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.
I started my embedded engineering journey by blinking an LED on a PIC microcontroller back in 2007. Maybe you can toss them an Arduino development board. Programming by itself could be boring and tedious, but seeing your program actually do things in the real world could be exciting, at least it was for me. There's so much to branch to from there, everything from industrial automation to vehicle navigation to robotics.
I'm actually using it because it's easier. I do hobby programming, and I like having every utility I would ever need related to that just one command away. Need a hex editor? It's in the repository. Need a calculator that can convert binary to decimal? Also in the repository. IDEs/plugins/compilers? Repository.
There's nothing that anyone can do in 2024 in the MS Office suite of applications specifically that I can't find a third party or cloud equivalent of to do the exact same thing.
Yeah, you only have to look at these once. Absolutely no point except eye-candy for a fleeting moment.
.I don't even care for graphical boots. Give me all the boot messages scrolling by.
It's fucking infuriating to think about the fact that these fucknuts affect my life and decide certain things for it. Religion is gonna have an iron grip on society until the day I die, isn't it?