# Linux...So Much Has Changed In The Last 20 Years

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** DistroTube
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol7kVJx8KcY
- **Дата:** 06.05.2026
- **Длительность:** 28:32
- **Просмотры:** 8,501

## Описание

A lengthy, unstructured boomer rant that goes all over the place.  Enjoy!

WANT TO SUPPORT THE CHANNEL? 
💰 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/distrotube 
💳 Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=MW3ZFGS8Q9JGW
🛍️ Amazon: https://amzn.to/2RotFFi
👕 Teespring: https://teespring.com/stores/distrotube

DT ON THE WEB:
🕸️ Website: http://distro.tube
📁 GitLab: https://gitlab.com/dwt1  
🗨️ Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@distrotube
👫 Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DistroTube/
📽️ Odysee: https://odysee.com/@DistroTube:2

FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE THAT I LIKE:
🌐 Brave Browser - https://brave.com/
📽️ Open Broadcaster Software: https://obsproject.com/
🎬 Kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org
🎨 GIMP: https://www.gimp.org/
💻 VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/
🗒️ Doom Emacs: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

Your support is very much appreciated. Thanks, guys!

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol7kVJx8KcY) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

One thing is certain, time always passes. Time always marches forward. There's nothing any of us can do about it. And here lately, I've been reflecting a little bit about the past as far as how things have changed over time as far as Linux in the last, you know, 20 years or so. How technology has changed in the last 20 years or so. how my time on YouTube as a content creator, especially a content creator in the Linux and free and open source software space, how things have changed over that time. You know, a lot of things are different. You know, when I take a look back from then till now, I see a lot of drastic changes in the world. I see how technology has changed the world in many cases for the better, worst. For me as a Linux desktop user, I've been using Linux on my desktop as my main operating system for going on about 18 19 years now. Switched to Linux and around 2008 and I never looked back. I've never had a machine that ran Windows since then. I've never owned a Mac in my life. So, it it's been a long time that I've been on Linux and certainly things have changed over the years. I often get people that ask me about the software I use because it has changed. You know, the 9 years that I've been doing YouTube. I don't use the same software today that I used 5 years ago that I used 9 years ago. Certainly not the same software I used 20 years ago when I first switched to Linux. Things naturally change as you get introduced to new stuff. You find stuff that you like more than the stuff you're currently using. So, you swap it out. For example, these days, let's talk about text editors. My text editor of choice for the last five or six years has been Emacs. I love Emacs. I spend a lot of time in Emacs these days. And I can't imagine ever moving on from Emacs, but it might happen, right? Because before that, I was a Vim user. And when I was using Vim, you know what I thought? I'll probably never move on from Vim until I found Emacs and then I was like, "Oh, right. I like this better. " And before I used Vilm, I was using plain text editors like a GEIit or a Genie. Uh when I was a Windows user 20 years ago, you know what my text editor of choice was? What I used for everything including scripting and programming? I used Notepad. Not Notepad++ or any kind of fancy text editor. Just the regular Notepad that is in Windows. That was what I used for many years. And I didn't customize it in any way. It was just the white background with the black text and it was oh I was just amazed when I got to Linux and I found all of these much nicer looking text editors with fancy features syntax highlighting and line numbers and all of that. Man, I can I can't imagine ever going back to using something like a notepad, right? I I wouldn't do it now. But again, that's the difference from then till now. You know, things change. People often ask me about file managers, and this is one I I have a hard time answering because I think a lot of people don't believe me when I say this. I don't really spend a lot of time in file managers. I don't really use file managers these days. Sometimes I'll pull one up on camera if I want to show you guys a guey file manager cuz sometimes that's easier than pulling up a terminal and cding all over the file system. But that's typically what I do. The terminal is my file manager. The GNU core utils are my file manager. And that's just the truth. I could easily live without a guey file manager because for 99% of the file management type tasks that I do on a daily basis, the GNU core utils and a terminal are just fine. occasionally for like mass copy and paste kinds of things. You know, sometimes the gooey uh file managers are a little cleaner for that sort of work. But, you know, outside of, you know, some really weird kind of issues that will crop up on occasion, for the most part, I prefer the terminal. In fact, for many years, the terminal command line interface workflow was my workflow of choice. I would say at least for the last 10 years of me being a Linux user, yeah, I started gravitating more and more to the terminal. I started learning more and more of the shell utilities and it got to the point where I spent most of my time in the terminal. Anything that wasn't a web browser, the web browser is the application you spend most of your time in, all of us, because you have to interface with the web to do most things on a computer these days. But outside of that, chances are if I wasn't in a web browser, I was in a terminal until I learned Emacs because then Emacs really kind of is a replacement for your terminal because of the nature of Emacs. So again, even that changed from then till now is now I probably use the terminal less now than I did 5 years ago just because in many cases Emacs replaces a lot of what I would normally do in a terminal. Certainly as far as

