this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Back in what day? My first Linux was in the early 2000s, and even back then it wasn't any more complicated than a Windows install.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

In the early 2000s getting things like wifi drivers working was a pain in the ass sometimes. It was definitely more difficult

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 day ago (1 children)

When I installed Linux for the first time around that time frame, I had to write X configs (for XFree86, not X.org) by hand. And be sure to get your monitor timings exactly right or risk permanent damage, said the scary warning.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

That was always 'fun'. Trying to find things like the 'front porch' timings was an exercise in frustration at times. Then put it all together and try it, hoping it either worked, or at least didn't go too badly. The 'boiinng' noise sone monitors would make was always a bit alarming.

I ended up soldering together an adapter to convert from VGA to a monitor that took separate red, green and blue inputs with a sync pulse on green. Working out the timings for that was interesting, but I doubt any other PC OS could have driven it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (2 children)

The mid 1990s for me, OpenBSD came out in 1996 and Solaris was Solaris was like 1992. I was admining a Solaris SPARC station back around 1997 that had a gnarly install if I remember correctly. It was on 3.5” floppies and I still have that SPARC station and the original Solaris OS sitting in the basement collecting dust. At one point that SPARC was being used by some of us working with the PHP group to diagnose file system limits on Solaris and build PHP binaries back when I was involved in PHP development. Fun times.

My first Linux install was like Red Hat 5.2 or something and it was much nicer.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

It's absolutely insane how much progress was made from 1995-2000.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Oh man. I remember Solaris. I tried to install that on something and never got it running.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

Bah! Young'un! ;) Installing Slackware off of a stack of 5 1/4" floppies and trying to work out your harddrive's geometry without switching the machine off to look at the label was a challenge. Doubly so if you were trying to dual boot.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Lemmites are old brah

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

my first linux install was on a 486 from a box of floppies we got at a computer convention in the late 90s. Back then you had to do all sorts of crazy setup steps like figuring out drive layouts and screen frequencies. It was craziness but when you're 13 and want to tinker with computers that's what you did.