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What a lot of people forget is that in the early days of Linux there was no software that targeted it. Everything you would want to run on Linux was intended to run on something else like Solaris, BSD, AT&T Sytem V, SCO, AIX or something else. As a result, Linux APIs were the most generic flavor of Unix possible. Almost every thing meant for a Unix would compile and run on it and there was rarely a dependency problem.

I still miss that.

The first time I encountered Linux was around 2007. I was just a kid in the 1990’s. None of my family had a computer science or programming affiliation. My dad worked for a company that made industrial plants and was an electrician. I got several old x286 through x386 desktops mostly in pieces for free as a result. I pieced these together to build our family’s first computers. I built stuff from the Windows 3.1 through XT era like this. I really only cared about AOL instant messanger, hotmail, MySpace, Age of Empires, Worms, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Star Craft, and Command and Conquer. So I had no real reason to search for alternatives. I think most of the Linux world revolves around networking and academics. Most people did not get into Linux unless they crossed these spaces. That kinda changed when M$ started deprecating hardware around the time of Windows 8, and adding native stalkerware ads nonsense. These give motivations that did not exist in the past. Also, it is very hard to understand how small computing and the internet were before the early 2000’s. You could not transfer media. This is why Linux distros on a CD were a thing. Most people had dialup connections. Let’s say you Jake an 8k image of 8192². That is 67m bits. If you were somehow capable of using the maximum theoretical bit rate of a 56k dialup modem, it would take 1200 seconds to load that image (20 minutes). In practice, triple that number, and pray for stability during the entire connection which was quite rare in a residential area. Back then, if you were downloading anything and the connection dropped, your file failed and you had to start over. So the primary way most people acquired software of any kind was in a brick and mortar retail store. Like Napster was super novel at the time as the first time a bit torrent client could be download and just worked without configuration complexity. It was a very different time. Like newspapers were a big part of life. The local classified ads were the primary way to find a job, a first car, and what was going on in your region. Any kind of real knowledge depth required making a trip to the local library.

We didn’t have -R, you had to go into every subdirectory and run the command manually.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Why not just install an old version in a VM and find out?

But remember, no search engines for troubleshooting, forums and printed matter only. (And mailing lists and IRC, but they’d probably tell you to Google it, which is off limits for this exercise.)

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.

Just raw dogged linux and loved it. Lot more stable than windows 95/98

Back in my day we had to get our Internet at the village Internet well. I remember the dialup modem noises it made as you pulled the bucket up.

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.