On Sat, 14 Sep 2013 17:38:52 +0200 "Adam D. Ruppe" <destructiona...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Saturday, 14 September 2013 at 06:57:23 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote: > > Windows and most of the other distros at the time offered: the > > ability to install a bare minimum system that could still > > function without *requiring* X11 > > > oh god X11 was too brutally slow to use on an older computer > anyway. Windows 95 was actually fast. > My first introduction to Linux was around 2001 with Mandrake and Red Hat (the two main "newbie-friendly" distros at the time). I couldn't believe how insanely sllloooooow Nautilus was compared to Win98 and Win2k on the same hardware. Plus, the X11 installation kept completely destroying itself for no apparent reason. One day, a few weeks after the most recent from-scratch OS installation, X would just simply decide not to start. And I never could manage to fix it without yet another OS re-installation. That, plus the constant tinkering, the awful state of pre-apt/yum packages, and the attitudes of many Linux users at the time left me swearing off Linux and running back to Windows until several years later when I finally gave it another try with "This new Ubuntu thing everyone seems to be talking about." Boy have things improved. Not perfect, granted, but far better than I had ever expected. > > Actually though now there's the whole qemu/kvm virtualization > stuff who's potential I really don't think has been fully > explored. I feel exactly the same way. EVen though I've never been a big VM-language fan, machine virtualization rocks. (Aside from Intel's deliberate marginalization of it for anything but high-end.)
