Was used to using pdp11/vax based systems moving to Suns and other workstations, and for a number of reasons the initial launch floppies of linux felt "under cooked" compared to the BSD systems also being released for larger Intel chips with MMU. But, the killer side of this was the linux code ran on smaller Intel boxes, probably a little better than Minix did.
when 386BSD got it's act together, it became less apparent but very quickly impetus got behind the distro "scene" and Linux took off like a rocket.
Those first early days, no real network stack, minimal desktop support, it was line-and-ball. Mainly, I think the BSD lawsuit/licence issues was the negative energy source in BSD occupying the ground.
I had an IBM PC/RT at the time running the 4.3bsd port which was just lovely. But such clunky hardware. PCs were coming into their own and IBM didn't want to keep playing in multiple OS and had AIX coming through and the ROMP chip was getting old. Once graphics display cards on PCI emerged along with decent cheap ethernet cards, and then ethernet on the motherboard I think it was game over. (although for obvious reasons most people's experience of network was modem on serial)
when 386BSD got it's act together, it became less apparent but very quickly impetus got behind the distro "scene" and Linux took off like a rocket.
Those first early days, no real network stack, minimal desktop support, it was line-and-ball. Mainly, I think the BSD lawsuit/licence issues was the negative energy source in BSD occupying the ground.
I had an IBM PC/RT at the time running the 4.3bsd port which was just lovely. But such clunky hardware. PCs were coming into their own and IBM didn't want to keep playing in multiple OS and had AIX coming through and the ROMP chip was getting old. Once graphics display cards on PCI emerged along with decent cheap ethernet cards, and then ethernet on the motherboard I think it was game over. (although for obvious reasons most people's experience of network was modem on serial)