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.
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.
Having grown up with Acorn Atoms. BBC Micro, MS and DRDOS, Gem, Xerox something, Windows 1, don’t remember 2, 3.0 to 3.11, NT. I didn’t realise how nice early (2004) Linux was until I used it in a Windows server hosted VM to handle my phone calls (VoIP@home or something it was called).
I did everything I could to ditch Windows after that. The webification of QuickBooks was the final release.
Linux was getting pretty nice by 2004. In 1996 it was a LOT rougher.
I basically left Windows in 2006 and never looked back. I did some cross platform work in Qt where I’d develop in either iOS or Linux and then hand the product over to the test team to compile in Windows - worked beautifully. Sure, there were things that worked in one OS that wouldn’t work in one or both of the alternatives, but when I figured out the problem it was 90%+ me “getting away with” bad practice on my development machine that once cleaned up ran everywhere just fine.
These days the Browser is 99% of the OS that means anything to anybody.
I live these old stories. Kinda gave up programming by 1996. It was a short-sighted thing to do!