Brian Masinick
Don’t mean to steer this thread off course to WMs, but Brian Masinick, sounds like you & I have traveled a similar path. I too started w/Slackware (dozens of floppies – lol) which came w/Fvwm. At work we had Solaris (I loved CDE’s unique pastel color-scheme choices & it’s dtterm terminal w/menubar). Then Red Hat which had an attractive WM & default scheme that used a WM (I suspect Bowman), but I left Red Hat I too settled on Mepis until Warren stopped making it, but soured on KDE when then abandoned their “kwm” app & longed for the old Red Hat WM, so around 2000 I discovered a close relative called AfterStep which was more customizable than any other I’d seen + easy with simple text files and well-documented with well-commented choices of default ones + good windowmaker dockapp support & have stuck with that ever since (I still use dockapps including a cpl of my own), including much code-tweaking to “fix” it’s quirks (https://github.com/wildstar84/afterstep). I don’t really want to have to learn how to customize another one now! It’s very lean & fast & written entirely in C, & mine doesn’t require dbus, systemD or a Gnome-session! As far as distros go, I briefly went from Red Hat to Mandrake to Knoppix to Knottix, then Mint and finally landed on antiX a/b 15 years ago & have been rolling w/antiX ever since Even my router now runs antiX!
Yes! While our paths are not identical, there are a few similarities.
In 1995 I was at DEC and that particular year I was changing organizations (and location). I was a member of the same group as a gentleman who was now a department head of one of the Digital UNIX organizations and when I went job interviewing I asked for his recommendation and guidance; he was happy to provide it, but then he said something else: before you decide on where to go, I’d like you to interview with one of my supervisors. Turned out I knew the guy that was one of his supervisors too, and they hired me.
About two months after I joined that group I heard a few guys talking very near my cubicle: turned out that among them were a couple of people from the same university I had attended – small world indeed. Another guy was a fellow who has written books and is well known in Linux circles – I also knew him because we used to chat in the afternoon, typically when popping some microwave popcorn!
Needless to say, between these 3-4 people, I got my intro to Linux on top of literature I had already been reading. Another interesting tidbit is that I ran into at least one person who ran Linux on his workstation and CONNECTED from that workstation to our UNIX servers – so I knew that this stuff was usable! That led me to a November 1995 purchase of my first personally owned computer – and I dual booted Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Slackware. That, of course, was only the beginning.
Your mention of KNOPPIX and other live versions (from CD back then) were significant reasons why MEPIS, PCLinuxOS and antiX (though a few years later) were among my early choices for follow up distributions. Why is that? I could run many of them live, especially from laptop systems. At a few points I was going to laundromats instead of washing and drying at home due to temporary issues with equipment, and they had Internet available, so I’d take a CD, plop it in and bring it in my laundry basket and tweak with distros while I waited for the boring laundry to finish. That wasn’t the start of my journey at the time but it was a sign of the direction I was taking, which strengthened considerably when antiX emerged in 2007.
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Brian Masinick
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