[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.