I started playing and using Linux around year 2000, before XP. My first computer was a Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and I went through the painful transition to Win 95, 98, 98 SE, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 8 and 10, so I've known them all.
The Linux you remember is very different than what I remember. To say that back then Linux was unusable on the desktop would be an understatement. Yes, you had Red Hat, Mandrake (later Mandriva) and SuSE that were trying hard to provide a usable desktop distribution, but nothing was working well. And people needed Win32 apps because there were no alternatives usable for Linux.
Nowadays Linux usually works well on most hardware you can throw at it, it doesn't choke on the most basic of tasks and while it still has an app problem, sadly, the web is making that less relevant. Nowadays all that average users need is a good web browser, coupled with Linux's security and remote debugging capabilities, it's a very good fit for my father for example.
Speaking of which, I don't have a high regard for companies and products popular among developers and that don't support Linux. I pay a premium for Dropbox because it works on my Linux box, even though my primary workstation is now OS X. And I've been transitioning away from 1Password. Voting with your wallet does work and if a company isn't supporting Linux then it means it doesn't want my money. OS X was in the same situation a while back, for certain use-cases it still is, yet it prevailed because people have stuck with it.
The Linux you remember is very different than what I remember. To say that back then Linux was unusable on the desktop would be an understatement. Yes, you had Red Hat, Mandrake (later Mandriva) and SuSE that were trying hard to provide a usable desktop distribution, but nothing was working well. And people needed Win32 apps because there were no alternatives usable for Linux.
There was a reason why you could buy Linux in bookstores for years. People were actually using it. For instance, SuSE had quite a stronghold in Europe. I was still in high school and I knew quite a lot of people that were using SuSE Linux.
coupled with Linux's security
What security? It's running every application unsandboxed and each X11 application can read all keystrokes, mouse events, make screengrabs, etc. Linux on the desktop is way behind macOS and Windows when it comes to security. It's just not a very interesting target, because of its small marketshare.
One can only hope that distributors will follow the lead of Fedora and move to Wayland soon.
At that time Windows security was a joke. You could write anywhere on the whole disk and you could "read all keystrokes, mouse events, make screengrabs" as well.
Gee, I've been using Windows since version 3.1 and never ever, ever had a major problem with the allegedly bad desktop security. Also, Linux since RedHat 5...and I've definitely spent way more time configuring Linux to do shit that Windows does without any configuration than I ever spent on Windows security issues.
Windows has always had the best desktop system and it still does. Some loud minority always talks about how great the Mac UI is but I think it's hideous and most of the world agrees with me since nobody copied the Mac OS' major UI gimmicks (and if they did, it was seen as a stupid unpopular mistake).
Anyway - I run all three in my business and I'm well versed in each of them. Linux is great for servers and I need Macs for iOS stuff, but nothing beats the sheer convenience of Windows, the best desktop OS that ever was.
Maybe one day Windows will become open source and all the Linux folks can stop trying to catch up on the desktop. Until then, I'll gladly throw my money at Microsoft for providing such a beautiful system for me to use.
These days less of a problem. Message injection/sniffing between applications in different contexts doesn't work. Unless you're the administrator, in which case it is game over already.
Right, well as you point out, nowadays Wayland is default on major distributions like Rebecca Black OS and some minor players like Fedora.
In any event, when a user is compromised, it's lol Windows. But when Yahoo is compromised, is anyone opining security in Linux? Or are these social engineering hacks?
Yes I can agree with you regarding the state of Linux alongside Windows 98 era. KDE 2 was on the scene and GNOME2 was there but it wasn't as polished as the systems are today.
Furthermore StarOffice was the office app available (Abiword and Gnumeric and KOffice were very young and struggled with MS Office files as I recall).
Konqueror as a web browser didn't really take off or mature until KDE 3 as I recall? Firefox/Firebird was very young, there was no Google Chrome. I think I might have been running Netscape on Linux at this time??
Having said all this, I did enjoy using Linux at this period. It was a fresh new operating system to me. I remember wasting hours of my life using it.
All this before .Net, Vala, before Qt was open source. egcs and the gcc fiasco, XFree86 etc. etc.
I don't think GNOME2 was really a part of the Win98 era since it was released almost a year after Windows XP came out. GNOME 1.4 was terrible and the memory requirements of Linux with a desktop environment in general were far and above those of Win9x back then.
Frankly Gnome 1.x was Icaza trying to "virtue signal" his way into the big times.
He was a fervent KDE fanboy until he did an about face and starting disparaging KDE over the Qt licensing while pushing a hodgepodge of software under the Gnome moniker.
During that whole time he picked up idea after idea from the Windows world (hell, his first program of fame, Midnight Commander, was a straight clone of the DOS program Norton Commander) and rammed them into Gnome.
And Now he works for Microsoft, go figure...
Thinking about it, i get the feel that Poettering is a rerun of Icaza. Only this time OSX is the source of the "inspiration" rather than Windows.
Beyond that it is yet another round of NIH projects and divide and conqueror political rhetoric.
Very informative. Interesting you should mention OSX being the inspiration for Poettering. I always thought GNOME2 and beyond were turning into OSX Snow Leopard (really dumb Nautilus, useless file dialog) and removal of all configurability (and I loved Snow Leopard, sad to see GNOME being a bit simplistic as it was happening though).
I did enjoy using Gnumeric so thank Miguel.
Also MC is pretty useful when you SSH into a box and want some form of file manager.
Ha my memory isn't that great then! Must have been the GNOME 1 I was using. I remember being impressed with the squidgy themes it supported, until using them for 2 days made you switch back to something more conservative.
KDE 3 was released in 2002, but Firefox, even the 1.0 version was a really good browser. It was so much faster and less resource hungry then netscape / mozilla suite.
Well Firefox basically paired down the suite to just the browser, and also "accelerated" the XUL UI by using native widgets where possible (GTK in the case of Linux, though i think there was some attempts at using Qt as well).
>Nowadays Linux usually works well on most hardware you can throw at it, it doesn't choke on the most basic of tasks and while it still has an app problem, sadly, the web is making that less relevant.
There's always been some flux to the ease of Linux vs the ease of say..Windows.
There was a time during XP SP1 and SP2 where installing Windows took fucking forever because it had none of the drivers pre-installed, whereas Linux had a grand majority of them bundled.
Windows still had better overall hardware support with peripherals, so there was still the odd thing missing - but if you had a compatible machine, you could do a clean linux install in under an hour and be loaded with apps, codecs, drivers, the works. With XP you would've been left scouring one web page after another for endless download links, often from another computer b/c your NIC driver didn't work out of the box.
The Linux you remember is very different than what I remember. To say that back then Linux was unusable on the desktop would be an understatement. Yes, you had Red Hat, Mandrake (later Mandriva) and SuSE that were trying hard to provide a usable desktop distribution, but nothing was working well. And people needed Win32 apps because there were no alternatives usable for Linux.
Nowadays Linux usually works well on most hardware you can throw at it, it doesn't choke on the most basic of tasks and while it still has an app problem, sadly, the web is making that less relevant. Nowadays all that average users need is a good web browser, coupled with Linux's security and remote debugging capabilities, it's a very good fit for my father for example.
Speaking of which, I don't have a high regard for companies and products popular among developers and that don't support Linux. I pay a premium for Dropbox because it works on my Linux box, even though my primary workstation is now OS X. And I've been transitioning away from 1Password. Voting with your wallet does work and if a company isn't supporting Linux then it means it doesn't want my money. OS X was in the same situation a while back, for certain use-cases it still is, yet it prevailed because people have stuck with it.