Linux

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.

You spent a few evenings downloading a hundred or so 1.44MB floppy imges over a 56kbps modem. You then booted the installer off one of those floppies, selected what software you wanted installed and started feeding your machine the stack of floppies one by one.

Once that was complete you needed to install the Linux boot loader "LiLo" to allow you the boot it (or your other OS) at power on.

All of that would get you to the point where you had a text mode login prompt. To get anything more you needed to gather together a lot of detailed information about your hardware and start configuring software to tell it about it. For example, to get XFree86 running you needed to know

• what graphics chip you had
• how much memory it had
• which clock generator it used
• which RAMDAC was on the board
• what video timings your monitor supported
• the polarity of the sync signals for each graphics mode

This level of detail was needed with every little thing

• how many heads and cylinders do your hard drives have
• which ports and irqs did your soundcard use
• was it sound blaster compatible or some other protocol
• what speeds did your modem support
• does it need any special setup codes
• what protocol did your ISP use over the phone line
• what was the procedure to setup an tear down a network link over it

The advent of PCI and USB made things a lot better. Now things were discoverable, and software could auto-configure itself a lot of the time because there were standard ways to ask for information about what was connected.

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.

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.

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

Contrary to other OSes, the information about it was mainly on the internet, no books or magazines. With only one computer at most homes, and no other internet-connected devices, that posed a problem when something didn't work.

It took me weeks to write a working X11 config on my computer, finding all the hsync/vsync values that worked by rebooting back and forth. And the result was very underwhelming, just a terminal in an immovable window. I think I figured out how to install a window manager but lost all patience before getting to a working DE. Days and days of fiddling and learning.

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.

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.

It was real real rough

Imagine gnome but instead of deciding your settings for you, they had a dialog where you had to pick the settings yourself.

Relevant xkcd's

I started using Linux right in the late 90’s. The small things I recall that might be amusing.

1. The installation process was easier than installing Arch (before Arch got an installer)
2. I don’t recall doing any regular updates after things were working except for when a new major release came out.
3. You needed to buy a modem to get online since none of the “winmodems” ever worked.
4. Dependency hell was real. When you were trying to install an RPM from Fresh Meat and then it would fail with all the missing libraries.
5. GNOME and KDE felt sincerely bloated. They seemed to always run painfully slow on modern computers. Moving a lot of people to Window Managers.
6. it was hard to have a good web browser. Before Firefox came out you struggled along with Netscape. I recall having to use a statically compiled ancient (even for the time) version of Netscape as that was the only thing available at the time for OpenBSD.
7. Configuring XFree86 (pre-cursor to X.org) was excruciating. I think I still have an old book that cautioned if you configured your refresh rates and monitor settings incorrectly your monitor could catch on fire.
8. As a follow on to the last statement. I once went about 6 months without any sort of GUI because I couldn’t get X working correctly.
9. Before PulseAudio you’d have to go into every application that used sound and pick from a giant drop down list of your current sound card drivers (ALSA and OSS) combined with whatever mixer you were using. You’d hope the combo you were using was supported.
10. Everyone cheered when you no longer had to fight to get flash working to get a decent web browsing experience.

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.

I got tired of compiling the kernel taking a day on my Pentium pc. So I got a pile of 486s the uni was throwing out, built a Beowulf cluster out of them and soon I was able to compile the kernel in two and half days.

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.

Spent a week getting the audio driver to work so I could finally figure out how to properly pronounce “Linux…” and I still couldn’t.

Spent like $50 on floppy disks and like 2 days labeling them by hand before printing out the 20 pages of instructions, formatting my hard drive and installing Slackware. Realized I didn’t actually know any unix commands. Paged a friend.

It was S.u.S.E. Linux 5.3

Great manual.

I was lucky that my NIC, graphics and sound card were supported out of the box.

But everything was still much worse than on Windows.

But I could taste the freedom.

Now all my devices run on Linux (except my Nintendo Switch).

Linux was exciting but time consuming and not all that useful.

I used to bike into University, spend half the night downloading disk images of SLS, spend hours more installing, and spend hours more getting the X config timings working for my monitor. But when I was finally able to use the same window manager config as the Sun workstations at school I felt like King of the World! But what was I actually doing with it? Xterm and an ancient version of GCC.

That said, I created my own basic Shell in the early days and a few little utilities. So I learned a lot. I do not think I would even have attempted many things without the technical confidence that just being a Linux user brought. There was the feeling that you could do anything even though you were hardly doing anything. And new capabilities were constantly arriving so that feeling lasted years.

I had an old laptop, and my WiFi required some kind of cutter driver that wrapped broadcom, my Intel graphics didn't work on newer kernels. It booted in 7 seconds on a 5400rpm disk though while XP took over a minute.

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

In the late 90s you could get CDROMs from the nerds at university with everything you need on them. If you got your sound card working and could play an mp3, you felt like a master hacker who had beat the game.

I got a very early version of Debian from a friend when I was in college. I had a very old computer gifted to me but couldn't get Windows to install. I ran that badboy with no window manager, just text. I used elinks for my web browser and pine for email. VI was where I wrote my papers. Drivers were a problem, so I had to save papers on a disk to print from a computer at a library.

The only OS that was solid as a desktop OS back then, with good usability, was BeOS. Both MacOS and Windows had stability problems (although NT/2000 were much better, but lacked app/game compatibility), and Linux was a nightmare to update and run (lots of compiling too). So the OS of choice back then for me, was BeOS. I could do everything I needed with it too.

winmodems and modelines were problematic but it was liberating to be able to tinker.

and walnut creek was doing the Lord's work.

In the 90s, it was hard :-)

It made sense to recompile the kernel to make it fit your hardware.

It was a mess to find peripherals that were working with Linux.

Prior to the website rpmfind.net, installing software was to put it mildly, a chore. Due to package dependency, you'd start the compile, and it would fail due to missing libraries. You'd then go out and find those libraries, only to have them fail on compile...due to missing libraries...it would go on like until you finally were able to compile the original package - at this point though you compiled it out of sheer spite for the universe that put you in that position.

I rate the experience a solid 5/7

it was garbage.

servers already worked well for the time, but desktop was rough.