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.
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!