AND WE LIKED IT! WE WERE GRATEFUL!

It's becoming more and more difficult to use smooth running linux installs as a tool for lording your 133t-ness over other, leser geeks. Have you people seen the Ubuntu installs? With their pretty graphics and ease of use and automated everything. I feel like an old grandpa reminiscing about how hard I had it back in old school.

Because we didn't have hardware detection. We had an endless yet frustratingly incomplete list of possible modules to sift through to find the driver that we hoped might have sort of worked with the hardware we had. And to test it, we had to compile the bitch. Back when I first waded the murky waters of Linux in high school there was no fun way to partition a your father's hard drive with all his financial records, no, we had to fdisk it and completely destroy any data that we didn't secretely back up forever. So if you fucked up, your parent's would be audited by the IRS and possibly thrown in jail for life. Thats some scary shit to go through just to see what linux was all about.

No graphical installs, kiddos. We had a floppy disk, a command prompt and a pocket full of dreams. Hell, if you managed to get the Graphical User Interface up, ever, you were flown out to Europe to be made a member of an elite commission and given a small Slavic country to run.

And if you ever did get a full Linux install up and running, Linus Torvalds would come to your place of business and punch you right in the face and scream "Welcome to my little slice of hell, BITCH". Because that's just how they roll in Finland. It's cold up there; they are very angry.

You kids have it so easy it makes me sick. Before the kernel torrents you had to fly out to Helsinki and hold a commedore 64 over your head, march in place and sing the Finnish National Anthem while they sprayed ammonia on you. If, after 24 hours, you were deemed worthy they would throw the disk over a cliff and have you climb down naked to fetch it. If they didn't deem you worthy, they just killed you and everyone you ever really loved.

Ah, but to become a Guru back then was truly life's greatest gift.