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.

  • floo@retrolemmy.com
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    12 hours ago

    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.

    • d00phy@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      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!

      • catloaf@lemm.ee
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        7 hours ago

        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.

      • floo@retrolemmy.com
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        7 hours ago

        Shit like that was the last straw for me and I ended up bailing on Lennox for, like, 10 years until I got back into it around 2006.

    • TFO Winder@lemmy.ml
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      11 hours ago

      Remember the slow internet jad to wait overnight for 40 megabyte game and finally finding out it didn’t work.