Getting Debianized
I’m switching my desktop computer to Debian Linux.
I should have embraced Debian from the beginning. Please allow me to offer my excuse for not having done so 26 years ago.
In 1997, when IBM basically put OS/2 to sleep for reasons that had nothing to do with its customers — nothing IBM ever does has customer satisfaction as the determining criterion, best I can tell — I needed to switch to a different operating system. Windows was not, as it continues not to be, a reasonable choice for anyone who considered a computer more than just another household appliance. The internet, and especially high-speed internet, was growing. A new word for most of us, “security,” would become an ever-greater concern.
Yes, I could have wrung a couple more years out of DOS, perhaps running the then-excellent GeoWorks GUI atop it but with other, serious applications available in text mode, the way anyone with a working brain ran Windows 3.x. (Windows 95 was a joke, and Windows 98 was a joke that didn’t even try to be funny.)