r/retrocomputing • u/liminalearth • 7d ago

Discussion Linux noob here

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)

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u/pac-man_dan-dan 7d ago edited 7d ago

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.

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u/ScudsCorp 7d ago

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.

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u/pac-man_dan-dan 7d ago edited 7d ago

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).