I held back from mentioning this... the part how you can be a 7 year old and just go spend an afternoon with some adult male without it being any sort of problem whatsoever. These days it is so very hard to believe.

As an adult male who now tinkers on stuff in the garage, I make it a point to shut the door to avoid any sort of 'trouble'.

I wonder if there was any 'elitist attitude' then. I mean, human nature doesn't change so surely there were people talking down to noobz and scolding them with a "Go RTF AARL Handbook!". However, as a kid growing up in the 70s and 80s I remember walking down the street on a weekend and just about everyone was out tinkering on something in their garage. Ham Radios, go carts, hot rods, RC cars/planes, model rockets, model trains, etc. If you showed even the slightest bit of interest they'd invite you in and give you the grand tour of what they're doing and why. Sometimes they'd even send you home with books and magazines.

I don't know if it's because I was a little kid, or if maybe 'nerd types' were more inclusive then. Greatest Gens and Boomers were always warm and inviting, and it was my own generation (X) that seemed to start with the elitist crap. Millennials often seem to be carrying that same torch. Perhaps Nerddom is diseased now.

Why the Digital Equipment Corporation logo as the icon for this story (and other DIY stuff)?

Has /. gotten so young that nobody knows it means something more than just "digital", or has /. gotten so old that nobody remembers DEC?

I believe you overestimate the dedication of a tech support drone at any level.

https://xkcd.com/806/

I could afford to replace every computer I own with a brand new Apple product, but they don't appeal to me in the least.

I thought this was "carpet matches the drapes".

All those folks going on about their wife's curtains and drapes has me confused. And possibly disturbed.

In the 1980s, the boys that were into math and science and (especially) computers were also getting their asses kicked on a regular basis by the popular kids Perhaps the girls were smart enough to not want any part of that.

Or at least they'd rather follow other interests than be associated with something or a group of people who were at the bottom of the social scale.

I had wondered this too. I felt that the rapid adoption of systemd was very un-Debianlike. Not only because I would have never expected Debian to accept systemd based on technical merits, but also the incredible speed at which it happened. We all know how lonnnng it takes for Debian to even make decisions about changing things in the stable branch. Hell, there's a series of long-running jokes about it. But for the Debian team to just suddenly jump up and say "Yep, we're going with SystemD. End of discussion." seemed incredibly fishy to me.

Getting bullied by Canonical makes loads of sense, but I don't like it one bit.

I haven't included the "desktop system" or whatever dselect offers you in a Debian install since probably the turn of the century. I usually just install the minimum base system and apt-get the stuff I want, which resulted in wmaker up till about 2002, and XFCE since. I'm not saying this to sound l33t or anything, but I remember doing it this way all along to avoid installing Gnome.

What was Debian's default desktop before now?

When it comes to the Big Three (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD) the complete system is precisely what this Venezia guy is describing. It is a working system with everything you'd need to run a legitimate server. Things like X, dev tools (excluding C compilers) etc are considered "3rd party add-ons". IME BSD systems are logical, intuitive, robust, light and fast. The other nice benefit is that everything is developed by the same team, and the documentation is superb.

Don't get me wrong, I love linux too. But the BSDs are sorely under-appreciated for what they are and can do.

That said, the base install of most of the original Linux distributions (or the base install plus a handful of packages) is also what sysadmins have been using for decades as a "server-oriented linux system".