Linux

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 mean, you could recreate it. Just burn some old distros on a cd and get one of tgese old white pc

I was just looking through old books and noticing my Yggdrasil manual the other day. That was one of the earliest plug and go cd-rom distributions. Before that was e.g. Slackware and the early Debian, both of which involved big piles of floppies. I also remember sending Linus an email and getting an answer. I'm sure he is too much of a busy celebrity for that now.

My first time trying out Linux was with a bootable CD from a PC gaming magazine. It was Corel Linux. If I recall correctly it booted into KDE.

Unfortunately on my system the mouse cursor was invisible. The mouse worked, I just couldn't see where the cursor was. My brother who was using Linux full time couldn't help me fix it.

Imagine a pile of floppy disks, with stuffs inscribed on it that you never heard of....

... will you insert one into your computer and reboot it?

Well, in the 90's I managed to essentially brick two NIC's by tinkering with the tulip driver on command line. In the distro I used it had to be done manually and I still have no idea as to what happened inside those NIC's, but they sure didn't work ever again. Yes, I made the same mistake twice.

LI

There was a similar question a while ago with some nice reads in the answers :)

https://lemmy.ml/post/17575792

LUGs were very important back then especially when you were new.