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The Linux Distributions of 1992

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Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#41

Post by unmole »

hef19898 wrote: post #9
nobleach wrote: post #5

I recall being in a B. Dalton Bookstore in the mid-90's. I picked up a book that had "Linux" on the cover. In the cover it had a floppy disk or two. Something felt very wrong to me. You can't give away an entire operation system! Perhaps this was just some "free for educational purposes" thing? I went home and fired up WebCrawler on AOL and came across Yggdrasil. I had experienced Unix on an SGI system. And I was ver…

I remember discussions back the day between Linux and Windows proponents. I was clearly in the Windows camp, seeing Linux fans as, well, bizarre sometimes arrogant pseudo programmers. That changed, now that Linux is probably the last OS I can run without a cloud account easily. Heck, I'd even pay for it! Back the day I was a gamer, the main reason why Linux never really was an option. Later for work, it was Windows a…

> Linux fans as, well, bizarre sometimes arrogant pseudo programmers.

To be fair, some of us were smug as hell.

I once picked an argument with a guy simply because he was wearing a Microsoft t-shirt.

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#42

Post by hef19898 »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #21
hef19898 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember discussions back the day between Linux and Windows proponents. I was clearly in the Windows camp, seeing Linux fans as, well, bizarre sometimes arrogant pseudo programmers. That changed, now that Linux is probably the last OS I can run without a cloud account easily. Heck, I'd even pay for it! Back the day I was a gamer, the main reason why Linux never really was an option. Later for work, it was Windows a…

>Heck, I'd even pay for it! I usually donate to FOSS projects I use since you can't pay for them in the traditional sense but I still want to support the developers. KDE is my favorite thus far.

I'll put it on the list once my Office 365 about expired. Because that Eco system, open source alternatives to MS, Google and so on, are more needed then ever. Or I just started to recognize how important they are.

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#43

Post by nescioquid »

Agingcoder wrote: post #19
kar1181 wrote: post #2

The ancient (read 90s) distros are a lot of fun to play with. Redhat still have a lot of their legacy distributions available and they are installable on vmware. You can learn a heck of a lot with really early distributions. I remember how complicated they seemed at the time but compared to nowadays it's pretty easy to have all the system components in your head at any one time. I spent a week or so upgrading compone…

Yes, I find 90s distros (I started with a strange linux distro called minilinux using an umsdos file system which I would start by typing 'linux' on the dos prompt, then moved on to Slackware 3 and redhat 2 around 1995 if I remember well) to be significantly simpler. Basically, they contain very little, so you can pretty much understand everything . Then, it's the usual 'build on it, get bigger, add complexity' , but…

> Basically, they contain very little, so you can pretty much understand everything .

Slackware (7) mentored me into Linux competence. RedHat was making itself more convenient at the time, but if the system got into a bad state, it was very hard for me to figure out how to correct it.

Slackware setup was more of a chore, but man did I end up an understanding of what was going on! I RTFMed because the M was fantasic. And if something did go wrong, I would usually have some ideas about where to start. That was such a valuable experience.

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#44

Post by hef19898 »

orangepurple wrote: post #40
hef19898 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if that's ever gonna happen. I could imagine, now that Steam tool care of a huge junk of gaming, Office is the main thing keeping a sizable number of people on Windows. Imagine if MS was reduced to MS Excel...

Microsoft is mostly reduced to the Office and Cloud teams. It's likely why the Windows UI is an inconsistent disaster.

Seems reasonable. And to be honest, Teams is good for professional collaboration. And the MS Office suite isn't too bad. I used to be soslo founder until recently, and for that Office 365 was just perfect. No VPN, no really worries about it security. And even pricing was, I'd say, reasonable. Customer service is shit show, so.

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#45

Post by nazgulsenpai »

criddell wrote: post #26
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Heck, I'd even pay for it! I usually donate to FOSS projects I use since you can't pay for them in the traditional sense but I still want to support the developers. KDE is my favorite thus far.

I've always wondered why no Linux app store has risen to prominence? Can one make a living selling their Linux applications to end users?

While I wouldn't quite call it prominence, nor can I imagine you could make a living with it exclusively, elementary OS has something of a Linux app store with their AppCenter. Flipping through the website it seems to offer developers the standard 70/30 split.

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#46

Post by opencl »

criddell wrote: post #26
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Heck, I'd even pay for it! I usually donate to FOSS projects I use since you can't pay for them in the traditional sense but I still want to support the developers. KDE is my favorite thus far.

I've always wondered why no Linux app store has risen to prominence? Can one make a living selling their Linux applications to end users?

It's quite simple, the market for paid end user applications on Linux is tiny. Canonical was saying years ago that they were going to add paid applications to the Snap Store but seemingly never got around to it. Elementary's App Center has integrated payments but they are optional and ~99% of users do not pay anything.

You can certainly make a living selling a cross platform application that supports Linux, but it's probably quite difficult to make much of a living selling Linux-only applications.

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#48

Post by dkarl »

nobleach wrote: post #5

I recall being in a B. Dalton Bookstore in the mid-90's. I picked up a book that had "Linux" on the cover. In the cover it had a floppy disk or two. Something felt very wrong to me. You can't give away an entire operation system! Perhaps this was just some "free for educational purposes" thing? I went home and fired up WebCrawler on AOL and came across Yggdrasil. I had experienced Unix on an SGI system. And I was ver…

In the spirit of "how could I not have known that:" back in college there was a terminal in a room in the physics department basement where I could log in and check my email. Nearby was a bookshelf with a bunch of tattered books that seemed to have been left by former students. Some Asimov, some Douglas Adams, books about Fortran and C, and a book about Unix. Absent-mindedly flipping through those books one day (as one did before one discovered the web) I noticed that the Unix command line prompt looked like what I saw when I logged in to read my mail. Huh. I tried some things from the book, and they worked just like Unix was supposed to. This thing I had been using to check my email all year could do other stuff! That was really cool, but not all that personally useful to me, until I read something in the book that made me realize there was probably a C compiler. There was! Even better, there was a C++ compiler. From then on I was hooked. Programming for me had been a hobby before I came to college, a way of avoiding real work. I had heard of C++ and wanted to learn it, but I had read that the compilers were really expensive, and I was afraid of asking my parents to buy me one. Here was one I could use for free! So naturally I ended up spending a lot of hours writing C++ code in that basement instead of doing my math and physics work, and that's how I acquired the skills that landed me my first job.

As for Linux, there was a CS major in my dorm who installed Linux and BeOS on his PC and did his programming assignments on them, but I never had the courage to do that, because I was afraid that if I screwed up my computer and couldn't immediately fix it, it would mess up my work for other classes. I didn't take that risk until years later, when I no longer had to turn in writing assignments in Microsoft Word format.

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#49

Post by squarefoot »

Ah, Yggdrasil Linux! The Fall 1994 CD has been my first ever contact with the Linux world. I was with some colleagues doing some shopping for my company at that IT store, saw the CD and recalled that some friends on the local BBS (social media? What social media?!?) were praising it, so bought it and that's when it all started. Well, not quite, because the CD was damaged with errors about in the middle of the operation, which was very long, therefore hard to spot, and the installation procedure would continue anyway, so in the end I had a system which was bootable but often gave errors about files missing, this and that. I had no Internet connection back then, so I played with it as much as I could, but in the end had to wait a couple years before finding a perfectly working copy of Red Hat bundled within a magazine, and that became the actual start.
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