5 ms·

This is why the world needs Linux.

pseudosavant 3y ago
I would bet $50 that it is easier to install Windows XP with an activation 'hack' than it would be to install most Linux distros from 2001. We are talking RedHat Linux 7 (not RHEL) running a Linux 2.2 kernel. Most Linux 'reviews' back then were basically a review on how easy (or more likely, hard) it is to install. Most distros installers faired pretty poorly back then. I succeeded in getting RedHat 7 installed, but could never get Slackware or SUSE to successfully install.
- dtx1 3y ago
  Yeah but Suse linux existed
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    And CentOS 4.5 (okay that was 2007 but we had both OS running at the same time - mostly because we weren't getting anywhere near Vista [2006]).
  - rootsudo 3y ago
    Mandrake was pretty easy, and even SCO UNIX (not GNU/Linux) had an release - grub worked, fat32/fat16 partitioning was possible and there was previous NTFS windows releases, NT 3.5/4 and 2000 that facilitated it. They all had GUI interactive installers, and had floppy boot disks to boot (too!)
    - gattilorenz 3y ago
      SCO Unix[1] didn’t have a GUI installer. Interactive it was, but only TUI, and generally more challenging than the classic TUI Debian installer - especially if you want to dual boot! Mandrake (9.2 is the version I used the most) was very nice, the GUI installer looked very polished, had nice explanations and package selection was done by answering “what are you going to use this computer for?”. A TUI installer was available as a safe option too. [1] At that time you are in SCO OpenServer territory, SCO UNIX is OLD, but the same applies to OpenServer 5 and 6. It might have been UnixWare (which I only installed once, no memories of it) or maybe SCO Linux (oh, the irony!)
  - hulitu 3y ago
    Oh Suse,where the disk partitioning program had a bug with displaying the partition size in Mebibytes and actually using Megabytes. Tough times.
- cellularmitosis 3y ago
  WinLinux 2000 (the first distro I ever installed) was a pretty painless experience. It installed as a Windows "app" which rebooted into Linux, and used UMSDOS to share a single filesystem.
- klodolph 3y ago
  If you're comparing RedHat Linux 7 against Windows XP, you're thinking in terms of the release date of XP. Windows XP was not very good when it came out, and it wasn't until it got the service packs. So if you're going to start with something like Windows XP service pack 3, meaning that you were someone who didn't jump straight to Vista (I'll be a Vista apologist, but people were being reasonable when they didn't jump from XP), at that point, you're comparing it to Linux distros of 2008. That would be something like Fedora 8, Ubuntu 8, or Debian 4. This was the GNOME 2 era and it was a pretty damn smooth experience. If you're thinking a bit deeper in terms of user experience for the early, early 2000s, then you would probably put FreeBSD high up on your list rather than treating Linux as an assumption.
- jdwithit 3y ago
  I vaguely remember trying to install Gentoo back in the early 2000s. It took more than 24 hours and eventually failed with an inscrutable C compilation failure in some random package. That was quite the eye opening experience. Certainly gave me an appreciation for the relative polish of Red Hat and other packaged distros, despite their warts.
- optymizer 3y ago
  You couldn't get Slackware or SuSE to install ... ever? or recently?
- em-bee 3y ago
  that is missing the point. people want to use windows XP in order to run old software that doesn't run on newer systems. (or because they are nostalgic, but those are not helped with linux, so we can ignore them) a modern linux distribution is way more likely to run old linux and windows software than a modern windows version. hence that's why the world needs linux, because it doesn't have the problems that windows upgrades have. you may argue that new linux distributions don't have old libraries either, which is true, but getting older libraries to install and run is way easier than on windows. and it's possible to put an old linux binary (even one for which there is no source) into an environment and make it workable on a modern linux distribution, and with things like flatpak it is also possible to make such an environment easily installable for a non-technical end user. getting old windows binaries to run is even easier because that's exactly how wine works.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    My daily driver now is a Windows 11 Alder Lake desktop that I assembled last year, but I still keep my prior machines in working order because neither virtualization nor emulation can hold a candle to execution on real, physical hardware. Specifically said prior machines are: * A Windows 7 Sandy Bridge desktop. * A Windows XP Pentium 4 Northwood desktop. * A Windows 98SE Pentium 2 laptop, with a Yamaha XG MIDI sound card. Microsoft and Windows are downright legendary with their commitment to backwards compatibility, but that becomes even better with access to many versions of Windows and the hardware of their times. Linux would not satisfy my needs and desires in any of my machines, let alone my daily driver. I don't have the time nor desire to faff around with dependency hell and terminal voodoo and maybe get something that half-works (which will immediately bork to a stiff breeze) when Windows instead will Just Always Work(tm) and get me going.
    - em-bee 3y ago
