Thanks!

@U051N6TTC also, something interesting happened with me with my current machine: I bought a computer and a friend of mine installed Windows 10 demo so my mom could use it for a while. The touchpad was not working at all (we tought it was faulty). Then I installed Linux. The touchpad started to work, so somehow, Linux detected the drivers and Windows didn't 🤯

Did you try reinstalling Windows? I mean… I would put a laughing emoji there to show that I was joking, except that this has fixed problems for me with Windows on too many occasions to dismiss it.

Linux has problems, but one thing that it's always been good with is consistency

Well, the idea of the computer is to be running only Linux, so I didn't even bother 😄

By the way, about the original message: it was a Conectiva 5 Linux (a Brazilian distribution that merged with Mandrake to become Mandriva). I kinda joke that using that Linux is like filling a glass with water, keeping it on the table to drink later, and suddenly the glass becomes a duck or other insane thing: the bugs were out of this world! In fact, the original bug was that if I was connected to the internet (dial-up at the time), any app that had graphical interface would take an insane amount of time to start: like, 10 minutes or so. And there was no processor spike, no resource consume, nothing: it was kinda like a (sleep ....). If the internet disconnected (either manually or automatically, as it happened at the time) then ALL apps that were waiting to open instantaneously would try to display their UIs. So, what I used to do was: I opened everything that I expected to use, then connected to the internet. If I forgot anything, I would open it and make a lunch, read a chapter from a book, etc, then go back. Insane times 😄

That sounds like something was trying to open some kind of connection that ended up going to the modem, and taking forever before timing out. In a case like that, you can use strace to look for file open operations, and check the parameters for things like serial devices in /dev, fifos, or other virtual files that might block. It’s less likely if those applications aren’t supposed to be looking for a netowkr, but you can also look for socket operations. That’s the thing with Linux… it may be horribly complex, but you can always figure out what’s going on, if you’re willing to delve far enough. On extreme occasions I’ve even added printk statements to my kernel, though that’s not for the faint of heart.

Yeah, but that was a looong time ago, I don't have these problems anymore, thankfully!