Ooh damn. Mandrake was my first distro, I remember being sooo excited when the CDs came in the mail. It was I think 4 discs?

The experience was absolutely not good lol. At the time I only had one computer (some eMachines something or other) and a 56k line that only went to 14400 or 2600 baud depending on the weather. My NIC wasn't supported and after some banging my head on the desk I ended up going back to windows 98se after a few days because it was the family computer I messed up and caught sooo much flak for wiping.

Returned some years later when it was called Mandriva and had a better experience with a custom built AMD machine. The eMachines machine by then was still around as a network file server running a flavour of BSD that served media to my OG xbox played through XBMC (now Kodi).

Great post OP and thanks for the trip down memory lane!

Gimp's mascot is in some kind of hard drugs in that icon

Multiple desktops, 1999. What an amazing feature.

A quick web search suggests that macOS (then OS X) got this in 2007 ("Spaces"), and Windows not until 2015.

This alone makes this GUI more functional IMHO.

Xkill... Now that's a name I havent heard in a long time :-)

Old KDE was great. So is new KDE though

Peak UI

I remember this! I'm French and remember reading Mandrake comics, so when Mandrake Linux came I needed to install it!

i want those icons back

Netscape ♥️

Now that's a flashback that works for me

Do you have the isos? I want to try this again

Jesus, UI design was terrible back then. I'm not talking about technical limitations, I don't need fancy transparency effects or something like that, but I'm sure that you could come up with something much better using the old UI libraries as long as you follow modern design principles.

Hey, where do you find the ISOs for these old distros?

Seeing all these makes me wish for a classic Linux de that just gives you all of that again