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Yes I can agree with you regarding the state of Linux alongside Windows 98 era. KDE 2 was on the scene and GNOME2 was there but it wasn't as polished as the sys

Yes I can agree with you regarding the state of Linux alongside Windows 98 era. KDE 2 was on the scene and GNOME2 was there but it wasn't as polished as the systems are today. Furthermore StarOffice was the office app available (Abiword and Gnumeric and KOffice were very young and struggled with MS Office files as I recall). Konqueror as a web browser didn't really take off or mature until KDE 3 as I recall? Firefox/Firebird was very young, there was no Google Chrome. I think I might have been running Netscape on Linux at this time?? Having said all this, I did enjoy using Linux at this period. It was a fresh new operating system to me. I remember wasting hours of my life using it. All this before .Net, Vala, before Qt was open source. egcs and the gcc fiasco, XFree86 etc. etc.

ajsalminen 10y ago
I don't think GNOME2 was really a part of the Win98 era since it was released almost a year after Windows XP came out. GNOME 1.4 was terrible and the memory requirements of Linux with a desktop environment in general were far and above those of Win9x back then.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Frankly Gnome 1.x was Icaza trying to "virtue signal" his way into the big times. He was a fervent KDE fanboy until he did an about face and starting disparaging KDE over the Qt licensing while pushing a hodgepodge of software under the Gnome moniker. During that whole time he picked up idea after idea from the Windows world (hell, his first program of fame, Midnight Commander, was a straight clone of the DOS program Norton Commander) and rammed them into Gnome. And Now he works for Microsoft, go figure... Thinking about it, i get the feel that Poettering is a rerun of Icaza. Only this time OSX is the source of the "inspiration" rather than Windows. Beyond that it is yet another round of NIH projects and divide and conqueror political rhetoric.
  - 72deluxe 10y ago
    Very informative. Interesting you should mention OSX being the inspiration for Poettering. I always thought GNOME2 and beyond were turning into OSX Snow Leopard (really dumb Nautilus, useless file dialog) and removal of all configurability (and I loved Snow Leopard, sad to see GNOME being a bit simplistic as it was happening though). I did enjoy using Gnumeric so thank Miguel. Also MC is pretty useful when you SSH into a box and want some form of file manager.
- 72deluxe 10y ago
  Ha my memory isn't that great then! Must have been the GNOME 1 I was using. I remember being impressed with the squidgy themes it supported, until using them for 2 days made you switch back to something more conservative.
babuskov 10y ago
KDE 3 was released in 2002, but Firefox, even the 1.0 version was a really good browser. It was so much faster and less resource hungry then netscape / mozilla suite.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Well Firefox basically paired down the suite to just the browser, and also "accelerated" the XUL UI by using native widgets where possible (GTK in the case of Linux, though i think there was some attempts at using Qt as well).

ajsalminen 10y ago

I don't think GNOME2 was really a part of the Win98 era since it was released almost a year after Windows XP came out. GNOME 1.4 was terrible and the memory requirements of Linux with a desktop environment in general were far and above those of Win9x back then.

digi_owl 10y ago
Frankly Gnome 1.x was Icaza trying to "virtue signal" his way into the big times. He was a fervent KDE fanboy until he did an about face and starting disparaging KDE over the Qt licensing while pushing a hodgepodge of software under the Gnome moniker. During that whole time he picked up idea after idea from the Windows world (hell, his first program of fame, Midnight Commander, was a straight clone of the DOS program Norton Commander) and rammed them into Gnome. And Now he works for Microsoft, go figure... Thinking about it, i get the feel that Poettering is a rerun of Icaza. Only this time OSX is the source of the "inspiration" rather than Windows. Beyond that it is yet another round of NIH projects and divide and conqueror political rhetoric.
- 72deluxe 10y ago
  Very informative. Interesting you should mention OSX being the inspiration for Poettering. I always thought GNOME2 and beyond were turning into OSX Snow Leopard (really dumb Nautilus, useless file dialog) and removal of all configurability (and I loved Snow Leopard, sad to see GNOME being a bit simplistic as it was happening though). I did enjoy using Gnumeric so thank Miguel. Also MC is pretty useful when you SSH into a box and want some form of file manager.
72deluxe 10y ago
Ha my memory isn't that great then! Must have been the GNOME 1 I was using. I remember being impressed with the squidgy themes it supported, until using them for 2 days made you switch back to something more conservative.

babuskov 10y ago

KDE 3 was released in 2002, but Firefox, even the 1.0 version was a really good browser. It was so much faster and less resource hungry then netscape / mozilla suite.

digi_owl 10y ago
Well Firefox basically paired down the suite to just the browser, and also "accelerated" the XUL UI by using native widgets where possible (GTK in the case of Linux, though i think there was some attempts at using Qt as well).