I took a more aggressive approach, I bought a second drive, but I just took the old one out (laptop). I made a windows recovery USB too and just stored them together. My laptop doesn’t get firmware updates through FW update so a couple times this year I have swapped the drive back in, booted up the windows partition and updated the firmware through their stupid tool.

Even on the vendor site, this laptop only has .exe files for firmware

I have this laptop, running Fedora with kde. It’s fine.

Lol shows how much I pay attention

Off the top of my head, GalliumOS or nix

This was me, you’re talking about me. 😂 In the 90’s Linux was barely getting started but slackware was probably the main distro everyone was focused on. That was the first one I ran across. This was probably late 90’s, I don’t remember when slack first came about though.

By the time the 2000’s came around, it was basically a normal thing for people in college to have used or at least tried. Linux was in the vernacular, text books had references to it, and the famous lawsuit from SCO v IBM was in full swing. There were distro choices for days, including Gentoo which I spent literally a week getting everything compiled on an old Pentium only for it to not support some of the hardware and refuse to boot.

There was a company I believe called VA Linux that declared that year to be the year of the Linux desktop. My memory might be faulty on this one.

Loki gaming was a company that specialized in porting games to Linux, and they did a good job at it but couldn’t make money. I remember being super excited about them and did buy a few games. I was broke too so that was a real splurge for me. I feel like they launched in the 90’s (late) and crashed in the early 2000’s.