I really wish that I was born early so I’ve could witness the early years of Linux. What was it like being there when a kernel was released that would power multiple OSes and, best of all, for free?
I want know about everything: software, hardware, games, early community, etc.
A real pain in the ass. It was still worth it to use for the experience, especially if you had an actual reason to use it. Other than that it was just an exercise in futility most of the time…and I think that’s why we loved it. It was still kinda new. Interesting. And it didn’t spoon feed you. Was quite exhilarating.
Constantly trying to remember obscure bullshit fucking commands
I cut my teeth with DOS and Netware, used Windows until the day 98 was released (had been using the GM for a month), and cut over to Slackware as my daily driver. Dabbled with Redhat before stabilising on Debian, which I’ve never found a need to change from for my headless boxes.
One thing I specifically remember was hand tuning my X11 config to drive my 15” Trinitron at 1024x768 @ ~68Hz.
X86 configs were painful and fun. Knowing a wrong setting might destroy your monitor was the right amount of adrenaline.
I started using Slackware in the late 90s - say 1998. I used it for most of my desktop applications pretty much right away.
I don’t game much so that wasn’t an issue for me.
It was definitely harder to configure. I recompiled so many kernels and told myself the speed boost from getting exactly what I needed and nothing else was impressive. It wasn’t.
I dunno. It wasn’t as polished as it is now, and was harder to configure, but it was still very good, and once you got it configured, it kept working, unlike the more popular os of the day.
Honestly, it sucked. Like most computing at the time. Everything came on a ton of floppy disks, it was impossible to update online unless you had a good connection (which nobody did), and you had to do everything by hand, including compiling a lot of stuff which took forever. I mean, I’m glad I got the experience, but I would never wanna go back to that. It sucked.
Remember the slow internet had to wait overnight for 40 megabyte game and finally finding out it didn’t work.
jad
deleted by creator
Hard
94-95 school year for me. Prior to win 95. Honestly OS2 warp was the tits then, blew windows and linux away. But the cool thing about linux was that you could pull a session from the college mainframe and then run all the software off campus. Over a modem. Pro E, maple, matlab, gopher, Netscape, ftp/fsp, irc, on and on. Once you had X going on your 486, you were good to go.
But honestly, it was nerd sh$t. Dos was king until win95. And then nobody looked back until win8 made us realize Microsoft had started sucking.
win8 made us realize
Bruh you were late. Vista sucked, 7 sucked, they were shit since XP. Sure, I kept using it until 10 because I was afraid linux still didn’t work, but XP was the last time I was happy with computers until I installed Fedora.
Nah, 7 was pretty good, although it was the last good one.
Anything past that was garbage but frankly I tolerated it as as a teenager I was too busy being horny all the time to notice how my computer was increasingly antagonistic towards me.
I tolerated all the way to windows 10 but windows 11 was the last nail in the coffin for me. I probably am indeed late to the party but tbh Linux didn’t inspire me until recently when I saw its became way more user-friendly than it was in 2015 when I first tried it.
