drives and 5 1/4″ floppies were absolutely downright pleasant and user friendly compared to Windows 11.
About the only time you had to mess with things were when you reached a certain area of a game like Pools of Darkness and it wanted a different disk. At least the system wasn’t totally bugged and slow to respond to even typing and full of malware like Windows 11 is.
The user interface with Commodore was also better than Windows 11. There were only a handful of basic commands to tell it to run a tape or something.
I have no idea how Microsoft ever got anywhere with DOS and Windows with all of the 80s computers that someone actually put a modicum of thought and effort into.
By 1985, Commodore was shipping a full GUI that wasn’t running on some hell-on-wheels system underneath it all, it was an actual OS. Amiga. It had dedicated sound and graphics hardware.
Microsoft was running ads about how you could load a picture in paint if you waited about 10 seconds for the window to scan it in and were good with monochrome or like 8 colors.
The situation fundamentally never seems to change except now instead of just a computer that comes with trash that needs to be removed, Microsoft pays vandals to implement “Secure Boot” to try to stop people from leaving it.
Windows is like the city dump. Instead of doing something to compact the trash and sort out the recyclables, they just want you to get a bigger dump.
Unfortunately, Microsoft people have infested Linux with their “Just get a bigger dump.” mentality. And Flatpak is part of this.
You almost have to use BtrFS compress to deal with all this shit, the tens of redundant libraries it spews everywhere. Running a normal file system on a laptop with an SSD is no longer even feasible thanks to this.
IBM is really trying to make there almost be no point in trying to do your computing better.
However, one of the upsides of PCs getting faster to deal with Windows is that if you try hard enough, you can eventually kill Windows, replace it with Linux, and have a machine that is so fast you can emulate almost any other full PC you want.
Just because it was meant to deal with a mounting pile of trash doesn’t mean you can’t run some interesting things with all that power instead.
One of my favorite things to do is retro gaming. Ironically I end up with Flatpaks on my system because I use a more “enterprise-like” distribution now and RPM repositories can sometimes try to clobber system libs and cause a mess that way. So, who needs this when they can just throw the garbage off somewhere in the corner and not risk the base system.
The last time I even thought about disk compression was in the 90s with DOS, and of course I learned fast to just live with the disk space I had without it, because Microsoft designed, or rather stole Stacker from Stac Electronics, their file system compression so badly that one small error could corrupt everything and cost you the entire file system, OS included.
Practically every DOS user from that era helpfully warned each other not to go near DoubleSpace or their allegedly non-infringing DriveSpace. (Stac sued them.) Like most Microsoft technologies it was flakey and temperamental and buggy, only this could cost you the family jewels when it went wrong.
BtrFS Compress has had some issues, apparently, but nobody living today who is much under 40 could even wrap their head around something so bad as Microsoft DoubleSpace.
openSUSE Leap 15.5 was kind of a pain to set up in the file system area. The kernel had ZStd support, so just adding lines to my /etc/fstab solved the issue for new files, but I had to pluck a new btrfsprogs RPM from their build system for Leap and jam it in to bypass an error saying ZStandard compression was not a valid format when I went to defrag the file system and compress existing files. I blogged about that.
When I was done with that, I deleted the mount point for /tmp, removed the files, and set up a *sigh* systemd service to manage /tmp on tmpfs.
Then I enabled ZRam and used the command to create a swap device of all of RAM in it using ZStandard.
I’ve ended up bringing some Fedora-isms with me anyway just to deal with the kind of bloat and trash that the several Flatpaks I do use throw everywhere. I also really don’t like the idea of temp files being written somewhere where they count as writes on the SSD and may end up outliving a reboot.