I found an old book written by Isaac Asimov while perusing the
stacks at my local library, it is "Buy Jupiter" [0], a collection of
his older short stories. It is different from most, however, in that
the author follows each story with some auto-biographical notes on
what he was doing at the time and how the story came to be
published.  It's a great look into Asimov's mid-life and career, and
I found these notes very interesting.

                                  ~
                                  
A recent republic bbs comment about how Linux had become too easy
reminded me of the very first gopher post I wrote back in 2009
titled "Linux is Boring, or Saved by the Slack" [1], followed up in
2020 by some similar sentiment [2] when sparcipx mentioned wanting
to ditch linux (sadly, his phlog post is no longer online for me to
reference). There were more replies on the latter by ratfactor [3],
logout [4], and 1436.ninja [5].

The situation with modern Linux distros becoming overly complex in
an effort to promote ease of use hasn't changed at all, and has only
gotten worse since then. Thankfully Slackware, Gentoo and the BSDs
are still around and are still championing simplicity, stability and
a DIY ethos. There are also old versions of many OSs available for
those retro-enthusiasts with older hardware. That and the ease of
use of modern hypervisors means there are plenty of options to
"regress" if one wants to.

[0]: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Buy%20Jupiter%20and%20Other%20Stories
[1]: gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/%7eslugmax/phlog/phlog_archives/slack
[2]: gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/%7eslugmax/phlog/2020-02-10-comments-on-ditching-linux
[3]: gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7eratfactor/phlog/2020-02-25-re-ditching-linux
[4]: gopher://i-logout.cz/0/phlog/posts/2020-02-11_on_ditching_linux.txt
[5]: gopher://1436.ninja/0/Phlog/20200210.md