[cgh]

I enjoyed this from their description of their dwm window manager, which took me back to the general state of Linux circa 1999:

"Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it’s pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions. There are some distributions that provide binary packages though."

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

I don't miss the general state of linux circa 1999 one bit.

[hnisnotreddit]

I, for one, miss spending 10 hours fully compiling GNOME 0.99.8 and Englightenment 0.15 from CVS every week on my Pentium 133 running Linux Mandrake.

Over the past 17 or so years I've been using linux full-time, I've experienced 3 or 4 of the "sweet spots", or times where using linux was superior to everything else on the market. GNOME 1.x with Enlightenment 0.15 (vs Win98) was the second one (the first, I'm told, was E DR0.13 with CmdrTaco's task managing app and Hand of God theme vs Win95). I believe we are currently at the end of another sweet spot with KDE 4.x being put out to pasture, as it completely destroys the UX of Windows 7/8 and Mountain Lion.

But don't knock the state of linux circa 1999. Sure, you had to ensure your sound cards had OSS drivers, and Winmodems sucked, but it was a superior experience to Win9x even back then.

[anon4]

I used to run dwm back when I had a machine with just 256MB RAM. The source code is very clean and if you just want to edit some keybindings or the colourscheme, etc. it's so well structured, it's pretty much like editing a config file. It also compiles in no time at all.

[agumonkey]

I wonder if this was how people felt about C in early days. ASM was the low level frailty, and C the oh-so-clean one-make-away world to create, extend, modify your system.

[Avshalom]

Lispmachines existed in the early days of C, so no probably not.

[agumonkey]

Weren't they pretty much a niche compared to unix systems ?

[Avshalom]

They were a niche at the time but remember, this was the early 70s, so was Unix.