you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 117 points 3 months ago (11 children)

I first installed Linux in 1995, before I had a second computer where I could look for help. Compared to that experience today's situation is paradise. So you won't hear me complain.

  • source
  • hideshow 11 child comments
  • [–] 37 points 3 months ago*

    Oh, I remember that. Red hat 2.0. Where you had to download the source code for all of the floppy discs, compile them, and then write all of the floppies. I remember it was 7 or 9 floppy discs, 13 if you wanted printer drivers.

    It wasn’t until Red Hat 2.5 that they had pre-compiled floppy images you could download.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Similarly, I ordered floppies for Slackware from Walmut Creek. Spent weeks screaming at my system for not being able to get a 256k Tulip VLB ISA video card to init into X before I found my first Linux BBS on I think DalNET... times were... different.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    I've definitely ran into the situation where I fucked something up half-way though installing a new distro, then had to wipe it to go back to an old distro so that I could access the internet and find out what I did wrong so that I could start from scratch.

    I hate doing debugging on my phone, but man sometimes is it better than the alternative.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Today's linux situation is paradise compared to gaming on windows any time before 2015. I still remember having to keep multiple different nvidia driver installers ready for launching just to match what game I wanted to play.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago* (3 children)

    I've never had to do that and I've used plenty of Nvidia cards, assuming we're talking Windows.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    There was a SoundBlaster Gold card I spent a whole month reading man pages and trying to get it to compile into the kernel.

    Those were the days, I tell you. Never again. I'm trying to forget as much as possible.

  • source
  • parent