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Linux wasn't mass market ready back then. So much hardware was unsupported, or extremely difficult to get working. Multimedia support was severely lacking, wi

Linux wasn't mass market ready back then. So much hardware was unsupported, or extremely difficult to get working. Multimedia support was severely lacking, with XAnim the only video playback option, which worked with few formats and very poorly. It wasn't until after 2000 when avifile and MPlayer came out that there was even the start of something. Office applications were an even worse state. You could write documents in Netscape Composer, but spreadsheets were a text-only affair. Some were starting to come out, but there was no clear direction. Sun really had a huge positive impact buying StarOffice and releasing it as open source, giving the community one largely complete Office suite to focus efforts on. I don't see the reason for the distro hopping, though. Nothing wrong with sticking with Slackware through to today. I don't, because work skews heavily towards Redhat, and managing one platform is complex enough.

salamandersauce 5y ago
Even before Sun open-sourced StarOffice or even bought StarDivision you could get StarOffice for Linux with v. 3.1. The same time period also saw Corel WordPerfect officially supported and running on Linux.
- axiolite 5y ago
  Corel was much too late in releasing their full Office suite. StarOffice was free by then. Even WordPerfect didn't have too much lead time over open source projects like AbiWord which were getting popular in the late 90s. Looks like StarOffice for Linux didn't exist until version 3.1 was released in 1997. That's more than 2 years for someone to be running Linux (instead of Windows 95) without an office suite available. And more importantly, I didn't buy it at the time because I'd never damn well heard of it. They must have had a terrible lack of notability in the English speaking world. And in a couple more years, Sun made it free. Once open sourced, it was obviously the way to go, instead of being an also-ran.

salamandersauce 5y ago

Even before Sun open-sourced StarOffice or even bought StarDivision you could get StarOffice for Linux with v. 3.1. The same time period also saw Corel WordPerfect officially supported and running on Linux.

axiolite 5y ago
Corel was much too late in releasing their full Office suite. StarOffice was free by then. Even WordPerfect didn't have too much lead time over open source projects like AbiWord which were getting popular in the late 90s. Looks like StarOffice for Linux didn't exist until version 3.1 was released in 1997. That's more than 2 years for someone to be running Linux (instead of Windows 95) without an office suite available. And more importantly, I didn't buy it at the time because I'd never damn well heard of it. They must have had a terrible lack of notability in the English speaking world. And in a couple more years, Sun made it free. Once open sourced, it was obviously the way to go, instead of being an also-ran.