Stuff needed tweaking more wine worked almost never even for basically window’s programs. Configuring Xfree86 was black magic. Running Startx at the terminal prompt was like rolling the dice. Distro choice was smaller and it was really a choice. Since the child distros were less of a thing. You had Debian , Redhat, Slackware, and SUSE. All were very different at a fundamental level with packaging and philosophy. Also it was way more common to buy boxed copies of Linux distros with big thick manuals that helped you get it installed and take your first steps with Linux. It reminded me of when I first got my TI 83 calculator an it had that massive manual with it.

Also Lugs and spending a lot of time on IRC getting and helping people on freenode (don’t go there now) was a must.

I spent what felt like many moons trying to compile Gentoo when I was a kid. There was only the wiki and a gritty forum for getting answers, nothing in real-time. I didn’t have very much knowledge of the kernel or messing with modules, and was certainly lost on getting a desktop environment going even after I got past the kernel part.

It was such an experience, I decided to become a janitor.

ETA: also this guy (not strictly linux, but same vibes)

My first experience was with two floppy images I found on “So much shareware! Vol.2”.

It was labeled Linux 0.99b, no distro. It was not of much use to me at the time.

A couple of years later I got my hands on Slackware 2.0 on CD. So much time spent compiling your own kernel, because no modules and the whole thing had to fit in main memory (640kB). So much time spent fiddling with xf86config hoping you wouldn’t fry your CRT.

Good times.

Then came gentoo, which had package management. No more did you have to browse sourceforge for endless dependencies to install something. No more did you have to re-install slackware on your root partition to update. So user-friendly in comparison.

We spent a lot of time on IRC.

MUDs kind of bridged the gap between IRC and games.

I remember spending a lot of time playing abuse, snes9x, quake + team fortress and quake2 + action quake.

Looking through music and budget software CDs at a computer store or a college vendor table, there would be one with a penguin or BSD mascot. It wasn’t like the other discs that had DOS shareware games or utilities. The CD rom drives were 1x speed, attached to a card on the ISA bus, without plug and play, so it needed an interrupt number that didn’t collide with other cards. The install process was curses based, with no mouse. There would be much time spent figuring out how to partition the drive, usually after buying a book. Back then, computer book sections were huge. The software install dialog had one line description per package, and it wasn’t easy to tell what they did. Then there was setting up X Server and choosing a window manager. Not all video modes were supported, so it took a lot of trial and error with editing config files and resolutions before the the window environment would work. This was before home internet so it would take a weekend or all week to figure out. The only accessible communities in many parts were dialup bulletin boards, unless there was access to a college computer lab with a mosaic or netscape browser. At this point it was realized that I lived in a tech desert, quit my retail job, and moved.

No audio, no WiFi, no well-established communities, sparse software selection, but total freedom on an alternate OS. I tried it out in the late 90s with Red Hat, left, came back about 5 years later in the early 2000s and stayed forever. SuSE 9.2 was amazing.

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.

Alrighty, old Linux user from the earliest of days.

It was fun, really great to have one-on-one with Linus when Lilo gave issues with the graphic card and the screen kept blank during booting.

It was new, few fellow students where interested, but the few that did, all have serious jobs in IT right know.

Probably the mindset and the drive to test out new stuff, combined with the power Linux gave.

Clumsy. Manual. No multimedia support really. Compiling everything on 486 machines took hours.

Can’t say I look back fondly on it.

BeOS community was fucking awesome though. That felt like the cutting edge at the time.

It wasn’t too early, maybe 1997.

I was like 12 or so and I had just installed Linux.

I figured out, from the book I was working with, how to get my windows partition to automaticallyount at boot. Awesome!

I had not been able to figure out how to start “x” though.

So I rebooted into Windows, for on EFnet #linux, and asked around.

Got a command, wrote it down on a slip of paper, and rebooted into Linux.

I should mention, I also hadn’t figured out about privileges, or at least why you wouldn’t want to run around as root.

