You could buy box copies of the original suse Linux that had manuals in the box the size of a TI graphing calculator manual.

Once you got X working everything else was cake by comparison.

Everything was harder back then - even when using Windows. But you had to be a real masochist to run Linux.

Computers were still quite new that most people had no real use for them beyond “work things”. Only nerds really used them for anything else. “Do you have an email address” isn’t a question you ask today.

“Kids these days” don’t realize how easy they have it when it comes to just general comparability. There weren’t a lot of standards yet and vendors had proprietary drivers and offered no support AT ALL for “lye nux”. You had to do a ton of research and fiddling to figure out if there was any support for your specific version of a specific chip used by any peripheral you used. And then to discover that you had to patch your kernel to add a driver that somebody had bodged together. So now you were running your own fun custom-kernel so you could get full-duplex rather than simplex audio! But it works!

Like - lets say today you want to buy an external IDE drive controller to plug in some old drives to for backup. You to to Amazon, search “USB external IDE enclosure” and buy the cheapest one you find. It probably works unless it’s defective. In '95 USB and Firewire were in their infancy so you would probably buy a serial or parallel port device. You would need to find whether Linux supported the specific version of the thing you wanted to buy, what tools there would be for it, etc. There was no standard “bulk storage device” driver that you could rely on or hope the vendor would implement. Even if you were an early adopter and got a USB or Firewire device it might have some “basic” functionality that works with OSS drivers but you couldn’t use all of it.

Vendors back then also shipped their own software with things, not just drivers. It was always just the absolute worst crap that was buggy as shit. But it would do a lot of the heavy lifting in working with their device. Like any Creative Labs audio player you wanted to get working. Sure it used USB but it didn’t just mount as storage device, you needed to use the worst GUI ever put before mankind to use it (under Windows). Under Linux you had to find a specific tool that would support pushing/pulling media from it. These days it would just mount as a drive automatically and you’d use standard desktop tools to interact with it.

Even with DOS/Windows you’d buy a game and as you came home from the store with it in a box wonder “will this work on my computer and how long will I need to mess with it?” I had to configure a specific CD-ROM driver to be used by DOS just to run Tie Fighter vs. X-Wing for example. Had a special boot floppy just for that game since that driver didn’t work with literally anything else I had.

Hardware just generally didn’t “auto configure”. “Plug 'n Play” was still very much in its infancy and you often had to manually configure hardware and install special drivers just for a particular card or peripheral.

IRQ 7 DMA 220. I probably just triggered some folks. If you were setting up a “Sound Blaster or compatible” then you had to know what interrupt it used (7) and what address it was on on the direct-memory bus (220). And you hoped there wasn’t a conflict with something else. If there was then there would be a DIP switch you could use to change the base memory address or IRQ from the default. But you were telling your software where to find the card.

USB was a f’ing game changer for peripherals. Serial and parallel ports were so slow and obnoxious to use. Before that there was no real way to “probe” the bus to discover what was there unless you knew exactly what you were looking for (there’s no lsusb for serial ports). So you just guessed at the driver you need and “modprob foo” hoping it worked.

It’s amazing what 20ish years of just developing standards has done.

If you want a taste of that world I highly recommend LGR on YouTube. He’s mostly Windows focused but look for videos where he tries out “oddware” to see how often he has trouble getting things to work on period hardware using the vendor-supplied software even. Then multiply that by 100x for Linux. :-)

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.

the first contact i had with linux back in mid-90’s brazil was with my isp’s login terminal, which displayed some arcane text reading “red hat linux version x.x”. after that, during my father’s final years working in bank of brazil he had to deal with cobra’s homemade distro in his workstations (cobra had developed an unix in the 80s that run on m68k’s, so no surprises here). it was an absolutely esoteric system to those who only knew the dos/windows 3.11 duo, since w95 only arrived in our country in numbers only in 96. the thing really caught on during the early to mid-2000’s, with faster and cheaper adsl connections, and with them, abundant knowledge and downloads available to any script kid.

Slackware and Red Hat were the two distros in use in the mid 90s.

My local city used proper UNIX, and my university had IRIXworkstations SPARCstations and SunOS servers. We used Linux at my ISP to handle modem pools and web/mail/news servers. In the early 2000s we had Linux labs, and Linux clusters to work on.

Linux on the desktop was a bit painful. There were no modules. Kernels had to fit into main memory. So you’d roll your own kernel with just the drivers you needed. XFree86 was tricky to configure with timings for your CRT monitors. If done wrong, you could break your monitor.

I used FVWM2 and Enlightenment for many years. I miss Enlightenment.

Driver support was so dicey. If you had anything even remotely not mainstream, you would be compiling your own video driver, or network driver, or basically left to figure it out for any other peripheral. So many devices like scanners and very early webcams just claimed zero Linux support at all, but you could at times find someone else’s project that might work.

I tried to switch to Linux as a desktop system several times in the late 90s but kept going back to windows because hardware support just wasn’t there yet.

I used it in a university course in '95, not sure what distro, but customising your shell prompt, and setting automatic timed updates for the wallpaper in tvwm certainly felt like the future. Different and electric.

We would play the linux shareware first release of quake in 12-16 player. Hiding the executable by renaming it ekauq… didn’t work, still got removed from our directories.

There were installfests at the local LUG, which were a fun way to share tips and help others.

One Linux support business existed in our town in the 90s, installing and fixing Linux boxen for businesses. Mostly home/hobby use though.

Slashdot.org was covering the majority of Linux news. Either MS FUD or the nonsense SCO lawsuit, amongst all the positive advances.

Linux conferences were a fun way to make it more real and see many of the big names behind the movement and technologies.

Installed RedHat 4 or 5.1 around 98 and then found the power of Debian. Currently running Trisquel GNU/Linux because it is a fully libre distro with no proprietary blobs or other obfuscated parts.

Many thanks to RMS and all FLOSS contributors, there is such an incredible spectrum of tools available for free use. It has been great to see the progression and expansion over the decades.