If you weren’t at a university it was generally a challenge to get hold of disks. Downloading at home took forever on a 28.8 or even 56k modem (ie. 56 kilobits per second).

Slackware and Redhat disk sets were the thing, in my experience. But generally that only gave you the compiled code, not the source (although there was an another set of disks with the source packages).

If you wanted to recompile stuff you had to download the right set of packages, and be prepared to handle version conflicts on your own (with mailing list and usenet support).

Recompiling the kernel with specific patches for graphics cards, sound cards, modems and other devices (I remember scanners in particular), or specific combinations of hardware was relatively common. “Use the source, Luke!” was a common admonition. Often times specific FAQ pages or howtos would be made available for software packages, including games.

XFree86 was very powerful on hardware it supported, but was very finnicky. See the other posts about the level of detail that had to be supplied to get combinations of graphics cards and monitors working without the appearance of magic smoke.

Running Linux was mostly a enthusiast/hobbyist/geek thing, for those who wanted to see what was possible, and those who wanted to tinker with something approaching Unix, and those who wanted to stretch the limits of what their hardware could do.

Many of those enthusiasts and hobbyists and geeks discovered that Linux could do far more than anyone previously had been prepared to admit or realise. They, and others like them, took it with them into progressively more significant, and valuable projects, and it began to take over the world.

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. :-)

I can’t remember if it was 99 or 2000, I got a copy of Red Hat 6.0 (Hedwig) on the cover of a magazine and installed it. I remember the Lilo boot manager giving me trouble and then it was multiple days of dialing up the internet on my dad’s PC to find info on getting X11 to run correctly on my graphics hardware. Once I got that going it was my win modem that defeated me in the end, couldn’t get any internet. So was back to Windows for another couple of years.

In 2003 my university course had a Linux Administration subject and the lecturer had built a live cd of Fedora Core 2 (this was in the days before live cds were a regular thing) it was a revelation and it worked with much less setup. We had a Linux lab, but the livecd allowed us to work on Linux on our personal machines. I’d dabble with Linux and explore distros for a few years, depending on hard ware compatibility, I’d always have at least one Linux box. I remember attempting to get HalfLife 2 running in Cedega (a commercial fork of wine), even played the original left4dead with friends, this was in 2008. I was there when pulse audio launched before it was ready and when KDE moved to version 4 and was an absolute resource hog. I bought the unreal and tournament games on disc to play on Linux. Was Disappointed when the UT3 release got delayed and then eventually canceled. I remember going to the id software ftps to get the Linux binaries for all the quakes. There were a few other Linux adventures in there, like a misguided attempt at compiling Gentoo in 2007 and working out mythtv server as a media pc and pvr.

Was excited when I got beta access to steam in 2012, and I haven’t had Windows on my personal computers since then.

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.

I started with Suse 5 when it came out, as something I was interested in fucking about with. I didn’t have internet access at that time, but I did had a couple of books about it (the distro came with a book as well). It was a couple of CDs and a boot floppy disk (booting from CD wasn’t really a thing).

I used it for years for software development and simple tasks like Word processing. Getting my printer working on the thing was a chore, as was basically anything. Especially without internet solving issues was sometimes simply impossible. My scanner simply didn’t work. Getting the desktop environment to run was very hard, I struggled with it for a long time. And once I got it working properly, I got a new videocard and it broke the whole thing again.

The system was very painful to use, it was super cool, but almost nothing ever worked right. And trying to fix shit usually made it worse. But once you did get it working right, it was simply awesome. And the feeling of accomplishment was awesome after finally getting something right. For software development on the terminal it was pretty awesome though. Back then I did almost everything in text mode, as I was used to DOS before that. Going into Windows was something you did only sometimes with Windows 3.11 (and even 95) and I did the same in my Linux environment. The desktop environment used up a lot of memory and was pretty slow, so I preferred the console. It was only later booting into the desktop became the norm (around the Windows 98 era).

I used Suse till version 6.1 (still have that box). I bought version 7 (still have that box as well), but never really used it.