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol7kVJx8KcY&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

Linux distros, things have changed a lot in the 20 years or so that I've been running desktop Linux. When I first switched to Linux, I switched to Auntu. That was my first DRO. And Auntu was great. It was your typical stable long-term support release kind of DRO. You installed it, it looked gorgeous. It ran like crazy fast, right? Compared to Windows. And when I switched I was running Windows XP and then switch to like Auntu 804 or something and you know and like the speed difference was mind-blowing. You're talking about Windows computers you know you boot it up and it might take 5 10 minutes for the thing to boot up. You know iuntu just booted up like that and menus and windows they just opened and closed instantly. And I didn't even think that was possible. I had never seen a computer that fast. And then over the years things slowed down a little bit, right? Because you know, Windows I or Linux in this case, Linux used to be really light. We used to take pride in being a lot more minimal and a lot lighter, uh, a lot easier on resources than Windows. Then, you know, a lot of the bigger desktop environments, they started using up more and more resources as they became a little more fullfeatured and sometimes fancier animations and stuff like that. So, I have never had the same experience with a lot of these modern dros as I did back then. I, you know, it doesn't blow me away the way it did 20 years ago. You guys that weren't around, especially in the mid to late 2000s and saw some of those really good early Auntu LTS releases, I think you'd be amazed at how fast everything was compared to these days. And of course, we've got different distros now than we had 20 years ago. When I switched to Linux, I mean the choice was Iuntu. That was basically the only userfriendly dro. It kind of made Linux popular on the desktop. Without Auntu, most of us wouldn't be using Linux, right? And we owe a debt of gratitude to Auntu making this thing popular. And but you know, there were some other popular desktop geared Linux distributions such as Mandre was around back then. Mandre became Mandrea Ma Maga now or what. And then you got open mandrea. You've got a lot of spiritual successors to the old Mandre. U PC Linux OS was pretty popular back then. You never hear about it now. It's still around, but it doesn't seem like anybody really uses it these days. I can go months if not years in between mentions of PC Linux OS. Somebody mentions that I was like, "Oh, that thing's still around. " Very popular Linux distribution 20 years ago. Debian, of course, Red Hat was around back then. Uh, Arch was in its infancy, but Arch wasn't popular. Arch was because it was still kind of new, a hobbyist kind of dro seen as something very difficult to get into and to use. Uh, rolling releases in general had a very negative view connotation. You know, everybody thought, well, rolling releases are unstable. And really it wasn't until the last I would say seven or eight years about eight or nine years ago I think Manoro popped up on the scene and it was an archbased dro that kind of made people think differently about rolling releases especially archbased rolling releases where it's like hey it's userfriendly anybody can install it and it seems reasonably stable and nobody really considered Arch or Archbased system as a stable desktop system that you'd put a normal user on. Nobody thought that before Mangaro. And then since Mangaro, we've had hundreds of Archbased distributions, right? Again, it was rather new when Mangaro first came out. Now we've got probably a couple hundred different Archbased dros to choose from. Many of them very easy to install. Really, you know, graphical installers. Click okay three or four times. You're installed in 10 minutes. And for the most part, because they're based on Arch, uh, and Arch itself is much more stable these days than it was in years past, you know, it kind of changed the game a little bit. I think one of the things that really hurt desktop Linux in the last 20 years, I mentioned when I first switched, I was amazed at the speed, how good everything looked. The distributions that, you know, like the Auntu releases and the Fedora releases, they looked really clean. They look really polished. um Open SUSA with KDE back then, you know, they were fast, they looked good, they were well put together. And you know, these days, I think what happened is well, I think we got ahead of ourselves on trying to do too much. We tried to make big changes. One of the biggest changes was Wayland. Many people don't realize just

