Back in the day we only had telnet and ftp in DOS on some old 286 computers without hard drives, in a Novell network. I could access gopher from telnet and it was decent. Archie for ftp, IRC could be used directly with telnet (I think this is still possible if one is patient enough), lots of MUDs, chat rooms, games (like FIBS). The Internet was very different.

One day I saw on MTV some addresses starting with http, I didn't know what to do with them, telnet would not connect, turns out I needed a "browser" that only worked in Windows (3.1, this was before 1995), so yeah, bad luck, we didn't have that. But there was a way: telnet into info.cern.ch and they were running a public version of a primitive text-mode based browser, I think it was an early version of lynx, you could type an URL and then all links were numbered. It generally looked worse than gopher, probably because most sites were expecting a graphic browser, but it was usable with some limitations.

Later, in the 2000s, I tried something called Gopher+, it was an attempt to make gopher more dynamic, but no, it had annoying bugs, didn't refresh the pages properly, and it was a bad idea anyway.

It was nice in its time, but the world has changed.

What about Alice?

Romania switched from Cyrillic to Latin in 1862.

I don't use Fedora too often, but I have a Fedora partition I try to keep up to date weekly or so, for testing stuff.

Going from 25 to 26, Wayland stopped working. I was able to use X just fine. It fixed itself after a number of updates. Going from 26 to 27 was uneventful.

Google is bad, you want to step way from it. I can understand that. But to Microsoft?

First Slackware, something with kernel 2.0.30 in 1997. Still remember it. First I read all that looked interesting in /usr/doc, then I edited all /etc, seemed like best system ever. I used Slackware for many years, now I mainly use Gentoo. I still have a Slackware partition I keep up to date, mostly from nostalgia, I think.

I haven't used Ubuntu since Unity, and I don't think I will with GNOME 3. Anything else will do, I don't even hate systemd. Kde, xfce, MATE, lxde/lxqt, even fvwm, anything is better.

Web Browser: chromium, firefox
Email Client: thunderbird, alpine
Terminal: don't care, whatever is default
IDE: vim, gvim
File manager: mc, thunar, dolphin
Basic Text Editor: vim, gvim
IRC/Messaging Client: pidgin
PDF Reader: okular or evince
Office Suite: Libre Office
Calendar: -
Video Player: mplayer / smplayer
Music Player: deadbeef, audacious
Photo Viewer: gqview, shotwell, gthumb. It depends.
Screen recording: simplescreenrecorder

It depends on what the app does. It may be essential for the service it provides. 2 examples I use frequently - SSH Server and XServer XSDL.

I used Macromedia Director extensively about 15 years ago. It had a scripting language called lingo, with a few unique features. It supported an old syntax, something like "set the visible of sprite 10 to true", and a new syntax, more like "sprite(10).visible = true". While most usual statements could be expressed in any way, some statements could only be expressed in the old syntax, and some other statements only in the new syntax. Worse even, there were a few corner cases where a statement written in the old syntax behaved slightly different from its new syntax counterpart. For example, the old syntax would return 0 while the new syntax would throw an error, I can't remember the exact details, but something like that, so you'd have to be very careful. It took me more than a year, maybe two, to find and work around many of these idiosyncrasies. It was, simply put, awful. It also had many bugs, some of them reported and not fixed for years.

Also Gentoo. And before I used Slackware. Why does one think all Linux distros are either deb or rpm based?

I wonder what's wrong with OpenSSH now... If M$ is starting to use something, I'm getting suspicious.

Are you sure you are not talking about prolog?

They expect it too, except when they don't.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.