What was like using Linux in the mid 2000s? Was it a better experience than now...

first time i use linux was in 2004
spotted a neighbour running Slax with KDE3.x from a 256MiB usb flash drive
upon asking about it, he gave me a cd of SimplyMEPIS 2004.4

i was quite impressed with it, everything just worked, even my parallel printer (which was a few years old and already hard to find XP drivers for)
KDE3 was really comfy, had a combined FM/web browser like windows, but with a good browser, media previews by mouse hover, tasteful levels of UI animation, etc

forgot to attach picture

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>zero hardware support
nah, it was mostly like it is today. Anything Intel worked fine, anything strange (winmodems, soundcards which 'emulated' soundblasters etc) didn't really.

Mandrake 8 or 9, they used to come with KDE.
Back then it was said that using Mandrake 9 was a similar experience than using Windows 95 (regarding quality and usability of the interface).

fuck this brings back so many memories

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UI was nicer, but hardware support was awful
interoperability was ho-hum at best

back in the mid-late 90's a buddy handed me a knoppix disc.
I tried it out and it was shit. all through the 2000's till present, I've been playing with linux on and off.
while the distros today are better than they were back then, it's still not primetime.
I spent most of 2018 trying different stuff, and while a lot of them were pretty good on a laptop, none made the cut on my daily driver machine.
i'm testing ltsb locked down with DWS currently, and i'm pretty surpised how decent it is.
I still keep a win7 build for things that the locked down one can't do, though

yeah, outside the fact that it spies on you, it looks just as boring the same on every machine and it's a little bloated, Windows 10 is surprisingly good for what people on here would make you think
in terms of looks I prefer KDE or any of the obscure Linux WMs, but it's just too buggy, clunky and amateurish for everyday use

youtu.be/73vBLOy4rEs?t=7s

Could be comfy

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Corel Linux, Older Red Hat or Solaris would probably give you what you're looking for.

thank you, installing it as we speak

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I was going to say getting your modem/ppp to work was a proud achievement, but that was late 90s early 2000s, not mid 2000s

I think I liked Suse then Unlike RedHat it just worked.

>What was like using Linux in the mid 2000s?
I don't know if 2007 is too late to be "mid", but that's when I started playing around with Loonix. This was several years before the main function of a computer was to be a Facebook machine, so the compatibility limitations stung a lot more than they do now, especially since Wine wasn't reliable yet.

>Was it a better experience than now?
Hell no lmao

>How can I run these old distros on a VM to experience it myself?
Just get old ISO's and fuck with VMWare until they work. A lot of current popular distros keep old ISO's hosted on their servers even if they're no longer supported, so you can get started with downloading those.

I remember taking a week to setup wifi/networking drivers and then having reinstall everything because I have a stupid fucking highschooler who wasn't patient enough to actually debug.
Just started using Ubuntu again, things have come a long way now. I'm just trying to set true Emacs keymapping system wide and copy OSX workspace management behavior right now.

I had to do it up to around 2009 ish with a DSL modem and it was still somewhat of a pain.

I remember using an old ubuntu live cd in 2008/2009 and the screensavers were pretty mesmerizing, anyone know what I'm talking about?

Holy shit, a nostalgia thread I can actually contribute to.

>What was like using Linux in the mid 2000s?
It felt like being part of the future, or the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars. We still kind of believed that we could get normies to switch to a different desktop OS, Windows was more unstable and shitter than it is now, and we didn't know the future would be about smartphones/cloud platforms

>Was it a better experience than now?
Objectively no, everything you could do back then you can do now but easier and with better support. But it might have felt better when compared to the Windows experience back then.

The coolest thing ever was using different windows managers and seeing how different desktops could be than Windows/Macs, when I used Enlightenment with the Bluesteel theme (pic related, though someone else's screenshot). It felt like I was using a system from the future, listening to techno in a dark room with xmms or kjofol felt like Lain in real life.

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yeah, that's one of the things I like about that era
every linux desktop looked different and most of them looked like you were about to hack the gibson
none of that minimalist anime girl s󠀀oyboy shit that you see nowadays, but also until compiz came into the scene, the hardware and software didn't allow too many effects either, so every theme designed put as much effort as they could into their bitmaps. plus painting window decorations pixel by pixel was actually viable when almost everybody was running 768x1024 displays
that's what I'm talking about, faggots that say I'm looking at the past with rose tinted glasses don't get that people were actually optimistic about the future of computing back then, and development was done mostly by programmers in their free time, Linux wasn't as corporatized and poetterized as it is now

>cloud platforms
Docker & Cloud were the best and worst thing for Desktop Linux.
On one hand Linux/Docker became the defacto platform for server applications and I had high hopes that it would start to pull developers to Desktop Linux. But what ended up happening was that developers just started using OSX since it was close enough and Docker took care of the rest.

Linux has gotten worse since the early 2000s. I remember that there was real optimism on sites like Slashdot and OSnews that Linux would make it on the desktop, but then they Linux community fucked it up with Gnome 2.6 and then Gnome 3. KDE fucked up with plasma. Then systemd and electron came along and finished it.

