Linux

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.

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.

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).

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

it was garbage.

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

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.

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

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

and walnut creek was doing the Lord's work.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

The absolute best thing about it was that after suffering under Microsoft's shitty operating systems for years, you were running a Unix-like on your own hardware. That part was amazing.

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

All I know is I wish I would've stuck with it when I first installed but...alas...I was lazy and too dependent on GUI