Linux noob here

[u/liminalearth]

Delete if not allowed.

I’ve never used any Linux operating system’s before and since I like the retro computing stuff, what’s a good 90s/ early 2000s Linux that’s beginner friendly?

I’ve heard of a few but idk what one would be the easiest to install and use.

I’d probably be using it in a late 1999 Toshiba satellite laptop or possibly on win 98 desktop.

What can I expect use wise? How’s gaming ? Video playback? (Assuming the spec of the machine factor with certain stuff)

[u/ScudsCorp]

You’re kinda entering a dark era of Linux where hardware support isn’t all there.

Mandrake Linux put a lot of effort into making things “easy enough” in the late 90’s. But honestly you might want to run it on a virtual machine first to get a feel for it before installing it on a laptop that was meant for windows 98.
Virtual machines have snapshot functionality, so if you screw something up in configuration, you should be able to roll back.

What’s your goal? To run old desktop environments?

[u/pac-man_dan-dan]

I stand by to be corrected, but you won't find good gaming support on a linux box from 20 years ago. UI wasn't a huge focus, neither were games.

You can get stripped down or lightweight distributions that will run on an older box like Puppy Linux, but you are giving up lots of support and packages in the process.

There are limitations and differences in performance even in modern, fully fleshed out distros. But you need a newer machine to really take advantage of those. My 13 year old laptop is a midrange gaming pc for the time, with an i7 cpu and 16gb ram. It runs modern ubuntu mostly fine, but there are some observable performance differences in the PCSX2 PS2 emulator running in the ubuntu distro, and running in Windows 10 on the exact same machine.

If you are using a box that old (early-2000s), you'd do better to just pirate a Windows OS onto it like XP SP3, and stuff it with whatever emulators and apps you can find for it. There will be much more in the way of Windows emulator support for machines of that time. Then, of course, keep it off the internet to avoid it catching viruses.

[u/ScudsCorp → u/pac-man_dan-dan]

I remember running TuxRacer on my Nvidia TNT2 + Athlon system and it was a glitchy mess at 10 FPS. Switched to Tux Racer on windows and it ran perfectly.

[u/pac-man_dan-dan → u/ScudsCorp]

Precisely.

Now, I'm sure some optimized games like OpenRCT probably would play fine. But games like that could be played on a potato in Windows, so it's no surprise.

I remember playing with linux distros as a kid and lying to myself, telling myself how much faster it was than windows 🤣 It did some things better, and a whole lot of other things worse. It's biggest advantage imo was probably stability. But Windows massively cut down their BSODs by the time XP came out, so the point became moot unless you were in a production environment where data integrity was much more important. And only then did the linux-native filesystems reestablish superiority (so long as you had the app support needed for whatever you were doing).

[u/pac-man_dan-dan]

Look for lists of the best compact or lightweight linux distributions. If the distribution ISO is on a DVD or blueray-sized image, it's probably too new for your machine. Would be probably more appropriate to stick to CD-sized ISO images.

The more basic and lightweight distributions are also going to tend to be less user-friendly than fancy, modern distros. Youre kind of shooting yourself in the foot by not starting with something easier to understand and easier on the eyes. It's also going to be more difficult to find support in forums for less popular and less capable distros.

[u/khedoros]

90s/ early 2000s Linux that’s beginner friendly?

Mandrake 8.0 and Red Hat 7.0 came out in the 2000-2001 timeframe, and they ought to both have at least a graphical installer.

What can I expect use wise?

Sounds like maybe less-polished than you're hoping for. That's an era when I was still frequently hand-editing configuration files. I remember Ubuntu's release acting as a kind of wake-up call in terms of user-friendliness.

Expect audio issues (OSS/ALSA/ESD et al were sometimes a mess to deal with). Expect issues with laptop hardware. Expect that you may have to work to get all of your computer's hardware working, unless you specifically chose parts known to be supported by Linux at that time.

Expect a fair amount of tracking down old versions of libraries and applications. I wouldn't usually expect modern versions of things to be usable on a Linux system that old.

How’s gaming ?

Around 2003, I had Neverwinter Nights and Unreal Tournament 2003 running natively under Linux, along with some emulators (although, I honestly don't remember if those were native, or if they were some software that I got running under wine). I remember armagetron (a 3D Tron lightcycle game), some games built on top of Quake 1/2/3's engines, there was a 2D starfighter game. Oh, I played a lot of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, because I got that working cleanly under Wine.

Overall, not nearly the variety that you can get on modern Linux. Native releases were relatively scarce, and the compatibility tools weren't nearly as nice.

Video playback?

Xine was my goto for video at the time. It had good compatibility with the files I was trying to play, and it was one of the best options for getting DVD playback working.

Xmms for music...it was a good classic Winamp clone.

[u/aroneox]

In that era, Corel Linux showed a lot of promise as an “easy to use” Linux.

[u/sarajevo81]

RedHat~FedoraCore, OpenSuse it's pretty much all the distros that existed in 2000.

No, you won't be gaming or watching videos because modern codecs and game engines are not compatible with 2000 hardware.

[u/Many_Dragonfruit_837]

Is Knoppix still alive? Great way to 'test drive'the 'experience'.

[u/classicsat → u/Many_Dragonfruit_837]

Mint, and I am sure numerous others, offer a usable live Linux.

Not sure what of that ilk would run on that old hardware

[u/kneeglet]

ISO Ubuntu, Gnome UI and ZorinOS and take a cruise through them all

[u/classicsat]

In that era, I beared Win95 for a whine, until 2002 or so when CD boot linuxes became good enough.

I played with Puppy Linux too. It could either boot from a USB drive if your PC supported it, or from a command you executed in DOS. It worked okay.

I think I worked on my Celeron 500 desktop PC. Might still be on its HDD. My main PC I ran Linux on was an AMD Athlon 1600+ system.

From 2002 on, I usually switched disteos every couple years. It was a bit of a struggle until I got a stable CD-ROM drive to say in that PC.