The Post Ninja

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Ah, yes, Linux around the turn of the century. Let’s see…

    GPU acceleration? In your dreams. Only some cards had drivers, and there were more than 2 GPU manufacturers back then, too… We had ATi, nVidia, 3dfx, Cirrus, Matrox, Via, Intel… and almost everyone held their driver source cards close to their chest.

    Modems? Not if they were “winmodems”, which had no hardware controller, the CPU and the Windows driver (which was always super proprietary) did all the hard work.

    Sound? AC’97 software audio was out of the question. See above. You had to find a sound blaster card if you wanted to get audio to work right.

    So, you know how modern linux has software packages? Well, back then, we had Slackware, and it compiled everything gentoo style back then. In addition, everyone had a hardon for " compiling from source is better"… so your single core Pentium II had to take its time compiling on a UDMA66-connected hard drive, constrained with 32 or 64 MB RAM. Updating was an overnight procedure.

    RedHat and Debian were godsends for people who didn’t want to waste their time compiling… which unfortinately was more common even so, because a lot of software was source only.

    Oh, and then MP3 support was ripped out of RedHat in Version 9 iirc, the last version before they split it into RHEL and Fedora. RIP music.

    As for Linux on a Mac, there was Yellowdog, which supported the PPC iMacs and such. It was decently good, but I had to write my own x11 monitor settings file (which I still have on a server somewhere, shockingly, I should throw it on github or somewhere) to get the screen to line up and work right.

    Basically, be glad Linux has gone from the “spend a considerable amount of time and have programming / underhood linux knowledge to get it working” to “insert stick, install os, start using it” we have now.

















  • flatpaks are designed for gui apps, and due to packaging dependencies, they are extra heavy in disk space. flatpaks are also most often installed on the user, not systemwide, so no root permissions needed to install.

    apt installs systemwide exclusively, but can have a much smaller download size if the dependencies are already installed. Apps sharing dependencies means much less disk space. cli is supported.