      you are right of course. if it works, it works, and most times it does. i am specifically talking about those that still use XP because it doesn't work. those cases are few, mostly badly written games i guess. i am curious what kind of programs you still run on those old machines. linux may not satisfy your needs, but not everyone can afford to keep old machines around like you do. and those stories of dependency hell and terminal voodoo are corner cases on linux just as much as they are on windows. especially if someone is going to set up a linux machine specifically to run old windows programs in wine then they most certainly will not run into any such issues. most cases of dependency hell on linux are likely caused by inexperienced users who follow bad advice to install software from the wrong version or a different distribution. don't do that if you don't know how to do it without causing problems.
- omoikane 3y ago
  I recall installing linux wasn't the difficult part, it's getting your peripherals to work after that.
- bombcar 3y ago
  IIRC Linux installed pretty well, as long as you were dedicating the whole drive to it. It was dual booting that would get you every time.
- activiation 3y ago
  I used to install Slackware with a bunch of floppies... I think it was easier then Arch today (although I can do both)
  - em-bee 3y ago
    if you have been installing linux since the early floppy days, sure, by 2000 it was easy. i was there too and i don't remember any problems either. but those new to linux at the time were likely having more difficulties than us grumpy old geeks.
- thsksbd 3y ago
  I remember trying to get red hat 5 installed. Epic fail. By 2002 I managed to get some district installed, but all I accomplished was having my distro eat my lab report (umount? Wtf?). I didn't really get into Linux until grad school, and then only because i had to use an SGI daily
- asveikau 3y ago
  Linux 2.4 released in January 2001. I remember circa 2004 I set up my non technical brother with one of the earliest versions of Ubuntu, after he kept getting malware on XP, and he didn't have difficulty with it. I was kind of surprised how easy it was. I was a debian and OpenBSD user at the time.
- phatbyte 3y ago
  Never had problems installing any major Linux dist, but 15 years ago I still remember the boring and time consuming on patching the kernel with custom patches so that my wi-fi card or gfx card could work. I stopped trying to use Linux as a desktop OS since then. But recently I tried for fun installing Ubuntu and everything just worked out of the box. I still feel Linux is too fragmented, too many package managers, too many UI managers etc...but that's part of the beauty of it I guess.
- neilv 3y ago
  For people unfamiliar with that era, here's a 1999 installation procedure for Red Hat 6 for a specific site (university lab), including configuring for their particular infrastructure setup (directory service, network filesystem including automounting, email, printing, clock-syncing): https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  My first Linux was Caldera OpenLinux 2.3[0] in 1999 that i got from a magazine and even at that time the installer was literally a "wizard" where you typed a few things like username, password, etc, selected which graphics card and monitor you have, what you wanted to install (full install ~1GB) in a series of Next, Next, Next, Done. It even had a tetris game you could play while waiting for the packages to be copied in the background. As a kid at the time i installed it on pretty much any PC i could get my hands on - my own, relatives, friends, etc, nobody was safe :-P though they found it interesting anyway since it was chock full of applications and games to play around - and i don't remember ever having issues. I tried it recently in 86box (which emulates old PCs) and it worked as good as i remember. Though in a way it was probably an exceptional case, IMO that CD was basically the best well-put together distro (especially when you consider that KDE was basically beta software at the time). [0] https://archive.org/details/OpenLinux2.3CD https://archive.org/details/OpenLinux2.3CD
- m463 3y ago
  I vaguely recall installs back then revolved around choosing compatible hardware more than anything else.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  windows XP wasn't easier to install, especially if you had some hardware (scsi hard drives) that required providing a floppy for the drivers. On linux it is and has always been about choosing hardware that is supported out of the box. Slackware wasn't particularly difficult to install, it was regular step by step based and the defaults were sane. What made it difficult to people was trying to setup a dual boot without deleting their precious data.
- ForOldHack 3y ago
  FYI: XP installed on my 700mhz Athlon, clock chipped to 950. Redhat was hard, Slackware was an absolute nightmare. Gentoo took weeks. We recompiled everything and discovered that Intel does not create good amd binaries. Never went back to Linux on the back burner for 8 years on an Intel. Microsoft wants your money and your loyalty. I have yet to discover what Linux geeks want except for you to join them in some weird reality distortion field. Two iMacs. One with Mint and one with Ubuntoo. Both just literally crawl. Alpine is so much faster, and we are gaining speed by hook and crook.
danjoredd 3y ago
I love Linux as much as the next nerd...but Linux was notorious in the early 2000s. Also this is about using Windows XP for the sake of using Windows XP.
rejectfinite 3y ago
This is about using Windows XP because it is Windows XP. Maybe we like it.