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol7kVJx8KcY&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

how long Wayland has been under development. So Whan really just became usable for some of the big desktop environments like Gnome and KDE what about five years ago maybe and for everything else. Whan has just become usable for a lot of people in the last like two or three years you like some of the tiling window managers that are out there like a sway or a hyperland. Some people were using it early, but depending on the hardware you were using, if you were an Nvidia user especially and really out other than the last 2 years, you probably couldn't have even really ran those things. And Whan has been under development for 17 years. Its initial release, many people don't realize this, was in 2008, I believe, maybe 2009. It's been around a long time. And even those early years, you know, the Red Hat gang, we're going to move from X11, we're going to create this new thing, Whan, and you know, it'll be ready in I don't a year or two, right? And, you know, like 20 years later, we're still, you know, waiting on the thing to become really good. Although these days, you know, it's certainly usable. There are still things that need to be worked on. But I think in many ways that project Whan really hurt us because I think if the desktop Linux community had really just focused on making X11 better fixing what needed to be fixing in X11 uh adding the features that you were going to add in Whan, can you add that to X11? In many cases, I think this is the problem with free and open source software. Sometimes we try to reinvent the wheel when things get good and this happens every time. When things seem like, hey, this is working perfect, then we fork it, we break it, we move on to the next thing. In many cases, that's what happened with those early Auntu releases that were so great. Abuntu with Gnome 2, right? Like Gnome 2 was so great. Millions of people switched away from Windows to Linux because of that fantastic Gnome 2 desktop. And when you combined it with the compositor with the whisbang effects and the floating windows, wobbly windows and drawing fire on the screen, that was amazing. And then because it was so perfect, you know, in the late 2000s, Gnome had to kill Gnome 2 and move on to Gnome 3, which was a complete and total dumpster fire in those first few releases. And KDE really didn't do much better. KDE at that time was KDE3. and KD3 everybody loved and then they moved to KD4 and kind of like Gnome 3 the early releases of KD4 complete and total dumpster fire and those are the two most popular desktops on Linux so you know it's like everything's going great and then we're going to break everything and then around that same time oh we're going to start working on a new display server Whan as well and this is the thing this is one of the reasons why you know as a content creator many people often ask about uh why I haven't uh taken a look at this dro or that dro on camera. I've taken a look at hundreds of dros over the last nine years and but there's plenty that I haven't taken a look at on camera or I have taken a look at but you guys didn't get to see it because I'm one of these people. I don't like highlighting free and open source software that isn't ready for prime time. Like sometimes I'll down there have been literally I bet 50 to 100 times I've downloaded ISO, put the camera on, turn the microphone on cuz it's a a quick uh first look. You I like to go in blind and some of these distros they either don't install correctly, they do install, but they're buggy as hell. And I don't want to highlight that. throw shade on anybody that's working on a piece of free and open source software. So, I just scrap the video, right? It never I just I don't even bother editing it. I don't put it out publicly, right? I just kill the whole thing. That was just a wasted day that day. And that happens a lot. Sometimes I record uh some of these videos on these Linux distros and I spend a couple hours, you know, trying to work out the bugs. And sometimes this is just so bad even though I could get a video out and show it to you. I know people would be like, "Man, that thing looks like garbage. I, you know, d I can't believe you're showing me this thing. So, I don't put that stuff out. Another thing I've learned as a YouTube creator is I never typically I never highlight brand new software, stuff that just had its very first release because a large percentage of that stuff does not ever see a second release. And you see this I see this with a lot of other creators. They will jump in on something that just had its very first release, a piece of software. Maybe it's a terminal or a text editor or web browser, whatever it happens to be. Hey, this new thing came out and it's going to be the best thing ever.

