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.
Slackware and Red Hat were the two distros in use in the mid 90s.
My local city used proper UNIX, and my university had IRIX workstations and SunOS servers. We used Linux at my ISP to handle modem pools and web/mail/news servers. In the early 2000s we had Linux labs, and Linux clusters to work on.
Linux on the desktop was a bit painful. There were no modules. Kernels had to fit into main memory. So you’d roll your own kernel with just the drivers you needed. XFree86 was tricky to configure with timings for your CRT monitors. If done wrong, you could break your monitor.
I used FVWM2 and Enlightenment for many years. I miss Enlightenment.
I used Enlightenment on Arch Linux for a year, in 2020-21. The PC had 4G ram and an HDD, Enlightenment was blazing fast. I could type enlightenment_start to a tty and reach a Wayland desktop under a second with 250M ram used total. E is still alive and kicking.
You mean your graphic drivers, right? not your actual hardware…
No. The wrong timing parameters could definitively break your hardware.
SGI workstations had the best GUI. That shit looked straight out of Hollywood