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That was an interesting article to read. I have many fond memories of the very early days of Freshmeat and my introduction to OSS and Linux. Freshmeat helped pe
by jimwalsh 12y ago
That was an interesting article to read. I have many fond memories of the very early days of Freshmeat and my introduction to OSS and Linux. Freshmeat helped people share their products and was a great place to find new and upcoming projects to check out or even help on.
I feel like the late 90s was such a Wild West time for Linux. Linux is in a great spot now, best it has ever been, but for whatever reason the community just feels incredibly different for me now. It's probably just me aging.
- jcd748 12y agoThere was definitely a feel of do-it-yourself, especially when installing Linux meant either wiping a partition, or trying to resize an existing one with very primitive tools. I remember using a weird variant called DOSLinux for a while, because my 486 couldn't handle the "real" distros, and then getting a new 350MHz machine and getting RedHat 6 installed. Then realizing I could use X, spending endless hours on themes.net, tweaking WindowMaker and finding new themes, and doing the Web 1.0 by learning perl to write a simple blogging engine. You're right, though. Different times, and the community feels very different. The feel I get when I'm browsing web forums for answers to questions is a lot of kids who use Linux because it's somehow "cool", and certainly it's ridiculously easy to install these days. But I might just be making assumptions based on the terrible grammar and incomplete sentences.