I think you forgot MSFT being the super monoculture that hard blocked linux being installed on desktop machines with OEMS. IE6 being the scourge it was and pretty much the only option until firefox came out. How MSFT killed netscape & got an antitrust lawsuit over it. The entire encryption export fight & the clipper chip fight and so on. We look at the past with rose colored glasses.
I don't think people really looked at how long lasting their hardware was back then, it was more of a happy accident. We still 'disposed' of hardware with glee, more because of huge moore's law gains. I think a lot of people still use a lot of older hardware you're not aware of either. People use cars from the early 2000s still. People using cars from the 70s wasn't much of a thing in the 90s and american manufacturers were far less reliable.
I hadn’t forgotten about Internet Explorer. But in fairness, Linux wasn’t really quite ready as a primary OS until around the time kHTML and Gecko became good enough most of the time. Plus Opera was free from 2000 too. Before then Internet Explorer was actually the better browser, as painful as it is to write that. I did also occasionally use a browser I’d written myself too (because that was semi-possible with Web 1.0 standards).
I also used to use an IRC client I’d written myself.
The more annoying walled garden was Windows itself. The 80s and early 90s has such variety then Windows dominated. If there’s one thing that’s better today its that applications are now platform agnostic just so long as Blink/WebKit/Gecko runs on it. So Linux is as much a first class citizen as Windows and macOS.
Very good point. Even today, MSFT has such control over the hardware world, if you want to run Windows 7 on a Z490 mainboard, you're SOL. The latest mainboards force you to run the latest Windows 10. Fortunately, they all run your favorite OSS os'.
I don't think people really looked at how long lasting their hardware was back then, it was more of a happy accident. We still 'disposed' of hardware with glee, more because of huge moore's law gains. I think a lot of people still use a lot of older hardware you're not aware of either. People use cars from the early 2000s still. People using cars from the 70s wasn't much of a thing in the 90s and american manufacturers were far less reliable.