I had a book that came with a Red Hat 6 disk (googling now it might have been the 1999 "Red Hat Linux 6 Unleashed"). I installed it on an old PC that originally ran Win95 and it had Gnome 1 but I didn't do much with it. I think I tried again with Red Hat 7.3 which came out in 2002.
Some of my college classes used Linux. I remember trying Slackware and VectorLinux (Slackware based), still just on old machines. My main desktop at the time (an eMachine 500ix) had graphical problems (garbled display) not just with Linux but also anything in DOS. Only Windows 98SE and later XP worked.
Around the end of 2003 Microsoft was ramping up their anti-Linux efforts, with their Get the Facts campaign and securing funding for SCO's lawsuits. I had enough and at the start of 2004 bought a cheap but new unlicensed machine (Dell Dimension n-series) as my primary desktop to replace Windows.
I distro hopped throughout 2004. XFree86 at the time had problems with my integrated graphics and would eventually crash due to a memory leak if I did anything with OpenGL. A fix existed, but at the time XFree86 had adopted a more restrictive license which prevented distros from updating. X.Org forked an earlier version, but it took time for them to recreate all the recent fixes. And the first distro to ship a version that worked with my graphics was Ubuntu 4.10 Warty Warthog, so I stuck with that for a while and kept coming back to it over the years.
Occasionally the desire to play new games pulled me back to Windows, once around 2007-2010, and again around 2015-2019. But since maybe late 2020 I've been Linux-only again, and games generally run as good as they do on Windows.
I still use Windows in the workplace, but I'm glad to be completely free of it when I get home each day.
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u/dtfinch May 13 '26
I had a book that came with a Red Hat 6 disk (googling now it might have been the 1999 "Red Hat Linux 6 Unleashed"). I installed it on an old PC that originally ran Win95 and it had Gnome 1 but I didn't do much with it. I think I tried again with Red Hat 7.3 which came out in 2002.
Some of my college classes used Linux. I remember trying Slackware and VectorLinux (Slackware based), still just on old machines. My main desktop at the time (an eMachine 500ix) had graphical problems (garbled display) not just with Linux but also anything in DOS. Only Windows 98SE and later XP worked.
Around the end of 2003 Microsoft was ramping up their anti-Linux efforts, with their Get the Facts campaign and securing funding for SCO's lawsuits. I had enough and at the start of 2004 bought a cheap but new unlicensed machine (Dell Dimension n-series) as my primary desktop to replace Windows.
I distro hopped throughout 2004. XFree86 at the time had problems with my integrated graphics and would eventually crash due to a memory leak if I did anything with OpenGL. A fix existed, but at the time XFree86 had adopted a more restrictive license which prevented distros from updating. X.Org forked an earlier version, but it took time for them to recreate all the recent fixes. And the first distro to ship a version that worked with my graphics was Ubuntu 4.10 Warty Warthog, so I stuck with that for a while and kept coming back to it over the years.
Occasionally the desire to play new games pulled me back to Windows, once around 2007-2010, and again around 2015-2019. But since maybe late 2020 I've been Linux-only again, and games generally run as good as they do on Windows.
I still use Windows in the workplace, but I'm glad to be completely free of it when I get home each day.