I really wish that I was born early so I’ve could witness the early years of Linux. What was it like being there when a kernel was released that would power multiple OSes and, best of all, for free?

I want know about everything: software, hardware, games, early community, etc.

  • PunkRockSportsFan@fanaticus.socialEnglish
    22·
    6 hours ago

    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.

    • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
      81·
      5 hours ago

      I learned how to make a dual boot machine first.

      My friend wanted to get me to install it, but he had a 2nd machine to run Windows on. So we figured out how to dual boot.

      And then we learned how to fix windows boot issues 😮‍💨

      We mostly did it for the challenge. Those Linux Magazine CDs with new distros and software were a monthly challenge of “How can I install this and also not destroy my ability to play Diablo?”

      I definitely have lost at least one install to getting stuck in vim, flailing the keyboard and writing garbage data into a critical config file before rebooting.

      Modern Linux is amazing in comparison, you can use it for essentially any task and it still has a capacity for customization that is astonishing.

      The early days were interesting if you like getting lost in the terminal and figuring things out without a search engine. Lots of trial and error, finding documentation, reading documentation, etc.

      It was interesting, but be glad you have access to modern Linux. There’s more to explore, better documentation, and the capabilities that you can pull in are still astonishing.