Back then I used Debian to create small internet routers for my friends. I got an old compact computer, put in a floppy with Debian, a couple of network cards and created small NAT boxes like that. This was before NAT routers were the norm, people just had internet on 1 machine, connected directly. But as computers became cheaper, a lot of folk had more than 1 computer in the home. With no real way to share the internet connection between the different computers. Microsoft created the Internet Connection Sharing feature, but that was pretty slow, disconnected often and ate resources on your “main” PC. So my little boxes worked great, I helped people setup a home network, connected my magic box to get every system online. Also helped them setup some port forwarding for the stuff they used.

Because I used Debian a lot, I switched over to Debian for my main rig when Suse 7 released. Used Potato, Woody, Sarge and Etch a lot. Switched around between Debian and Ubuntu in the Lenny and Squeeze era. Have been using Ubuntu ever since, never really had a reason to switch. Debian compared to Suse was so nice, I really liked the way Debian did things. It made a lot more sense for me in my head compared to Suse.

As I fucked around with computers a lot, I always had both Linux and DOS/Windows machines running and even had a couple of dual boot systems. For any kind of gaming DOS/Windows was required back then and I did love to game. I do think Windows 10 will be my last Microsoft OS, since Windows 11 absolutely sucks (use it at work, I hate it). Work stuff has become less and less of an issue to get stuff done on Linux just as well as on Windows. And gaming has come leaps and bounds due to the work on the Steamdeck.

So hope to fully ditch Microsoft in the near future, even though my first ever computer in 1984 ran Microsoft firmware with Microsoft Basic being the default user interface.

Well, XFree86 ( before Xorg and before KMS ) was an adventure. I spent hours guessing the vertical and horizontal frequencies of my monitor trying to get decent resolutions.

Other than that, Linux was way more work but “felt” powerful relative to OS options of the time. Windows was still crashy. The five of us that used OS/2 hated that it still had a lot of 16 bit under the hood. Linux was pure 32 bit.

Later in the 90’s, you could run a handful of Windows apps on Linux and they seemed to run better on Linux. For example, file system operations were dramatically faster.

And Linux was improving incredibly rapidly so it felt inevitable that it would outpace everything else.

The reality though was that it was super limited and a pain in the ass. “Normal” people would never have put up with it. It did not run anything you wanted it to ( if you had apps you liked on Mac, Windows, OS/2, Amiga, NeXTstep, BeOS, or whatever else you were using ( there were of potential options at the time ). But even for the pure UNIX and POSIX stuff, it was hard.

Obviously installation was technical and complex. And everything was a hodge-podge of independently developed software. “Usability” was not a thing. Ubuntu was not release until 2004.

Linux back then was a lot of hitting FTP sites to download software that you would build yourself from source. Stuff could be anywhere on the Internet and your connection was probably slow. And it was dependency hell so you would be building a lot of software just to be able to build the software you want. And there was a decent chance that applications would disagree about what dependencies they needed ( like versions ). Or the config files would be expected in a different location. Or the build system could not find the required libraries because they were not where the Makefile was looking for them.

Linux in the 90’s had no package management. This is maybe the biggest difference between Linux then and Linux now. When package management finally arrived, it came in two stages. First, came packages but you were still grabbing them individually from FTP. Second came the package manager which handled dependencies and retrieval.

The most popular Linux in the mid to late 90’s was Red Hat. This was before RHEL and before Fedora. There was just “Red Hat Linux”. Red Hat featured RPMs ( packages ) but you were still installing them and any required dependencies yourself at the command line. YUM ( precursor to NRF ) was not added until Fedora Core 1 was release in 2003!

APT ( apt-get ) was not added to Debian until 1998.

And all of this meant that every Linux system ( not distro — individual computer ) was a unique snowflake. No two were alike. So bundling binary software to work on “Linux” was a real horror-show. People like Loki gave it a good run but I cannot imagine the pain they went through. To make matters worse, the Linux “community” was almost entirely people that had self-selected to give up pre-packaged software and to trade sweat-equity for paying for stuff. Getting large number of people to give you money for software was hard. I mean, as far as we have come, that is still harder on Linux than on Windows or macOS.

