It used AALib and SVGALib (screenshot). And that was on hundred-MHz Pentiums.

Depends on what your needs are. I was still rocking an i7-2600K/16GB/SATA SSD system until the beginning of this year. Was still getting the job done, except in modern games of course. Then I inherited some money, and now it's a 3950x/64GB/PCI4 M.2 machine. Might not last me eight years again, considering that there's actual CPU competition now... but it should be good for a while. Bump up the video card in a few years and I expect it'll still be fine for games. They're going to finally move to more multithreading, now that people will actually have more than four cores.

Bullshit. Verbose names are fine when you've got tooling support to find the stuff. APIs were small enough to fit in someone's head in the 80s and 90s. Nowadays the scope of things is way too broad.

That's not a dig on things like the POSIX API, BTW. I mean EMACS was called "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping", because the systems were fractions of the power we have now. (I just did a little mandelbrot set program in Go and C, just to check. They were almost identical in performance, but the C executable was 20KB and the Go one was 2.4MB.)

We can afford sprawling APIs with lots of little nooks now. And that means a big namespace.

...the American Community Survey. Theoretically, answers are required by law, but no one's been prosecuted in over 40 years. In fact, the legal theory argument that the survey is constitutional has never been tested in court.

We got it a couple years back and I refused any information beyond what the regular census requires. I got a phone call where I explained I didn't trust them to secure my information. So far, I haven't been prosecuted for it, nor have I heard back from them. Came down to it, I'd be okay with being the test case.

Well, okay, if the things you want aren't on Linux, that's just the way it is, I guess. Of course, it used to be that way for games in general, but now a lot of "AAA" stuff shows up on Linux, too. If not immediately, then a few months down the road. As I said, I have enough games on my plate right now, I can afford to wait a bit.

Steam is quite dirty to install though... No source, 32-bit only (same for the games), some UI bugs, etc.

Ah, an AC. No, the games can be 64-bit, I run The Talos Principle that way, for example. As to source, for operating systems and utilities and most software, I want source. Games are an area where open-source doesn't work quite as well. I'm fine with closed-source and actually paying money for games. If you want to be a purist, you go on with your bad self.

And for what's left, you have to sort the real and well-made native or ported games, from the clunky ports by people who are not GNU/Linux developers...

Not so far. They've all worked just fine. If I measure, there's a framerate drop on some games between Windows and Linux, but up to this point not so's it bothers me in actual gameplay. Of course, I have an Nvidia card. People with AMD have some legit issues there, but I bought my hardware with Linux in mind.

For example.

There have been at least two Windows 7 updates I've had to temporarily disable Grub for, otherwise they fail.

...it's really not a big deal. Yes, it's not as many as Windows. However, there's so many just on Steam that it's plenty to fill any rational amount of leisure time. I've been mucking with The Talos Principle, Antichamber, and QUBE recently, on a bit of a first-person puzzler kick. Of course, before that I was playing Shadow of Mordor, Alien: Isolation and Tomb Raider (2013), along with XCom Enemy Within. Mucked around with Saint's Row 3 and Dead Island, too. That's just "major studios". But there's plenty of others I've been dipping into - The Fall and The Swapper, Sublevel Zero, Monstrum, Metro 2033, Victor Vran, Stealth Bastard, Doorkickers, the new Day of the Tentacle Remastered. Haven't had a chance to muck with Sir You Are Being Hunted. And I think I'm going to be spending quite a bit of time in Duskers.

More games than I can handle, really. All full Linux ports. I do have Windows, but haven't booted it to play games in at least a couple months now.

I use FB on my phone... via a mobile browser. One that I only use for FB. I have a separate browser I use for websurfing. I don't let the FB browser post notifications or have access to my location. I lose a few features that way, but I can still participate in "social media" without giving FB total access to my phone and life.

...like, say, Ted Chiang's "Understand".

I've got some old webcams that I'd like to use Zeros for. Turn them into motion-sensitive security cameras with a FIFO buffer (on SD card). I've got some old Bluetooth dongles for networking purposes, and a powered hub or two. Should make a decent little setup after a little experimentation.

Lots of pictures of, and for, cakes.

...having an inexpensive, low-power, general-purpose machine around to automate some tasks is actually rather nice. I've got a Pi plus a USB drive as a bittorrent server/client hung up on the wall in my basement. My wife's little website/email account is set to forward to gmail, and that's how she accesses it. But the emails build up and can hit the storage limit. So, presto, a little command-line POP3 client and a cron job later, the account never fills up again.

Certainly there's nothing special about a Raspberry Pi for such purposes, but they are common and inexpensive. I just wish that Pi Zeros were actually available. I've got some old webcams I'd love to turn into security cameras...

I was making fun of those blindly accepting that vaccines are safe.

Well, I was making fun of those blindly accepting that vaccines are terribly unsafe.

In that vein, one more note. You wrote:

Chicken pox itched like crazy, but wasn't life threatening and its spread is easy to prevent.

Chicken pox wasn't easy enough to eliminate before vaccines. And perhaps it wasn't life threatening for you but one of our sons had a classmate who had to have a liver transplant at age 3. (I'm sure poor lifestyle choices led to that...) Chicken pox could easily kill that child. Every time anyone in his school came down with any of several common illnesses, he had to stay home for several days. Vaccination is more than a personal issue.

Does the population around you have a hard time keeping their genitals from crashing into each other accidentally?

Well, actually, a rather large number of humans throughout history have had a spot of trouble controlling their genitals, yes. Humans are, er, far from perfect.

I've heard some weak-ass excuses for infidelity before,

With Gardasil, by far the primary issue is sex before marriage, not adultery. I'm not sure where you're getting that from - certainly not from anything I actually wrote. Did I miss something in the previous comments?

But I'm going to continue the car analogy. Our oldest is learning to drive, and we're teaching him to be careful, cautious, and defensive. Not to take stupid risks, etc. Of course, most parents do that when teaching their kids to drive. And yet, kids do impulsive and stupid things with cars every day. (Heck, so do adults.) So we're also teaching him to use his seatbelt. Even if he does everything right, someone else could do something terrible. (I'm sure you can't imagine any analogy to sex there, right? Something about involuntary sexual activity even if someone's being sensible? There's a word for it...)

I certainly want my kids not to make mistakes. But if I can minimize the consequences of mistakes - particularly preventing long-term and/or fatal consequences - I'm going to do that. You can disagree as you choose, I guess.