it was garbage.
servers already worked well for the time, but desktop was rough.
this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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I tried to use Slackware in the mid 90s. After two solid days trying to get my ppp dialup connection to come up after a reboot - it would come up in the first boot after install, run for days like that, but after any reboot it was dead and gone and nobody on the internet seemed to know how to deal with it. "Real men" didn't use dialup, and people on dialup (self included) had no clue.
I declared it "not ready for prime time" due to that, and issues with sound drivers, and ignored it until 2003. In 2003 I tried some Cygwin and was impressed with its performance, so very close to "bare metal" Ubuntu. In 2004-5 the 64 bit AMD chips were coming out and I used Gentoo to build a true 64 bit system addressing 8GB of RAM - there wasn't really any other option.
I got tired of compiling every little part of the system from source for days on end and migrated to various flavors of Ubuntu / Debian, which by 2006-7 was becoming a viable desktop alternative. Before that you ALWAYS had to have a Windows machine for something, usually several somethings. At this point I only use my company issued Windows laptop when I need to connect to the company VPN, which can be months between needs depending on what I'm doing. My wife and I use Ubuntu full time now.
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Games: xbill, koules, and quake1 prerelease test(8 or 16 player multi)
Crafting XFree86 config lines to get a monitor working(no auto-detect for resolution modes)
Sharing tips, on how to solve all these issues, with others at Linux User Groups(LUGs)
On the topic, did AOL work on linux? They were the google of their time, i can't imagine the FOSS world thought very highly of them
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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.
Hmm my first linux distro was Suse 5.x that came on 5 CDs (i think it was 1998) ... can't say I used it much, I had weird German ISDN Internet at the time and the PPPoverWhatever (forgot the exact name) just didn't wanna work. Making music wasn't really feasible at the time. It mostly lay dormant. I slowly climbed the learning curve and switched to Linux full-time in the mid-2000s, when a lot more things were possible ...
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.
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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)
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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
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.
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stacks of diskettes, for every operating system.
would routinely spend hours doing an install only to hit a block and have to reinstall DOS to have modem access to get help on usenet. Then hours of reinstalling to move forward and repeat on another issue.
I really loved it though, it was a massive upgrade over DOS and windows on a 286.
Hard
94-95 school year for me. Prior to win 95. Honestly OS2 warp was the tits then, blew windows and linux away. But the cool thing about linux was that you could pull a session from the college mainframe and then run all the software off campus. Over a modem. Pro E, maple, matlab, gopher, Netscape, ftp/fsp, irc, on and on. Once you had X going on your 486, you were good to go.
But honestly, it was nerd sh$t. Dos was king until win95. And then nobody looked back until win8 made us realize Microsoft had started sucking.
I started programming in DOS professionally in January 1991. It was pretty clear how bad Microsoft sucked by February of 1991, and blindingly obvious when they "updated" DOS more than annually with "95% backward compatibility" which translated to: "we just broke all your programs and you're only going to have to figure out which 5% of your code you're going to have to update to make it work in this version - aaaaand, by the time you do that we will be releasing a newer version! ;-P "
Something called DrDOS came along and we used it just because it wasn't updating and breaking backward compatibility so often. Since 640k wasn't enough for us even then, we ended up putting the kludge "Phar-Lap 32 bit extender" libraries on our product so we could access all the cheap RAM that systems were being shipped with (2MB was pretty much standard by 1992).
Then there was the day that McAffee decided that our product's main .exe was a virus. It wasn't. It wasn't infected with anything. It didn't do anything vaguely resembling malware. McAffee just had a false positive pattern match with our software.
The Microsoft treadmill was a very real thing all through the 1990s - much like Android and iOS are today. Sure, you've got a cool idea for an app, but we're going to keep shifting the OS underneath you so that you're spending 90%+ of your time just recoding your same old app for the latest OS release. That way you don't have any time to innovate and maybe threaten our business model.
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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.
I started using it before distros were really a thing. I got as far as having something that would boot to a shell, but then since I was 14 I had no idea what I was supposed to do.
Backed off until I bought a Slackware book that came with a CD. Then I had the fun of trying to get X working. Manually entering frequencies for your monitor was scary, because if you got it wrong you could damage the monitor.
Then I had a fun problem of either my modem would work, or my sound card would work, but never both at the same time.
Honestly I never got a system which I could actually use for anything, but I was a kid having fun, and it taught me to not be afraid of the computer.
We didn't have -R, you had to go into every subdirectory and run the command manually.