For those veteran linux people, what was it like back in 90s? I did see and hear of Unix systems being available for use but I did not see much apart from old versions of Debian in use.
Were they prominent in education like universities? Was it mainly a hobbyist thing at the time compared to the business needs of 98, 95 and classic mac?
I ask this because I found out that some PC games I owned were apparently also on Linux even in CD format from a firm named Loki.
This. However from about the release of knoppix and ubuntu things started looking and feeling a lot more like they are today. – I credit that to Knoppix for X & filesystem work and Ubuntu for setup and everything desktop.
So even though late 90s it was tough, it was nothing like mid 90s. But by around 2004-2005ish the install and setup was substantially easier however the reputational damage still exists to today.
I remember spending a lot of time in XFree86 config files, re-configuring it trying to figure out what works best on my monitor, and then the migration to XOrg. All good times.
There was however a substantial amount of hype around Linux. It wasn’t quite what it is with AI. But you couldn’t read a magazine without encountering it in some way, but it was the type of hype were everyone knew of it but few people had anything to do with it.
Another thing that hadn’t been mentioned is that there was a new distribution cropping up every day or so. (It felt like at least.) But this seems to back up that statement: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg
