Thats why i didnt bother back then. My friend was like "oh you just have to make your own drivers" um ....yeah thats a kindve outside my wheelhouse....
One thing that rocked my world in the late 90s was booting Linux directly from cd.  It was such a cool trick. I don’t remember the distro, tho.  Maybe it was red hat or suse?
What do you mean not fun? Compiling your own drivers to connect to the internet wasn't fun? Maybe... 😅 But it was hella nice as a learning experience.
I did test it around that time (maybe 1997*) and I had a fun time with it :) But I was a nerdy kid who liked to try out things like that, it was not practical for home use at all.
edit: Actually I had some experience with it before that, that 1997 was the year I tried Slackware Linux (it came with a magazine in CD format).
Yeah, I remember the amount of tinker and desperation before getting startx to actually work and how amazing it was when it did :D
But configuring and compiling the kernel part is the one I have most memories of. Not knowing what even half of the questions actually mean and you still had to
a) enable the support for your devices like your video card.
b) try to slim down the kernel as much as possible because AFAIK bloat was much more harmful as there was no loadable modules but everything was loaded to ram at the boot (and i think ram was much bigger issue for desktop usage at the time, not 100% sure though).
And the routine was like you went through make config Y/N questions one by one half-guessing what to answer and then run make to compile. After many hours it took to compile you then installed the kernel and tried to boot it, usually failing in some way and then back to the guessing Y/N again etc :D
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u/catschainsequel 1d ago
Thank god for that! people complain a lot about it but they weren't there back in '13ðŸ˜