Yeah, but at least we knew how to switch consoles.

I bet that most Linux users nowadays don’t event know the CTRL+ALT+Fx shortcuts to switch console.

Can’t say that the old days were really “good” compared to what we had now, but there was definitelly a lot of satisfaction in step by step getting the system to work.

Stories from the “good” old days running Linux on a 386 machine with 4 MB or less of memory aside, in the present day it’s still perfectly normal to run Linux on a much weaker machine as a server - you can just rent a the cheapest VPS you can find (which nowadays will have 128 MB, maybe 256MB, and definitelly only give you a single core) and install it there.

Of course, it won’t be something with X-Windows or Wayland, much less stuff like LibreOffice.

I think the server distribution of Ubunto might fit such a VPS, though there are server-specific Linux distros that will for sure fit and if everything fails TinyCore Linux will fit in a potato.

I current have a server like that using AlmaLinux on a VPS with less than 1GB in memory, which is used only as a Git repository and that machine is overkill for it (it’s the lowest end VPS with enough storage space for a Git repository big enough for the projects I’m working on, so judging by the server management interface and linux meminfo, that machine’s CPU power and memory are in practice far more than needed).

If you’re willing to live with a command line interface, you can run Linux on $50 worth of hardware.

Similar story but I just installed slackware on one of the University PCs (they just had a handful of PCs in the general computer room for the students and nobody actually watched over us) since I did not have a PC yet (only had a ZX Spectrum at the timback then).

Trying to get X-Windows to work in Slackware was interesting, to say the least: back then you had to manually create your own video timings configuration file to get the graphics to work - which means defining the video mode at the very low level, such as configuring the number of video clock cycles between end-of-line-drawing and horizontal-retrace - and fortunatelly I didn’t actually blow up any monitor (which was possible if you did the configuration wrong).

At least we had some access to the Internet (most things were blocked but we had Usenet and e-email and one could use FTPmail gateways to download stuff from remote servers) via Ethernet, so that part was easy.

Anyways, my first reaction looking at the OP’s post was like: yeah, if they’re running X it’s probably a too powerfull machine.

We are CURRENTLY in a situation where people from the “wrong” social groups are discriminated against, and that’s a problem. People who are less qualified are being hired over people who are more qualified. Denying that is either ignorance or bad faith.

The solution to that problem is to hire people ON MERIT ALONE

Gender is not merit and is not competence, and yet here you are claiming unironically that to “solve” the problem that people are chosen on the base of gender, people should be chosen on the base of gender.

How about making sure that people are not being chosen on the basis of gender?!

Your “solution” just moves the unfairness around, still hiring because of chromosses they were born with some people who didn’t deserve to be hired and not hiring because of the chromossomes they were born with some other people who did deserve to be hired, fully preserving the unfairness of gender-based hiring, but being unfair to different people (and not those individuals who gained from previous unfairness, which would be just, just those who happen to have been born with some chromossomes similar to some otherwise totally unrelated individuals who benifited from the previous direction of Discrimination).

As I wrote earlier, you can’t Discriminate your way out of Discrimination.

The article itself clearly and unambiguously wants gender-specific hiring, so clearly some people believe that the problems of Discrimination are solved by Discriminating in a different direction.

The way I see it, more Discrimination with different beneficiaries is not an easy shortcut to fix the problems of Discrimination and the only way to fix it is the hard work of cracking down on the causes of Discrimination.

Judging not just by this Article and also by many discussions I’ve that view is definitely contentious, often because people think that “counter”-Discrimination will correct the effects of past Discrimination, which at times it does, only it does so by moving the problem around as the new Discrimination is itself unfair for both people who were never victims of the past Discrimination and don’t deserve the gains they will now get and for those who never gained from past Discrimination and are now unfairly sidelined by the new Discrimination.

Is it wierd for me to not want people to be chosen for a responsability that has nothing to do with gender (unlike actors and actresses, were the character being played usually is gendered) based on their gender?

If there is a gender inequality problem in this, I bet it’s the same as a lot of other areas with a similar kind of gender inequality: were people are given opportunities based on who they know and who their parents are - i.e. Cronyism - and those networks of mates mainly contain people of the male gender because of the enviroments were the form and the profession currently being dominated by that gender. However such an environment doesn’t explicitly disciminate against women, it discriminates against anybody who isn’t friend with the “right people” or doesn’t have the “right parents”, quite independently of them being male or female.

Maybe “Financial Mentors” should invest in Unknown Filmmakers in a gender agnostic way and “Take a Risk” - I bet that a lot of great new filmmakers who aren’t part of the “mates network” and happen to be female would gain from it, right alongside those who happen to not be female.

I vaguely remember that they were already preloading the Office DLLs way back in Windows 95 or XP days.