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Linux was horrendous on PCs in 1995. First of all, OP is talking about hardware support: switching OSs doesn't give you a copper, or a soundcard with four voice

Linux was horrendous on PCs in 1995. First of all, OP is talking about hardware support: switching OSs doesn't give you a copper, or a soundcard with four voice wavetable synthesis. Linux was slightly convenient on PC in 1995 if you really cared about: (1) a basically Unix-y userland, with all the good and bad that implies. Shells and stuff worked better than cygwin (2) tcp stack (3) gcc That's really it. X was a fucking nightmare to get to work "correctly" and then, as now, "correctly" on X means "it handles a remote networking case no one cares about better than the alternatives but still poorly, and everything else about it is totally broken." Hardware support for every feature that was becoming interesting in PCs in 1995 (basically anything where economies of scale were making interesting stuff cheap) was absolutely terrible on Linux. Drivers for PC hardware, even the kind of PC hardware nerds liked (SCSI CD-ROM drives) were super flaky or non-existent. Application software was horrendous. There was no support at all for anything that still had a licensing regime around codecs, which, at the time included all the media software. Linux was "quite good" in that you could set it up in a corner of your house and run httpd. That was dope in 1995. But compared to Amiga as a user-facing hacking desktop, it sucked shit. Hell, it sucked shit compared to a PC running Windows or a Mac. Seriously, find a 486SX/25 w/ 4MB ram, a 160MB disk, a decent modem, and an S3 video card and put like, Yggdrasil on it. It will be way less fun to fuck around w/ than an old Amiga/Mac/NeXT/BeBox/SGI....at least in 1995 an Intel machine running DOS could run DOOM. It's probably the least-fun hardware/os combo from 1995 you could dredge up to play with.

zurn 11y ago
If you got the best supported video card and best supported sound card etc (like I said, built the PC with Linux in mind), they worked. It wasn't for everyone, it wasn't polished but I thought it was awesome to have your own graphical Unix box and be connected to the community building Linux. I had a lot of fun. You could browse the web, listen to mp3s (if you had a 100 MHz 486), learn Emacs and Perl and Python and C, get to know how everything on the Internet worked including security aspects by playing with all the server software. All this for free and on cheap hardware. The old 1995 Linux box is less interesting to play with than the stuff in your list because all the stuff in your list became extinct and aren't just retarded versions of their modern incarnations.
vidarh 11y ago
In 95, I ran X on 486's w/16MB RAM, and an Amiga 3000 with a Picasso II and an Apollo (?) accelerator. While I still held on to the Amiga 3000 and loved it, I don't agree Linux was that painful hen. And of course it would be worse than BeBox, SGI, NeXT. SGI and NeXT were high end work stations (or above). We had SGI Indy's at uni that they'd gotten at near cost from the distributor at about 3x the cost of the my souped up Amiga 3000... BeBox was a PPC SMP box - it was where many of us had hoped the Amiga was headed. I held on to the Amiga 3000 for 2-3 more years, but mostly out of loyalty and nostalgia at that point. I still loved (and love) the OS, but already in '95 it was on borrowed time and it cost a fortune to tack on enough third party add ons to make it viable. And the lack of software was becoming a problem - a colleague and I even spoke o Escom at the time about writing a browser for them, because the available Amiga web browsers were already then lagging behind he times. And in '95 people did care about the "remote networking case no one cares about". At university, we also had old Sun servers that served up apps for dozens of dumb X11 terminals each. At work, by '96 5 of us ran all our applications off a single 120MHz Pentium w/128MB RAM, using our 486's as terminals.

zurn 11y ago

If you got the best supported video card and best supported sound card etc (like I said, built the PC with Linux in mind), they worked. It wasn't for everyone, it wasn't polished but I thought it was awesome to have your own graphical Unix box and be connected to the community building Linux. I had a lot of fun. You could browse the web, listen to mp3s (if you had a 100 MHz 486), learn Emacs and Perl and Python and C, get to know how everything on the Internet worked including security aspects by playing with all the server software. All this for free and on cheap hardware. The old 1995 Linux box is less interesting to play with than the stuff in your list because all the stuff in your list became extinct and aren't just retarded versions of their modern incarnations.

vidarh 11y ago

In 95, I ran X on 486's w/16MB RAM, and an Amiga 3000 with a Picasso II and an Apollo (?) accelerator. While I still held on to the Amiga 3000 and loved it, I don't agree Linux was that painful hen. And of course it would be worse than BeBox, SGI, NeXT. SGI and NeXT were high end work stations (or above). We had SGI Indy's at uni that they'd gotten at near cost from the distributor at about 3x the cost of the my souped up Amiga 3000... BeBox was a PPC SMP box - it was where many of us had hoped the Amiga was headed. I held on to the Amiga 3000 for 2-3 more years, but mostly out of loyalty and nostalgia at that point. I still loved (and love) the OS, but already in '95 it was on borrowed time and it cost a fortune to tack on enough third party add ons to make it viable. And the lack of software was becoming a problem - a colleague and I even spoke o Escom at the time about writing a browser for them, because the available Amiga web browsers were already then lagging behind he times. And in '95 people did care about the "remote networking case no one cares about". At university, we also had old Sun servers that served up apps for dozens of dumb X11 terminals each. At work, by '96 5 of us ran all our applications off a single 120MHz Pentium w/128MB RAM, using our 486's as terminals.