Why were Gnome 2.6 and KDE 3 bad according to you?

no flash support

Gnome 2.6 experimented with Nautilus and made it worse. Plasma just started taking the old KDE and adding Vista style bloat to it.

why would you need flash support on a DE? that's something for the distro and the browser to deal with isn't it

finished installing mandrake 9 and it's pretty good except I can't find any browser that'll work with google's noscript captcha to try and make a post here, apparently some kind of SSL issue

>experience
you can't, I used to install mandrake and go to a "internet coffee" to reasearch and then compile driver for NIC, or broke ubuntu with updates

did you ever have to modify C code to get something to compile?

I bought Suse linux from some PC shop around that time. The guy looked at me funny I was like 14-15 years old or something. He said "Well, it's cheaper than Windows". Linux intrigued me for some reason. I tried to install it, wiped the windows off my Dad's PC unintentionally. It didn't go good. I lent it to my friend who installed it, but couldn't really do anything. He told me "Linux is only for hackers".

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debian 6 was superior to anything came before and after it.

KDE 1.2 was great

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Suse was super polished back then compared to everything else. It was the Mint of the early 2000s.

I was teaching a course in pc tech in summer 2000 and had to pick an easy Linux distro for them to work with, and I chose Suse even though I didn't use it myself.

>copy OSX workspace management behavior right now.
pro tip: you cant

That's great. I did get it installed eventually, but I couldn't get my wireless network card to work, so I gave up.

Dependency hell if you wanted to install anything not in the native package manager format of the distro (which was a lot). Mount/umount follies, along with endless fucking /etc/fstab editing, just to access a disk drive. No vidya.
But: it was free and not controlled by some faceless monopoly. You could compile your own kernel to make it run faster, look at all the internal processes and open files. Windows was slow as hell, hid shittons of stuff and you needed commercial programs to really customize it.

Linux has come a long way, thankfully

welp, that felt exactly like what i imagine death feels like, it completely ripped my heart out and sent my life flashing before my eyes
thanks user

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uh, you know that's a screenshot of windows 2000, right?

I've seen that ElementaryOS is starting to copy the behavior. If I can't accomplish that in GNOME I'll probably switch to that.

It's gotta be copypasta from somewhere. The rebel alliance line gives it away.

early 2000s was the golden times. i was a know nothing shit ass who downloaded redhat. within weeks i was hacking into servers. everything was made for security/counter-security instead of UI fluff like it is now

It was fucking shit. I took a linux class in high school back in 03 and failed the course in part because I couldn't get a single distro to work with all my hardware on my home computer for homework. I had either an AMD duron or an athlon 2200 and either a geforce 4 mx440 or a radeon 9800. Anyways, the shit wouldn't work. The class used knoppix and it worked well on the Dell workstations at school that were so common back then, but on my homebuilt computer nope.

Strange? Like and AMD computer using a motherboard using a via chipset?!! Oh my, that was certainly strange since AMD was doing well back then and Via was a common chipset manufacturer. That's what I had back then.

>within weeks i was hacking into servers.
kek, sure buddy
>everything was made for security/counter-security instead of UI fluff like it is now
You really have no clue what you're talking about. Security hardening on the Linux side in earnest has been a recent/post-2000 development since Linux has become the defacto platform for web servers.

I first used Linux in 1998 when I installed Phat Linux. It ran in my Windows 98 partition so I didn't have to uninstall Windows.

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xscreensaver maybe

I installed mandrake around 2004 -2005 ish

Confused the hell out me - went back to XP

lol I don't have it installed right now so I just googled "Enlightenment Bluesteel" and grabbed one that looked right. I didn't even know people used it on Windows, hah

It's not, it's pretty much the feeling I had, it may have been just me being a teenager back then, though.

It was much more of an educational experience and test of patience than it is now. As others have mentioned, automatic hardware detection was pretty flaky or nonexistent, especially where audio, displays, and touchpad mice were concerned. It took a lot of googling and asking around in forums to get things working in a manner that could be remotely described as reliable. As a result, Linux was seen as a hobbyist or "hacker" OS much more than it is even today.

Wobbly window animation when they closed. Other than aesthetics most things seem similar to today except that installs are pretty much completely automated today in comparison.

Corel was ok, mandrake was the shizznizzle!

Gnome 1.x was peak Gnome
ReiserFS was the best filesystem until you are forced to rebuild tree

I tried using debian on a laptop in the mid 2000s and it had literally zero power control. It kept all the fans on at max and killed my battery in about 30 minutes.

>knoppix
>mid-late 90's
Knoppix wasn't released until 2000

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>What was like using Linux in the mid 2000s?

it was a nightmare

I'll agree it was a steep learning curve - logging into tty1, editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf in nano and the startingx and the such like but when you had the sweet spot of working alsa and xorg it made never having to see pic related again SOOOOOOO much worth it.

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ftp://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/discontinued/i386/
Try it yourself in a VM.

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