I would bet $50 that it is easier to install Windows XP with an activation 'hack' than it would be to install most Linux distros from 2001. We are talking RedHat Linux 7 (not RHEL) running a Linux 2.2 kernel. Most Linux 'reviews' back then were basically a review on how easy (or more likely, hard) it is to install. Most distros installers faired pretty poorly back then. I succeeded in getting RedHat 7 installed, but could never get Slackware or SUSE to successfully install.

dtx1 3y ago
Yeah but Suse linux existed
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  And CentOS 4.5 (okay that was 2007 but we had both OS running at the same time - mostly because we weren't getting anywhere near Vista [2006]).
- rootsudo 3y ago
  Mandrake was pretty easy, and even SCO UNIX (not GNU/Linux) had an release - grub worked, fat32/fat16 partitioning was possible and there was previous NTFS windows releases, NT 3.5/4 and 2000 that facilitated it. They all had GUI interactive installers, and had floppy boot disks to boot (too!)
  - gattilorenz 3y ago
    SCO Unix[1] didn’t have a GUI installer. Interactive it was, but only TUI, and generally more challenging than the classic TUI Debian installer - especially if you want to dual boot! Mandrake (9.2 is the version I used the most) was very nice, the GUI installer looked very polished, had nice explanations and package selection was done by answering “what are you going to use this computer for?”. A TUI installer was available as a safe option too. [1] At that time you are in SCO OpenServer territory, SCO UNIX is OLD, but the same applies to OpenServer 5 and 6. It might have been UnixWare (which I only installed once, no memories of it) or maybe SCO Linux (oh, the irony!)
- hulitu 3y ago
  Oh Suse,where the disk partitioning program had a bug with displaying the partition size in Mebibytes and actually using Megabytes. Tough times.
cellularmitosis 3y ago
WinLinux 2000 (the first distro I ever installed) was a pretty painless experience. It installed as a Windows "app" which rebooted into Linux, and used UMSDOS to share a single filesystem.
klodolph 3y ago
If you're comparing RedHat Linux 7 against Windows XP, you're thinking in terms of the release date of XP. Windows XP was not very good when it came out, and it wasn't until it got the service packs. So if you're going to start with something like Windows XP service pack 3, meaning that you were someone who didn't jump straight to Vista (I'll be a Vista apologist, but people were being reasonable when they didn't jump from XP), at that point, you're comparing it to Linux distros of 2008. That would be something like Fedora 8, Ubuntu 8, or Debian 4. This was the GNOME 2 era and it was a pretty damn smooth experience. If you're thinking a bit deeper in terms of user experience for the early, early 2000s, then you would probably put FreeBSD high up on your list rather than treating Linux as an assumption.
jdwithit 3y ago
I vaguely remember trying to install Gentoo back in the early 2000s. It took more than 24 hours and eventually failed with an inscrutable C compilation failure in some random package. That was quite the eye opening experience. Certainly gave me an appreciation for the relative polish of Red Hat and other packaged distros, despite their warts.
optymizer 3y ago
You couldn't get Slackware or SuSE to install ... ever? or recently?
em-bee 3y ago
that is missing the point. people want to use windows XP in order to run old software that doesn't run on newer systems. (or because they are nostalgic, but those are not helped with linux, so we can ignore them) a modern linux distribution is way more likely to run old linux and windows software than a modern windows version. hence that's why the world needs linux, because it doesn't have the problems that windows upgrades have. you may argue that new linux distributions don't have old libraries either, which is true, but getting older libraries to install and run is way easier than on windows. and it's possible to put an old linux binary (even one for which there is no source) into an environment and make it workable on a modern linux distribution, and with things like flatpak it is also possible to make such an environment easily installable for a non-technical end user. getting old windows binaries to run is even easier because that's exactly how wine works.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  My daily driver now is a Windows 11 Alder Lake desktop that I assembled last year, but I still keep my prior machines in working order because neither virtualization nor emulation can hold a candle to execution on real, physical hardware. Specifically said prior machines are: * A Windows 7 Sandy Bridge desktop. * A Windows XP Pentium 4 Northwood desktop. * A Windows 98SE Pentium 2 laptop, with a Yamaha XG MIDI sound card. Microsoft and Windows are downright legendary with their commitment to backwards compatibility, but that becomes even better with access to many versions of Windows and the hardware of their times. Linux would not satisfy my needs and desires in any of my machines, let alone my daily driver. I don't have the time nor desire to faff around with dependency hell and terminal voodoo and maybe get something that half-works (which will immediately bork to a stiff breeze) when Windows instead will Just Always Work(tm) and get me going.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    you are right of course. if it works, it works, and most times it does. i am specifically talking about those that still use XP because it doesn't work. those cases are few, mostly badly written games i guess. i am curious what kind of programs you still run on those old machines. linux may not satisfy your needs, but not everyone can afford to keep old machines around like you do. and those stories of dependency hell and terminal voodoo are corner cases on linux just as much as they are on windows. especially if someone is going to set up a linux machine specifically to run old windows programs in wine then they most certainly will not run into any such issues. most cases of dependency hell on linux are likely caused by inexperienced users who follow bad advice to install software from the wrong version or a different distribution. don't do that if you don't know how to do it without causing problems.
