For those veteran linux people, what was it like back in 90s? I did see and hear of Unix systems being available for use but I did not see much apart from old versions of Debian in use.

Were they prominent in education like universities? Was it mainly a hobbyist thing at the time compared to the business needs of 98, 95 and classic mac?

I ask this because I found out that some PC games I owned were apparently also on Linux even in CD format from a firm named Loki.

  • mortalic@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 months ago

    This was me, you’re talking about me. 😂 In the 90’s Linux was barely getting started but slackware was probably the main distro everyone was focused on. That was the first one I ran across. This was probably late 90’s, I don’t remember when slack first came about though.

    By the time the 2000’s came around, it was basically a normal thing for people in college to have used or at least tried. Linux was in the vernacular, text books had references to it, and the famous lawsuit from SCO v IBM was in full swing. There were distro choices for days, including Gentoo which I spent literally a week getting everything compiled on an old Pentium only for it to not support some of the hardware and refuse to boot.

    There was a company I believe called VA Linux that declared that year to be the year of the Linux desktop. My memory might be faulty on this one.

    Loki gaming was a company that specialized in porting games to Linux, and they did a good job at it but couldn’t make money. I remember being super excited about them and did buy a few games. I was broke too so that was a real splurge for me. I feel like they launched in the 90’s (late) and crashed in the early 2000’s.