[Xaero252]

Life kinda threw me some curveballs and my time for hobbies has basically been null until recently. I know Shrak (and myself) more or less dropped off the forum shortly after the Huddler move.
(coming back now, I can see this was a wise decision. The intrusive advertisement placement and lack of proper functionality for the forum is kind of sad.)

This forum seems pretty inactive, so maybe we can all say hello again to give it some life?

 

[Xaero252]

Yeah, I was checking in from time to time all the way through 2017, and made a couple of posts in 2018 but after the huddler move and some aggressive moderation towards Linux posts I think the majority of our community members departed. Pretty sure last time I was active you were still active staff ;-) 2019/2020 seem like they could be excellent years for Linux, so maybe we'll see some new faces around these parts!

 

[Xaero252]

@OP

I'm still around, but nowhere near as active as I used to be. I suspect the moves to/from Huddler pushed away a lot of people, but I also suspect that the combination of Reddit & YouTube is drawing a lot of people away from this forum (and others like [H]).

Anyway, welcome back.

It's good to be back, fwiw. If I can stay around this time lol. And yeah, the huddler thing was a mess, this current platform seems pretty messy as well. We definitely don't have the personal touch of the days when this was Admin's baby. It still seems like a solid community overall, even if PC gaming and modding has hit the mainstream and is starting to leave it.

It's also due to the fact that OC has gone mainstream, products ship OCed out of factory and all it takes is load a profile or run manufacturer's auto OC app.
The lack of evolution of forums also takes it's toll especially when they upgrade backward. People will rather watch a video tutorial from another amateur on YouTube on their phone than go talk and learn on forums etc.
You can see the phone infestation even on forum here since there was the bugged mobile OCN version, no idea why people browse forums on a tiny screen, but there seem to be plenty.

Yeah, a lot of things in the PC and Internet world have changed. The hobby has taken a turn for the worse imho. The internet is more locked down and less useful than it ever has been. A lot of the things that are worth optimizng or experimenting with are locked behind paywalls or being made impossible intentionally. I tried to buy a generic, full profile keyboard for my work desk - all I could find were "mechanical gaming keyboards" at the ~$60+ pricepoint or cheap chiclet keyboards with membrane switches. The amount of customization and flexibility is being artificially limited and it's awful. One of the reasons I want to go back to running Linux full time. I got promoted, and moved states and hopefully the new position will alot me the free time to do so. Not sure yet though, it seems to have a lot more breathing room as far as time goes, but my cost of living has increased substantially, so even though I'm making more - I'm not sure I'm actually taking home more... But there is still room for wage increases and further upward movement from this role, so I feel good about the change either way.

Weird to see myself talking like some old man all of a sudden haha. Hopefully the new generation of internet users will have that same drive for customization and optimization as they get into their late teens, early twenties that we all had and we start seeing great big things again.

 

[Xaero252]

I doubt it. The new generation does everything on a phone. It's been 2 years since this happened but, I was doing a lighting retrofit in an office building one night and I saw the Windows XP screensaver running on one computer. When I told the two young guys I was working with, they looked at me like I was speaking Chinese. Phones are the new PC's.

We just took on a contract for a customer that has PBX phone systems and emulates IBM mainframes. The guys in the field are going absolutely mad because "this stuff is too old"

That's actually the most common complaint I would hear in the field.
"Yeah well if we could get some new equipment. This stuff is from like the 80s." - referring to devices designed in 2015/16, manufactured in 2017, and deployed in 2018. That's pretty "bleeding edge" for the environment if you ask me lol.

It's a sad state of affairs. The market has become stagnant, competition between the involved parties has become nil so there's no push for further advancement. I never thought I'd see a day where storage technology was advancing faster than CPUs. I know we're just in a low period of activity, it's not normal for the advancements to come year after year like they have for the last decade and a half.
Software seems to be healthy still, and so are other technical fields (3d printing, ai, etc.) just not the mainstream PC world. Linux keeps moving forward, sometimes at a shocking rate... but the recent moves by microsoft to aquire various linux-related things and implement linux-like featuers has me concerned.

 

[Xaero252]

I actually quite miss Shrak's presence. He was a stand-up fellow, and an inspiration for myself to hone my skills. I think at one point him and I were probably considered to be of roughly the same skill level from the outside - but the honest truth is he blew me totally out of the water 99% of the time. Miss seeing the excellent discussions Plan9, Rookie, Shrak, enorbet et al would bring to the table, and how in-depth we went for the sake of customization and optimization of our workflow.

My current position at work forces me to run Windows on more than one machine - and free time is substantially limited so it's been tough to get back into Linux gaming again... Though now seems like it's probably the best it's ever been (dxvk and all)