OldFartPhil

Mine was powered by hamster wheels. The damn wheels squealed all day long - drove me crazy. Not to mention the feed bill.

I am a Boomer when it comes to coding

Hey, OP, I think it's cool that you'd like to learn to code. I made my living as a coder for many years and it's a good career path. But I would not say it's an essential life skill and the vast majority of people of all ages get by fine without coding skills.

With that out of the way, I'm going to defend the honor of Boomers here. Boomers (and the Silent Gen before them) built the technology industry as we know it today. For example, here's a list of popular programming languages and their inventors:

• Java: James Gosling (1955) - Boomer
• C: Dennis Ritchie (1941) - Almost a Boomer
• C++: Bjarne Stroustrup (1950) - Boomer
• C#: Anders Hejlsberg (1960) - Boomer
• Python: Guido van Rossum (1956) - Boomer
• PHP: Rasmus Lerdorf (1968) - X Gen
• Perl: Larry Wall (1954) - Boomer
• JavaScript: Brendan Eich (1961) - Boomer
• Ruby: Yukihiro Matsumoto (1965) - Cusp of Boomer/X Gen
• SQL: Raymond Boyce (1946) and Donald Chamberlin (1944) - Boomers
• Go: Robert Griesemer (1964), Rob Pike (1956) and Ken Thompson (1943) - 2 Boomers and an almost-Boomer

. Thank you for your indulgence.

I'm not sure what's being implied here, but the quote from the article is true. ChromeOS is FOSS, was based on Ubuntu (a long time ago) and is now based on Gentoo. Early versions of ChromeOS, which were basically just a full-screen browser, didn't feel very Linuxy. But I think current ChromeOS versions look and feel a lot like using a simplified Linux distro.

I don't have a strong opinion on whether ChromeOS should be grouped with traditional Linux distros for statistical purposes. But it is notable that Google maintains the two most most popular non-server OSs built on the Linux kernel.

I didn't hate The Martian, but I did not love it. I really liked Project Hail Mary, though. The sciencey stuff was still there, but it was bolted on to a much more compelling and interesting story.

Life is too short to read books you're not going to enjoy, OP.

My biggest enemy is boredom - I have to be engaged to keep reading. Although the last two books I've abandoned were for other reasons. One because of a graphic animal-abuse scene that I couldn't make it through and one that turned into a Christian novel half-way through. None of the reviews mentioned it, but apparently the author found god and released a new, improved printing featuring extra Jesus. Blech.

No "average person" troubleshoots their own Windows machine, but they know someone who can. if you install Linux on someone's machine, you are their tech support. Most of the time that's fine, because Linux is pretty damn reliable. But when something goes wrong an average person is going to have a harder time finding support.