| >1) We are talking about the late 90s, well before Ubuntu, where Desktop Linux was pretty poor in terms of features and polish. I think it's hard to understate how much traction Linux had in the late 90's/ early 2000's. It felt like ground breaking stuff was happening pretty much all the time, major things were changing rapidly every release and it felt exciting and genuinely revolutionary to download updates and try out all the new things it really felt like you were on the bleeding edge, your system would break all the time but it was fun and exciting. I remember reading Slashdot daily being excited to try out every new distribution I'd see on distrowatch, I'd download and build kernels fairly regularly etc. Things I can remember from back in those days: - LILO to GRUB boot loader changes - Going from EXT2 to EXT3 and all the other experimental filesystems that kept coming out. - Sound system changing from OSS to ASLA - Introduction of /sys - Gentoo and all the memes (funroll-loops website) - Udev and being able to hotplug usb devices - Signalfd - Splice/VMsplice - Early wireless support and the cursed "ndiswrapper" Nowadays Linux is pretty stable and dare I say it "boring" (in a good way). It's probably mostly because I've gotten older and have way less free time to spend living on the bleeding edge. It feels like Linux has gone from something you had to wrestle with constantly to have a working system to a spot where nowadays everything "mostly works" out of the box. I can't remember last time I've had to cntrl + alt + backspace my desktop for example. Last major thing I can remember hearing about and being excited for was io_uring. |