A long time ago the power supply blew out in the machine I played Counter Strike: Source on and I was a teenager just barely 16 with no money so I couldn't replace it.
I was able to keep in touch with my drug dealers and my girlfriend's friends (who were also all super hot) which was very important to me at that age, in an environment where you really needed a car or people who had cars to do anything with anyone worth doing anything with.
I got OpenSolaris booted on a Pentium II box that had 384mb of RAM then ran Openbox and a communications suite of SILC, IRC, Pidgin, Finch (a text frontend to libpurple), and some XMPP+OTR clients -- all in Solaris Zones to not get my shit wrecked by the same RCE exploits I was using against other Pidgin users (which seemed to be as numerous as exploits for the official AIM client). This was before Facebook.
Solaris Zones gave me that feeling of power over software that Qubes enthusiasts like to talk about, similar dopamine+endorphin flow to being a military dictator of a 3rd world country. Shit was so cash.
Thanks to Unix' elegance, I still had a life until moved enough herb to assemble another box I could run Counter Strike: Source (on FreeBSD, Cedega for the win) on.
Thanks for letting all these nerds on HN know how important it was to maintain contact with a drug dealer and super hot girls when you were a hip teenager, I mean... i totally get it because I was also a really cool hip teenager. Did we just become best friends?
I’m surprised that OpenSolaris had hardware support for random Pentium II boxes, but I guess if you had a supported Ethernet card that everything else could work…