The movie came out in 1999. In the movie, they state that it’s 1999 (in the Matrix anyway). Neo is pretty tech savvy and a renowned hacker.
My assumption is he would’ve used FreeBSD. Or, maybe, Slackware. But I’m leaning more towards BSD.
Nah. It is DOS with Norton Commander.
I just can’t believe I just read the words Norton Commander.
It’s like the Proust story where he smells a macaroon and all of a sudden he’s remembering an avalanche of things long forgotten.
My brain defragging
Dos Navigator
Bwahahahahah
Man I wish FreeBSD hadn’t fallen to the wayside. It’s really cohesive and feels put together in a way not Linux distro ever has.
Except it uses push over licensing
That’s a GPL point of view. Most BSD users I’ve talked to prefer a more permissive license. Theo said: “GPL fans said the great problem we would face is that companies would take our BSD code, modify it, and not give back. Nope – the great problem we face is that people would wrap the GPL around our code, and lock us out in the same way that these supposed companies would lock us out. Just like the Linux community, we have many companies giving us code back, all the time. But once the code is GPL’d, we cannot get it back. Ironic.”
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You know, I’ve never used it. Maybe I’ll install it in a VM tonight and give it a whirl.
Is it still worth using? Say, for a web dev? Or is it less supported?
It’s usually used for storage servers these days. ZFS is most stable there.
Honestly it isn’t. Support for anything front-end related is way more sparse compared to Linux.
That’s a shame. I’d love a new exotic OS to try.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard FreeBSD described as either “new” or “exotic”
New and exotic to me.
“hello system” is pretty nice to look at, and has some Mac-isms I find helpful. FreeBSD has a new release recently, so maybe Nomad or GhostBSD could be worth trying. You’ll find FreeBSD is a lot more “consistent” compared to Linux, but be prepared for random hardware to not work.
I’ll give you “new” but it’s about as far from exotic as you can get… Not a bad thing, BTW, and I highly recommend giving it a try, it’s an excellent system, though probably better for a server than a workstation/desktop (though it definitely can be a very good workstation/desktop if you like)
Its Ports system is the inspiration for Gentoo’s Portage, BTW
I mean, it’s decades older with a history of being used in business critical applications…
In 1999, I bet he was running Gentoo.
The first release was in 2002.
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Definitely Gentoo
PC-BSD
I’d argue that he’d use OpenBSD and be running his own firewall, web server, email server, and ftp server.
Or SuSE Linux, the non-slackware or jurix version was bleeding edge at the time.
Maybe both? BSD for his server, Slackware for his desktop. Or something.
Realistically, Debian, because it existed when the movie was set.
And also because realistically there’s no need for any other distro. :P
Other distros exist to teach people that Debian is better.
KDE NEOn
Hannah Montana Linux
This, but maybe slackware with the hannah montana ui.
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Slackware.
I don’t know the distro, but surely the messenger is based on Matrix protocol
Kali
Initial Release: 2013-03-13
Neo lived in 1999.
In a simulation 1999.
It would have been
BackTrackKnoppix back then. And even that wasn’t released until 2000.
I wanna know what the newsreader he uses is
Looks a bit like the Arachne browser for DOS.
Well, since the movies where one big trans allegory, the answer can only be Arch.
Wut
Page doesnt load
How about this link
I am not a big Matrix fan, so maybe my knowledge about the films (I saw 1 and 2, both only once) might be too limited. But I completely fail to understand the symbology.
From what I can remember, the simbolism is stronger in the first movie and not so much on the other two. I recall two key things that can simbolize the struggle trans people go through or are references to transgenderism.
- Neo feels that there is something wrong with the world and that he does not belong in it
- The Character Switch was originally supposed to be a man in the real world and a woman when plugged in to the matrix.
I’m sure there’s more but it’s been a while since I came across the analysis.
Worth noting that when I watched the movies I never made an association with transgenderism. I think in great part because I was not even aware of it.
The Character Switch was originally supposed to be a man in the real world and a woman when plugged in to the matrix.
This would have been a clear symbol.
A bit subtle, especially if you weren’t familiar with medicines at the time, but the blue pill is supposed to represent an antidepressant (Prozac was apparently blue at that time, don’t know about now, and was commonly prescribed to closeted trans women instead of actually addressing the core issue), and the red pill HRT (one of the common hormone pills at the time was red)
Which makes the “redpill” movement extra hilarious.
As said, though, it was really subtle if you knew that and completely opaque if you didn’t
With a lot of shots, scenery, and concepts stolen right from the movie Dark City.
He is Assembly, Operating Systems require him to operate.
Probably debian or slackware, there weren’t that many in 1999
There was a lot more that you’d think.
But most of those were extremely shitty or niche and got abandoned. Except Mandrake. That one was pretty good but I think I remember they were constantly having funding issues.
Mandrake was to Redhat as Ubuntu is to Debian now.
So, like today?
Mandrake, Suse, Corel, Red Hat, Turbo, Conectiva, PLD, Caldera, Rock, Coyote… that’s just the more well known distros, there were dozens at that point already.
i’m sure he runs his own, custom distro he spun himself
There is no distro.
Yeah he doesn’t distribute it due to privacy and security. He wrote it himself.
Do not try and hack the distro, that’s impossible.
Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no distro.
Then you will realize it isn’t the distro you hack, it is only yourself.
NixOS - about a year ago it would have been Arch, but the Nix bois seem to have overtaken them
us.