Linux

The danger of poorly configuring your XF86Config in a way that could irreparably damage your giant CRT monitor was thrilling.

I started using it before distros were really a thing. I got as far as having something that would boot to a shell, but then since I was 14 I had no idea what I was supposed to do.

Backed off until I bought a Slackware book that came with a CD. Then I had the fun of trying to get X working. Manually entering frequencies for your monitor was scary, because if you got it wrong you could damage the monitor.

Then I had a fun problem of either my modem would work, or my sound card would work, but never both at the same time.

Honestly I never got a system which I could actually use for anything, but I was a kid having fun, and it taught me to not be afraid of the computer.

It wasn't too early, maybe 1997.

I was like 12 or so and I had just installed Linux.

I figured out, from the book I was working with, how to get my windows partition to automaticallyount at boot. Awesome!

I had not been able to figure out how to start "x" though.

So I rebooted into Windows, for on EFnet #linux, and asked around.

Got a command, wrote it down on a slip of paper, and rebooted into Linux.

I should mention, I also hadn't figured out about privileges, or at least why you wouldn't want to run around as root.

Anyway, I started typing in the command that I wrote down: rm -rf /.

I don't have to tell you all, that is not the correct command. The correct command was startx.

After I figured it was taking way too long, I decided to look up what the command does, and then immediately shut down the system.

It was far too late.

There was a similar question a while ago with some nice reads in the answers :)

https://lemmy.ml/post/17575792

My first time trying out Linux was with a bootable CD from a PC gaming magazine. It was Corel Linux. If I recall correctly it booted into KDE.

Unfortunately on my system the mouse cursor was invisible. The mouse worked, I just couldn't see where the cursor was. My brother who was using Linux full time couldn't help me fix it.

Well, I was an Amiga user. That was already unix-like, preemptive multitasking, etc. It was fading fast in the early nineties, and while i was already working in I.T., I was not interrsted in using Windows 3.11 and 95, so I began playing with Slackware Linux. I figured it was a good way to get comfortable with "real" I.T..

I learned Bash and had to compile most of the software i wanted to try. Since, like all programmers, I'm lazy, I wrote some simple scripts to build the code and make them into packages (tgz) for Slackware. This took tedium out of the work, and i could use the packkage manager to install and remove them.

Those were rough days for desktop users, though. I really had to use windows when i needed to pass output to "normies". I tried several window manager and desktops, and eventually landed on Ubuntu.

stacks of diskettes, for every operating system.

would routinely spend hours doing an install only to hit a block and have to reinstall DOS to have modem access to get help on usenet. Then hours of reinstalling to move forward and repeat on another issue.

I really loved it though, it was a massive upgrade over DOS and windows on a 286.

No audio, no WiFi, no well-established communities, sparse software selection, but total freedom on an alternate OS. I tried it out in the late 90s with Red Hat, left, came back about 5 years later in the early 2000s and stayed forever. SuSE 9.2 was amazing.

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.

Before modularized kernels became the standard I was constantly rerunning “make menuconfig” and recompiling to try different options, or more likely adding something critical back in :-D

Spent a week getting the audio driver to work so I could finally figure out how to properly pronounce “Linux…” and I still couldn’t.

Spent like $50 on floppy disks and like 2 days labeling them by hand before printing out the 20 pages of instructions, formatting my hard drive and installing Slackware. Realized I didn’t actually know any unix commands. Paged a friend.

LI

Clumsy. Manual. No multimedia support really. Compiling everything on 486 machines took hours.

Can't say I look back fondly on it.

BeOS community was fucking awesome though. That felt like the cutting edge at the time.

All my homies who were into it were like “everything is free you just have to compile it yourself”

And I was like “sounds good but I cannot”

Then all the cool distros got mature and feature laden.

If you were a competent computer scientist it was rad.

If you were a dummy like me who just wanted to play star craft and doom you wasted a lot of time and ended up reinstalling windows.

Alrighty, old Linux user from the earliest of days.

It was fun, really great to have one-on-one with Linus when Lilo gave issues with the graphic card and the screen kept blank during booting.

It was new, few fellow students where interested, but the few that did, all have serious jobs in IT right know.

Probably the mindset and the drive to test out new stuff, combined with the power Linux gave.

You got it from a friend on a pile of slackware and floppies labeled various letters. It felt amazing and fresh, everything you could need was just a floppy away.

Then we got Gentoo and suddenly it was fun to wait 4 days to compile your kernel.