This was my first exposure to Linux - one of the PCs in high school had it installed. (I had read about Linux before then, but not had a chance to try it)
It had a little foam Tux in the box, and I got to keep it:
The only flaw in Corel’s logic was that as soon as you’re running Linux, you lose all desire to run WordPerfect, and develop an irresistible need to align yourself with vim or emacs…
Logged into GUI as root 🤣
The 90’s was a wild time…
Specially for people coming from windows, this was normal. The appeal of mandrake and corel and suse was this kind of graphical control panel à la windows where you needed root privileges in a graphical interface.
I myself didn’t learn about sudo until years later, and su just from debian 3.0.
It was a serious issue back then. People were wandering around on the Internet with root accounts. A lot of #linux IRC channels were kicking&banning anyone with “~root” or “root” ident with educational sentence like “Do not use root account as your ordinary account, check instructions”. We don’t see the issue widespread today since distros did very good intended “dark patterns” to push users to regular user accounts. Linux (or UNIX) “root” account is true god mode. E.g. infamous “rm” as root joke (!) could even affect Windows running WSL2, so MS had to implement special workarounds.
WSL has no direct connection to the host file system. WSL’s drives are virtualized. Which is a real fuckin peach when you just want to copy things to and fro and end up discovering this 😅
Anyone with physical access to the computer also has full file system access and could wipe everything, even without password or technical knowledge.
It’s bad for other reasons too, like a script on a website would launch as root… And also without a password if your disk was encrypted your data is protected even if someone has physical access.
It is just generally common knowledge to not run around in God mode all day, otherwise sudo wouldn’t exist.
I remember that this existed, but I don’t remember why.
Corel was known for a drawing program and later for WordPerfect. They were never well known for their involvement with Linux.
Linux was the NFT or Blockchain or AI of 1999, so every tech company was jumping on board.
The sales pitch, as I remember, was that you could run your Wordperfect or CorelDraw shit on it, and not need to have Windows to use it and instead could join the future, which was Linux. Though, amusingly, their version of the future was running Windows binaries via Wine on Linux which, eh, okay but…
Of course, nobody used Wordperfect or CorelDraw at that point in history so I’m not entirely sure how that was supposed to sell you on buying not-Word and not-Photoshop.
WordPerfect continued to thrive in the legal industry for years to come due to its “reveal codes” feature and the way it counted words.
Here’s a post about that from 2008.
https://ask.metafilter.com/96820/Why-do-so-many-laywers-use-WordPerfect
Yeah, I’ve read about that. But, then again, the legal industry was probably exceedingly low on the likely-to-change-to-Linux probability list in 1999, as well. I’ve worked for some lawyers in the past and they’re a shockingly traditional dont-change-anything-ever group. (Not particularly shocking.)
Corel was, and still is, used in a lot of industries, like signmaking, embroidery, etc. It has been losing share in the general vector graphics space for years though.
Honestly it wouldn’t be too incredibly crazy for them to make a Linux graphic suite. They could even start maintaining a Linux distro.
However this is would be high risk with a high chance of failure as Linux users don’t usually have big wallets unless you count enterprise servers
they were trying to make a windows alternative since microsoft was using their leverage w windows to make corel lose money and courts were doing little more than slapping microsoft on the wrist for doing it.
I find it reminiscent to what Valve is doing with SteamOS and Proton today. That is, establishing a viable alternative to MS Windows through using Wine/Proton in order to not be reliant on a competitor for running their software.
Yeah, Bill Gates destroyed a lot of other companies with his OS monopoly, Dbase (Access) and Lotus 1 2 3 (Excel)…
That was my first linux distro I tried, took 12 minutes to boot on my Pentium 75 with 8mb RAM. Still better then win98 though
