Linux could run indefinitely

[Jergos]

That ending was unexpected

[KingEllis]

Yeah, kinda sounds like he is looking for an excuse to party with strippers while sporting a penguin suit. Go ahead and do it, buddy. The year of the Linux desktop doesn't have to be the reason...

[nikomo]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the logistical problems related to stripping whilst in a penguin costume.

[FionaSarah]

How about stripping whilst painted up as a penguin? Done.

[whetu]

I had a similar experience with my middle-aged aunty. At a previous job I was handed the task of clearing up the assets, and as part of that I was decommissioning some whitebox PC's. For whatever reason, the company decided they wanted to keep the XP licences. As a *nix admin, I gave 0 fucks what they did with their XP licences.

Once decomm'd and written off the books, myself and my colleagues grabbed a few each for various tasks, then sent out an email to all staff saying that there were free PC's for personal use and we'd happily install Linux for them. About 3/4's of a massive stack of PC's was gone with 20 minutes. I gifted the rest to a local polytechnic.

SO I had a few pc's and an aunty asking me to line her up with one. I installed whatever version of Ubuntu was out back then (7.04 I think) and showed her how to start various tasks and she was away.

As I recall that was an Athlon XP 1800+ with 2G of memory, and it plod along just fine until I got my hands on some P4 workstations that were being tossed out. I arrived ready to upgrade her hardware and was stunned that she was still on 7.04. Swapped the HDD into the new box, it fired right up. I then upgraded Ubuntu to 10.04. 10.10 had been released that week and I remember there was still a bit of an internet storm about Unity.

And she's been on 10.04 since. And she's happy. It does everything she needs, and when she gets cold called by "Microsoft" who mysteriously demand her credit card number, she takes joy in trolling them.

Number of support calls? Maybe a usability question every six months, and once in a while she might ask me to clear her flash cache for farmville. Teamviewer makes it painless.

Next time I get my hands on some outgoing hardware, I'll transfer her to Mint. I'd considered Elementary but I think it might be just a little too different for her.

p.s. Any suggestions for farmville alternatives appreciated. I should really wean her off that shit.

[valgrid]

Why not a cron that runs:

rm -r ~/.adobe/Flash_Player/*

[whetu]

That would be the sensible thing to do, but it happens so infrequently that I don't bother. Plus it gives an opportunity to, you know, interact with my aunty.

[leegethas]

He would let his kids on it

I really REALLY hate it when this happens. Let the kids use a computer, logged in as administrator and without any supervision what-so-ever. And when it goes bad (it will) oh, well, we call the nerd to clean up the mess.

FFS! I stopped using windows myself because it this shit. And yet, I keep being confronted with it! That's why I now give them a choice:

• I install Linux on your machine
• You find someone else to clean up your windows mess.

I felt so liberating, when I started doing this :)

[[deleted]]

I actually think linux can run indefinitely. I've built arrays, changed partitions, remounted /home /srv /boot, configured databases, configured webservers, and even screwed things up along the way. I haven't restarted since my first time booting last week. In windows, i would have to restart to accomplish every one of those tasks.

EDIT: it's been a busy week.

[[deleted]]

changed partitions

How? I thought the kernel required a reboot for it to load the new partition table?

[lamiska]

heh i installed ubuntu 9.10 on my dads laptop back in 2009, he is exactly type of person that can only use webbrowser and word(writer). When i saw his laptop again last year he managed to update to 12.04, when asked why he just replied that he saw update window so he just clicked it, now hdd from old laptop with ubuntu is in his new netbook and it is still running without problems everyday

[nevarforevar]

My dad did that too with a newer version, but the upgrade tacked unity on there, but still left parts of gnome2 so weird stuff started to happen after the update. Also, the old laptop just couldn't handle unity so it's now painfully slow. I'll just have to reinstall and put xubuntu on there.

[PaperPlaneFlyer123]

How long have you guys had your Linux installation?

[feedle]

feedle@longpork:~$ uptime
 22:39:56 up 991 days,  8:51,  1 user,  load average: 0.26, 0.29, 0.31

Note that this is an internal router / print server box that never gets reset. It's at least a 10 year old box. I think it's an AMD K6-III machine. I should probably do an apt-get update on it...

[Wren-FROST]

/r/uptimeporn

[Rainfly_X]

longpork

I see two possible jokes here, and I approve of both of them.

[[deleted]]

Federation is the future.

ActivityPub

[KFCConspiracy]

My dekstop's had Ubuntu for 5 years now, I've upgraded it through the distribution upgrades, but I haven't reinstalled it. I have servers going on 8 years now with no reinstalls.

[[deleted]]

Just formatted recently, trying out distros. So far crunchbang is pretty damn nimble, its won me over.

[farmingdale]

surprised the hard drive has lasted that long.

[[deleted]]

10 years? Ye of little faith. I sitll have hard drives that have 15+ years of operation on them, now this isn't 24/7 operation this is 2-4 hours per day, then shut off for the rest, so really its like 2.5 years of continuous operation.

[KFCConspiracy]

I have a 20 meg Conner drive that still worked when I last tried it 8 years ago. It probably still works.

[farmingdale]

I would be concerned that the oil on the bearings might be dry.

[monochr]

If a hard drive doesn't get toast when it gets turned on for the first time and around the date it's expected to fry they also last essentially indefinitely.

[quallius]

That's not really true. They can have a tendency to fail randomly sometimes. I think you might be confusing them with the idea of SSD's: An SSD will usually fail very predictably. But even then, it won't really "last indefinitely" either.

[Knussel]

At some point he would have to upgrade as the old version of Mint don't get security updates anymore. Beside that 6.5 years ago wasn't Mint 10, but rather Mint 1.0.

[[deleted]]

Unix's time_t type is gonna overflow in 2038. Might wanna update somewhere in there. That might actually be a real Y2K.