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol7kVJx8KcY&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

Leave whatever it is you're using and switch to this thing. And within 6 months, that piece of software, that project behind it is dead. This happens all the time. And because of that, typically I let something marinate for a little bit, right? The 1. 0 no release is not when I'm going to take a look at it, right? I need to see, you know, a couple, you know, three or four releases. Once I know, hey, that somebody's really working on this and they're putting in, you know, some constant effort, I go to the GitHub, the GitLab, see there's regular commits, then I might take a look at it. And this has become even more common, I think, in the last 20 years is more and more of this software is like this. It's a one-time deal. People have just put something out there for the public. like, hey, I just released this. Go take a look. And that's the only release of it you get. It seems like that's much more common now. I think that's probably just my perception because there's much more software now, more people are out there putting free and open source software out there. So, you know, I don't have any hard data to back that up, but I think that is one of the changes. And I think uh speaking of changes, I think the community over the last 20 years has changed as far as free and open source communities and Linux related communities. Uh when I first switched to Linux, there was communities that were, let's just say, kind of harsh to newbies, right? You'd go to, you know, a famous example, the Arch forums and ask a dumb question and they would be mean to you, right? The Debian forums were kind of notorious for being kind of like that as well. But that was not what we have today. We have communities today that are rather distasteful and mean to people, but they do it not because you asked a dumb question. They do it for political reasons. The communities around free and open source software today have become very political. Most of them have become way too political as far as there are many free and open source software projects now that openly state they're more about politics and social activism rather than the actual software they're working on. And that's something that probably was around 20 years ago, but it was much less common. You didn't see people so openly say, "Hey, this is a software project, but it's really a political organization. " And by the way, if you don't agree with my politics, I'm going to ban you, kick you out of this project. You have to agree with all of my stances 100% as the lead of this project. If you don't, you get publicly shamed and banned, right? And this is you didn't see that or at least it was much less common 20 years ago. And I think a lot of it just because you know the free and open source software space which m was much smaller back then especially we were really fighting to get noticed as far as free and open source software and Linux. Uh the space was smaller and we were trying to attract people to the movement and the way is to let everybody participate. Right? That's the whole point of freedom as far as free software. Everybody is welcome. So you saw everybody, you know, it was broad messages in these projects. You had a free and open source software pro project. You didn't make the message so narrow. You not just talking about the software. You I'm talking about the message as far as what you're putting out to the community. You know, everybody's welcome. Doesn't matter as long as you respect the um the ideals of the free software movement and the open source software movement. Come on in. But now we have these really narrowminded political organizations that are putting out free and open source software. And because their message is so narrow, it it's all about a certain set of political principles, literally it disqualifies well over half the population in most cases and in some cases 90% plus of the population from actually being a part of your organization because you've made this message that you're trying to get out. so narrow that most people just we can't participate. And I think one of the things that changed all of these free and open source software communities over the last 20 years why they went from not really being all that political to being very political. Like that's the default stance now is it's we have to have these political uh ideological kind of views on everything and we have to demand 100% compliance from everybody. Social media. Social media didn't really exist 20 years ago. It was in its infancy and then social media kind of rotted people's brains. It became everybody had to be on Facebook and Twitter and it's just you're constantly bombarded with all of this negativity and hate on social media. If you just get away from social media

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol7kVJx8KcY&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00)