You can download early Debian or Red Hat distros today if you want to experience it for yourself. That said, even the world of hardware has changed. You will probably not be wrestling IRQs to get sound or networking running on modern hardware or in a VM. Your BIOS will probably not be buggy. You will have VESA at least and not be stuck on VGA. But all of that was just “computing” in the 90’s and the Windows crowd had the same problems.

One 90s hardware quirk was “Windows” printers or modems though where the firmware was half implanted in Windows drivers. This was because the hardware was too limited or too dumb to work on its own and to save money your computer would do some of the work. Good luck having Linux support for those though.

Even without trying old distros, just try to go a few days on you current Linux distro without using apt, nrf, pacman, zypper, the GUI App Store, or what have you. Imagine never being able to use those tools again. What would that be like?

Finally, on my much, much slower 90’s PC, I compiled my own kernel all the time. Honestly multiple times per month I would guess. Compiling new kernels was a significant fraction of where my computing resources went at the time. I cannot remember the last time I compiled a kernel.

It was a different world.

When Linus from LTT tried Linux not that long ago ( he wanted to game ), he commented that he felt like he was playing “with” his computer instead of playing “on” his computer. That comment still describes Linux to some extent but it really, really captures Linux in the 90’s.

I went to college in 93, and they ran a Unix mainframe with thin clients connected to it in the computer labs.

I didn’t really know much about any computers then, but I learned quick and had nerdy friends teach me a lot. Home computers ran DOS, but this fancy thing called Linux had entered the scene and nerds played with it.

I remember it being a bear. My comp sci roommate did most of the work, but he’d dole out mini projects to me to help him out. You had to edit text files with your exact hardware parameters or else it wouldn’t work. Like resolutions, refresh rates, IRQs, mouse shit, printer shit - it was maddening. And then you’d compile that all for hours. And it always failed. Many hardware things just weren’t ever going to work.

Eventually we got most things working and it was cool as beans. But it took weeks - seriously. We were able to act as a thin client to the mainframe and run programs right from our apartment instead of hauling ourselves to the computer lab. Interestingly, on Linux, that was the first time I had ever gotten a modem and a mouse working together. It was either/or before that.

It was both simultaneously horrific and fantastic at the same time. By the time windows 95 rolled out, the Unix mainframe seemed old and archaic. All the cool kids were playing Warcraft 2 and duke nukem 3D.

It was prominent in smaller businesses that wanted or needed a Unix but weren’t going to pay what sun or IBM or HP and friends wanted for their hardware+software.

It ate the proprietary Unix market awfully quickly and I don’t think anyone really misses it.

For me, educational stuff was all windows with a small amount of macs and I don’t think I ever saw a Linux system in actual use anywhere.

I used it on the desktop but that was super rare because hardware support was nowhere as good as now - even getting X up was a challenge (go read up on mode lines if you want some entertainment).

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.

Ah, Linux from scratch…

Also, hardware was… Harder back then, on Linux (mostly modems).

Beside that, software wise there was less stuff on Linux than today, so you had to check carefully you had what you needed.

But I was already a Linux user, and a linux-only user at that.

It was kind of an upstart thing and people were trying to find ways to monetize it.

My first Linux was Red Hat on a 486 in 1998 and it was different than I was used to. I was a kid who didn’t know how to startx so I just emailed a developer using pine and they helped me figure out and choose a window manager. Nobody even got mad at this barely teenager just emailing dumb questions. I got lost with fvwm95 and afterstep. I tried every window manager, mlvwm, qvwm, IceWM, etc but ended up liking blackbox the most. I had 12MB of RAM on my first Linux system, 1MB of vram and 256 colors. We were all sarcastic in a cringe, adolescent way but everyone was friendly and helpful.