Anyway, I started typing in the command that I wrote down: rm -rf /.

I don’t have to tell you all, that is not the correct command. The correct command was startx.

After I figured it was taking way too long, I decided to look up what the command does, and then immediately shut down the system.

It was far too late.

“Please insert Slackware disk Set A disk 3”

All my homies who were into it were like “everything is free you just have to compile it yourself”

And I was like “sounds good but I cannot”

Then all the cool distros got mature and feature laden.

If you were a competent computer scientist it was rad.

If you were a dummy like me who just wanted to play star craft and doom you wasted a lot of time and ended up reinstalling windows.

Before modularized kernels became the standard I was constantly rerunning “make menuconfig” and recompiling to try different options, or more likely adding something critical back in :-D

You got it from a friend on a pile of slackware and floppies labeled various letters. It felt amazing and fresh, everything you could need was just a floppy away.

Then we got Gentoo and suddenly it was fun to wait 4 days to compile your kernel.

If you wanted to run Unix, your main choices were workstations (Sun, Silicon Graphics, Apollo, IBM RS/6000), or servers (DEC, IBM) They all ran different flavors of BSD or System-V unix and weren’t compatible with each other. Third-party software packages had to be ported and compiled for each one.

On x86 machines, you mainly had commercial SCO, Xenix, and Novell’s UnixWare. Their main advantage was that they ran on slightly cheaper hardware (< $10K, instead of $30-50K), but they only worked on very specifically configured hardware.

Then along came Minix, which showed a clean non-AT&T version of Unix was doable. It was 16-bit, though, and mainly ended up as a learning tool. But it really goosed the idea of an open-source OS not beholden to System V. AT&T had sued BSD which scared off a lot of startup adoption and limited Unix to those with deep pockets. Once AT&T lost the case, things opened up.

Shortly after that Linux came out. It ran on 32-bit 386es, was a clean-room build, and fully open source, so AT&T couldn’t lay claim to it. FSF was also working on their own open-source version of unix called GNU Hurd, but Linux caught fire and that was that.

The thing about running on PCs was that there were so many variations on hardware (disk controllers, display cards, sound cards, networking boards, even serial interfaces).

Windows was trying to corral all this crazy variety into a uniform driver interface, but you still needed a custom driver, delivered on a floppy, that you had to install after mounting the board. And if the driver didn’t match your DOS or Windows OS version, tough luck.

Along came Linux, eventually having a way to support pluggable device drivers. I remember having to rebuild the OS from scratch with every little change. Eventually, a lot of settings moved into config files instead of #defines (which would require a rebuild). And once there was dynamic library loading, you didn’t even have to reboot to update drivers.

The number of people who would write and post up device drivers just exploded, so you could put together a decent machine with cheaper, commodity components. Some enlightened hardware vendors started releasing with both Windows and Linux drivers (I had friends who made a good living writing those Linux drivers).

Later, with Apache web server and databases like MySql and Postgres, Linux started getting adopted in data centers. But on the desktop, it was mostly for people comfortable in terminal. X was ported, but it wasn’t until RedHat came around that I remember doing much with UIs. And those looked pretty janky compared to what you saw on NeXTStep or SGI.

Eventually, people got Linux working on brand name hardware like Dell and HPs, so you didn’t have to learn how to assemble PCs from scratch. But Microsoft tied these vendors so if you bought their hardware, you also had to pay for a copy of Windows, even if you didn’t want to run it. It took a government case against Microsoft before hardware makers were allowed to offer systems with Linux preloaded and without the Windows tax. That’s when things really took off.

It’s been amazing watching things grow, and software like LibreOffice, Wayland, and SNAP help move things into the mainstream. If it wasn’t for Linux virtualization, we wouldn’t have cloud computing. And now, with Steam Deck, you have a new generation of people learning about Linux.

PS, this is all from memory. If I got any of it wrong, hopefully somebody will correct it.

The danger of poorly configuring your XF86Config in a way that could irreparably damage your giant CRT monitor was thrilling.