omoikane 3y ago
I recall installing linux wasn't the difficult part, it's getting your peripherals to work after that.
bombcar 3y ago
IIRC Linux installed pretty well, as long as you were dedicating the whole drive to it. It was dual booting that would get you every time.
activiation 3y ago
I used to install Slackware with a bunch of floppies... I think it was easier then Arch today (although I can do both)
- em-bee 3y ago
  if you have been installing linux since the early floppy days, sure, by 2000 it was easy. i was there too and i don't remember any problems either. but those new to linux at the time were likely having more difficulties than us grumpy old geeks.
thsksbd 3y ago
I remember trying to get red hat 5 installed. Epic fail. By 2002 I managed to get some district installed, but all I accomplished was having my distro eat my lab report (umount? Wtf?). I didn't really get into Linux until grad school, and then only because i had to use an SGI daily
asveikau 3y ago
Linux 2.4 released in January 2001. I remember circa 2004 I set up my non technical brother with one of the earliest versions of Ubuntu, after he kept getting malware on XP, and he didn't have difficulty with it. I was kind of surprised how easy it was. I was a debian and OpenBSD user at the time.
phatbyte 3y ago
Never had problems installing any major Linux dist, but 15 years ago I still remember the boring and time consuming on patching the kernel with custom patches so that my wi-fi card or gfx card could work. I stopped trying to use Linux as a desktop OS since then. But recently I tried for fun installing Ubuntu and everything just worked out of the box. I still feel Linux is too fragmented, too many package managers, too many UI managers etc...but that's part of the beauty of it I guess.
neilv 3y ago
For people unfamiliar with that era, here's a 1999 installation procedure for Red Hat 6 for a specific site (university lab), including configuring for their particular infrastructure setup (directory service, network filesystem including automounting, email, printing, clock-syncing): https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/
badsectoracula 3y ago
My first Linux was Caldera OpenLinux 2.3[0] in 1999 that i got from a magazine and even at that time the installer was literally a "wizard" where you typed a few things like username, password, etc, selected which graphics card and monitor you have, what you wanted to install (full install ~1GB) in a series of Next, Next, Next, Done. It even had a tetris game you could play while waiting for the packages to be copied in the background. As a kid at the time i installed it on pretty much any PC i could get my hands on - my own, relatives, friends, etc, nobody was safe :-P though they found it interesting anyway since it was chock full of applications and games to play around - and i don't remember ever having issues. I tried it recently in 86box (which emulates old PCs) and it worked as good as i remember. Though in a way it was probably an exceptional case, IMO that CD was basically the best well-put together distro (especially when you consider that KDE was basically beta software at the time). [0] https://archive.org/details/OpenLinux2.3CD https://archive.org/details/OpenLinux2.3CD
m463 3y ago
I vaguely recall installs back then revolved around choosing compatible hardware more than anything else.
prmoustache 3y ago
windows XP wasn't easier to install, especially if you had some hardware (scsi hard drives) that required providing a floppy for the drivers. On linux it is and has always been about choosing hardware that is supported out of the box. Slackware wasn't particularly difficult to install, it was regular step by step based and the defaults were sane. What made it difficult to people was trying to setup a dual boot without deleting their precious data.
ForOldHack 3y ago
FYI: XP installed on my 700mhz Athlon, clock chipped to 950. Redhat was hard, Slackware was an absolute nightmare. Gentoo took weeks. We recompiled everything and discovered that Intel does not create good amd binaries. Never went back to Linux on the back burner for 8 years on an Intel. Microsoft wants your money and your loyalty. I have yet to discover what Linux geeks want except for you to join them in some weird reality distortion field. Two iMacs. One with Mint and one with Ubuntoo. Both just literally crawl. Alpine is so much faster, and we are gaining speed by hook and crook.

danjoredd 3y ago

I love Linux as much as the next nerd...but Linux was notorious in the early 2000s. Also this is about using Windows XP for the sake of using Windows XP.

rejectfinite 3y ago

This is about using Windows XP because it is Windows XP. Maybe we like it.