There was this fascination with monkeys in pop culture, but not real monkeys --chimps and gorillas. People would throw monkey in their username or in some random nu-metal song for some reason. There were monkeys you could download for your desktop. There was this thing by PC gamer called coconut monkey. I don’t know what that’s all about. And anyway I associate this period with the foot logo of Gnome, which was unprofessional but that was the point. Also, gimp was a funny name for an app (its cringe today), and PAN stood for pimp ass news.

I discovered Slashdot and Freshmeat and Sourceforge and kuro5hin. Usenet groups were great back then. So was irc. I trolled Slashdot and got negative karma and for the next 15 years before we all moved to SoylentNews, my comments started at -1.

Nobody knew how to pronounce Linux. Some people said Line-X because his name was Linus like on Charlie Brown, and some people said Leenucks.

At some point it became a corporate thing and the term Linux was everywhere. Randomly on magazine covers. There was also this divide, almost marketing driven, it seemed that people who liked warez and whatever started to love Microsoft and shit on Linux. So gamers especially started to shit talk and that’s the first time that being a computer nerd wasn’t like this unifying concept, there was an us versus them divide. People who could compile code they wrote and who were genuinely curious versus people who just wanted to download a bunch of shit and show you how big their start menu was and play games. I think this divide still exists.

There was a bunch of commercial software for Linux too. Metro-X, Accelerated X, Motif, Applixware, Star Office. Descent 3. One of the Quakes. Motif, the toolkit, looked amazing. I thought CDE with themes was the coolest looking thing ever. But I couldn’t afford CDE so I used XFce which was an XForms knockoff. And then enlightenment came along and pushed the boundaries of what we thought a desktop would be. Also, I was able to drag console windows with transparency on that 486 on e16.

Debian kind of had an elitist community and talked down to people so I never used it. I liked Slackware the most and spent a weekend downloading the floppies over a dialup connection. That led to me discovering FreeBSD in 1999, which I stuck with for almost a decade.

Later, a comp sci student, I didn’t see Linux at university in the labs. It was Solaris and macOS in the mid 2000s. Eventually, the Solaris computers were shut down and replaced with more Macs.

My girlfriend’s Windows ME computer was so full of spyware so I installed SuSE with KDE on it for her in her dorm. And she was able to do her papers in AbiWord. And 20+ years later we are married and it all worked out.

I finally switched to Debian stable about 4 years ago and have no complaints. It’s a lot easier now.

Edit: A couple more things: I started using Linux because I was very poor and it was free and Windows 95 was a mess on my system. I mean dirt roads and no water for long periods of time. My 486 in 1998 was sort of old already and it came with 8mb of RAM as a hand me down in 1995, but I was dumpster diving outside a community college when I was 12 and found an IBM PS/2 and stole the 30 pin SIMMs out of it. And one of them worked in my 486 computer so I ended up with 12mb of RAM. I overclocked it to 100mhz. That 486 got me through high school and into college where I ended up with an AMD system with a pirated Thai RM233 Windows 2000. But I went back to FreeBSD because I needed a compiler. So that kind of knowledge was useful and now that I have a good career from what I learned, I have donated a lot of money over the years to different projects. Also I make sure my kids have only ever known Linux and Gnome and it works fine for them.

I am a 90s child, so I don’t completely fit your timespan, but I remember the first PC with SuSe Linux that I built with my father from old server hardware he got from his job.

Back then his job used unix and it was pretty common in his field of work. So Linux was the natural choice for a home pc. SuSe was popular back then, I think mainly because it came on CDs and had books available.

One of the main things I remember is the hassle with network drivers, having to download them on a working pc first.

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.

You have several long and comprehensive answers so please allow me to add an emotional one:

Fucking compile error in hour six of what you estimated to be a four hour compile job because of a mistake you made that you found within 5 seconds after the error!!

Fucking why doesn’t this compilation start I can’t find my mistake for hours?!

Where does this module come from?! What do you mean “root kit”? Learning was fun!

It all was fun! :)

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.