it's the world is not a violent, angry, hateful place. At least it's not the way it's portrayed on social media. But many people will imagine social media is the real world and then they bring that stuff into all aspects of their life such as their software projects. And what's really bad is the creators of these social media mega sites, people like Mark Zuckerberg for example, he knows what he's doing with Facebook. He knows that Facebook caters to anger, hate, violence. He knows it's destructive. He knows social media is addictive. He knows that in many cases these kinds of social media sites, they cater to psychopaths, sociopaths, you know, people that in regular life, they have no outlet to be what they could be, right? On social media, it's like, hey, a psychopath, he can be his normal self on the internet, especially anonymously on social media. out in the real world, some wacko, some complete nut job, he's not going to get very far. But on social media, these people are given a voice. In many cases, they're given positions of prominence. What I find funny is because I don't live in the world of social media, right? I don't have any of that stuff. I can tell you that you know in the last 20 years there is a lot less for example racism and bigotry in the world but if you ask people today that are tied into social media where social media is their world they'll say it's the most racist the most hateful place this is the most horrible time to live in is because they have been again their mind has kind of been polluted by social media in many cases the only reason there is all this political hate and religious hate and uh racial hatred um in the world. It's all generated by social media. What's another crazy thing here in the last few years especially is the fact that bots run the internet. Most of the stuff that's on social media, especially the hateful stuff, the people that are out there spouting propaganda or the social activism kind of post, most of that is not even real people. This is powerful organizations, pe billion-dollar corporations that want to push a message. Some cases, countries trying to push a message there. You know, 70 80% of the stuff you see on social media is probably not even real posts by real people. That's how bad it's gotten. But the 20% that are real people that are participating in this stuff, in many cases, they don't recognize that that's the game. They don't realize that in some cases they're a mark, right? They're being conned. They don't realize in many cases you're just being played. You're being manipulated to push a certain social activist agenda, and you don't even realize that you're bought into a little bit of some But here's the thing. from then till now I social media really in the early days you know I don't think it was doing much damage and then I would say especially about 5 to 10 years ago I think was the heyday of social media Facebook and Twitter especially and now I do see a swing back the other direction I think people now realize how dangerous social media is especially to the people that are addicted to it that the people that have been manipulated you know by all the automated spam and bots that they don't realize, oh, it's not even real people. You know, I think nowadays some people are waking up and I see a lot more people getting off social media in general. I see a lot more people doing things like uh tech detox, uh digital detox where you just get off the phone, right? you get off the computer, uh uninstall all those social media apps, especially turn off the notifications and just get away for a few days, in some cases a few weeks at a time, hopefully permanently. That's what I did, you know, and one of the things for me, I did have a Facebook account and a Twitter account, both for a few months, and I can say they didn't do much for me. I recognized right away that this was not real life, that, you know, this was a game. For one thing, just in general, you guys, if you've been following my channel for the last nine years, you probably know I'm not much of a bullshitter. I just call things as it is. I kind of look at the world as it is. I look at reality. And I knew right away Facebook was not reality. And damn sure Twitter was not reality. So, I eventually deleted those accounts. You know, I probably spent 6 months on each of them. And then, you know, I got rid of them. And that was probably nearly 10 years ago that I got off of those platforms. And I'm glad and I've tried to tell people for a long time, hey, get off. Get off those platforms. You don't need to be there.

### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol7kVJx8KcY&t=1500s) Segment 6 (25:00 - 28:00)

Well, I need to be there cuz all my friends and family are on there. Well, you still have your friends and family in real life, right? It's like people don't realize that you can actually pick up a phone and call a friend or a family member or go to their house. If they live in the same town as you, why are you talking to them on faking Facebook? But I think this is a war we're winning. I think more and more people Even if they don't get off of social media, I think most people now actually do recognize it's dangerous. Like that's become normal. Used to 10 years ago when I told people to get off social media, people would tell me I'm crazy, that I'm paranoid, a conspiracy theorist, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Now pretty much everybody if I say, "Hey, social media is dangerous. " They're like, "Yeah, okay. I'm still not going to get off of it, but okay. " They recognize that at least that's true. Also, you know, from then till now, YouTube has changed. The YouTube community has changed, especially around Linux, right? We have so many more Linux content creators now than when I started 9 years ago. The Linux YouTube community was a much smaller place. We probably have 20 times the Linux content on YouTube now that we had when I started. Easily that. And why do we have so many more Linux content creators and so much more Linux content is because Linux itself is vastly more popular than it was just 9 years ago, right? Linux was probably still 1% as far as desktop market share 9 years ago. And now we're hovering somewhere around the 5 to 6% range. Like Linux popularity is growing fast on the desktop. And when you think about that, going from 1% to 5%, well, damn, that's five times as many users. And you're going to see a lot more people craving Linux content. providing Linux content now. And I think that's a great thing. It's one of the things that I've always wanted uh especially here in the last few years as you know, I've been doing Linux content for a long time. I've covered so many different topics and I don't like sometimes going back and covering the same topics again. You know, you get burned out talking about the same things again over and over. And you know, I do think it's important to talk about some of this stuff, issues related to free and open source software and Linux. And at some point, I'm not going to be doing this anymore, but I still want other people doing this. I want as many people in this space as possible. I want free and open source software to be as popular as it possibly can. I want Linux, especially as a desktop operating system, as an alternative to proprietary software like Windows and Mac. I want Linux to be as popular as it possibly can. So, I love the fact that we have so many fantastic Linux content creators these days. So, there you have it. Just a little bit of a rant as I ramble on about some of the things that have changed over the years as far as tech and Linux and YouTube and everything else. Uh, I hope you enjoyed this little bit of a ramble. It's not my typical kind of content where it was a little bit unstructured. Just turn on the camera and start talking, but um hopefully you got a little bit of something out of it. Peace, guys.

---
*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/49741*