The early days were tough on some of us PC power users who were itching to try Linux.
I won a copy of Red Hat at a Unix User Group meeting, felt positively drunk with power all the way home...and never got it to start X. A few friends tried getting it to work, no go. Then I bought Mandrake at CompUSA. Same result.
I tried installing again, and it was infuriating watching all those icon files getting copied over, with a gut feeling that the result would be the same.
(Have you ever felt that eagerness, watching hundreds of icon names scroll by, and imagining how cool they would look on YOUR (hacker) screen? Holy smokes.)
So that sucked--nothing worked, no X, just a command line and I didn't feel I had the preparation to work with it, nor did I really understand that I could do most of my work on the command line if I wanted to.
Eventually, about a year later, I tried the Knoppix Live CD and somehow it shipped with the right modelines for things to just work. Why didn't anyone know to check my modelines?! I could have had X working for years. Stupid modelines...
After that, Ubuntu came out, and it also Just Worked for me, and Shuttleworth had rendered POV-Ray code in space, with even the resulting art showing this unique community effort. I started an online community for my favorite FOSS project, and it all felt like some kind of amazing global village. Depending on where you go, the same community vibe is still there in various places...
Pretty soon Textpattern and WordPress and Joomla also made it worthwhile to move away from Flash for the web, and boom--my media & web business could be built and maintained using Linux server and desktop platforms.
Ha! Me too! I thought I was the only one. I remember that whatever release it was had a bunch of problems because it was the first version not based entirely on Red Hat and that they rushed the release of the next version to fix all the issues. So my purchased boxed copy ended up being both buggy and only relevant for like 6 months.
I think I switched to FreeBSD for a while after that.
I bought Mandrake online I think around early 2000's (for love of god, I can't remember how/which website). Everything worked (for realistic definition of "everything" in those days when it came to Linux). It was the most polished of the few distributions I experienced (until Ubuntu Dapper Drake came along much later and basically blew me away).
I won a copy of Red Hat at a Unix User Group meeting, felt positively drunk with power all the way home...and never got it to start X. A few friends tried getting it to work, no go. Then I bought Mandrake at CompUSA. Same result.
I tried installing again, and it was infuriating watching all those icon files getting copied over, with a gut feeling that the result would be the same.
(Have you ever felt that eagerness, watching hundreds of icon names scroll by, and imagining how cool they would look on YOUR (hacker) screen? Holy smokes.)
So that sucked--nothing worked, no X, just a command line and I didn't feel I had the preparation to work with it, nor did I really understand that I could do most of my work on the command line if I wanted to.
Eventually, about a year later, I tried the Knoppix Live CD and somehow it shipped with the right modelines for things to just work. Why didn't anyone know to check my modelines?! I could have had X working for years. Stupid modelines...
After that, Ubuntu came out, and it also Just Worked for me, and Shuttleworth had rendered POV-Ray code in space, with even the resulting art showing this unique community effort. I started an online community for my favorite FOSS project, and it all felt like some kind of amazing global village. Depending on where you go, the same community vibe is still there in various places...
Pretty soon Textpattern and WordPress and Joomla also made it worthwhile to move away from Flash for the web, and boom--my media & web business could be built and maintained using Linux server and desktop platforms.
Congrats to the Linux community.