Coding?
Recently my brother from the same mother, Pilot, had a post about moving away from American technology. That was the kick I needed. I had been thinking about installing Linux on my Mac mini for quite some time. Sure, some Americans probably work on it, but it's open source and worldwide so it doesn't count. After some research, I decided on Ubuntu, which I had used many, many years ago for a very short time span, and settled on the Kubuntu flavour.
Next thing was to do the install. I fought for about seven hours over two days until I finally found my answer: They haven't figured out how to get Ubuntu onto the M4 chip yet. My computer is two years old, but that's the chip it has. They figure it'll be early to mid 2027. OK. That wouldn't have been nice to know before I attempted all the stuff that continuously just kept not working. I'm going to be patient with it and wait though.
One funny/sad thing happened during it though. Kids, man. Make you feel old. I was trying to flash the Ubuntu installer to a USB drive and none of the software would do it (Cause I was using an M4 chip it turns out). So, I ended up doing it manually using the MacOS terminal.
My sweet, innocent daughter walked up behind me and asked "What are you coding?"
Fuck off! That wasn't coding. That's just what you had to do to run a computer back in the day! You wanna play a game? You type in all that stuff and then get the instruction booklet to type in the right code to match with what's on the screen so they know you bought the game. Then, if you're lucky enough to have a mouse, you clean the gunk outta the ball so that it works properly and try to remember to walk all the way around the police car or else you'll blow a tire out!
Oh, how the world is changed. And listen, I'm not one of those guys that thinks kids need to learn that skill I did like handwriting or anything like that, it's not needed. You don't need to know that to use a computer. You don't need cursive writing to sign your name, you can print it or just use any symbol. What we learn generation to generation has to change or we never get anywhere.
But as Principal Skinner says: "No. It's the children who are wrong."
Comments
I've long used Ubuntu and while I've never had any issues that weren't just part of the Linux learning curve, I know the Linux community has been a bit cold on it in recent years. The good news is that distro is South African!
Hoping to do a follow-up post in the next couple of weeks on my original. Made some progress and found some real challenges as I move through all of this!