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.
Honestly, it sucked. Like most computing at the time. Everything came on a ton of floppy disks, it was impossible to update online unless you had a good connection (which nobody did), and you had to do everything by hand, including compiling a lot of stuff which took forever. I mean, I’m glad I got the experience, but I would never wanna go back to that. It sucked.
Remember when packages like RPM were first introduced, and it was like, “cool, I don’t have to compile everything!” Then you were introduced to Red Hat’s version of DLL-Hell when the RPM couldn’t find some obsure library! Before YUM, rpmfind.net was sooo useful!
I still use pkgs.org pretty frequently when I need to find versions of packages and their dependencies across different distros and versions of distros. I had to use that to sneakernet something to fix a system just this past week.
Shit like that was the last straw for me and I ended up bailing on Linux for, like, 10 years until I got back into it around 2006.
Poor Annie.
Remember the slow internet jad to wait overnight for 40 megabyte game and finally finding out it didn’t work.
Nope, i had 10Mb fiber in 1995.
Up all night, and all you got to see was a boob
Half of it because random disconnect happened in the middle and download did not resume.