90’s Linux gaming was a lot of Freeciv, Doom, Quake 3, and Tux Racer.

Wine really didn’t work for shit for AT LEAST another decade, and even then, didn’t really really work for a further decade after that. It took a very very long time for Wine to get to where it is now with Proton and playing basically everything that doesn’t need a rootkit to run.

As for finding Linux games, I could just go to Microcenter. They had a whole shelf full of Linux software ranging from distros, to games, to commercial office suites, to just random shit that looked like it was boxed up in some guy’s garage and contained just… stuff. I miss being able to buy software in big shiny boxes, though :(

Ah yes, the (in?)famous mWave cards come to mind here.

So shitty they not only didn’t work in Linux, they ALSO never fucking worked right in Windows, either, and got IBM sued over what utter trash they were.

You can also install modern Linux on an old piece of hardware too! https://www.adelielinux.org/ is pretty shockingly compatible, back to a Pentium-class system. (A P166 was the oldest I’ve personally installed it on).

I wouldn’t uh, say it was all that useful, but it’s still sitting on the retro computer pile doing retro computer stuff.

I’ve recently moved drives between m2 slots and usb-c enclosures and everything worked, but that’s also why I used the word ‘should’ a lot.

I’ve had zero issues in the past few years moving drives around (even between different systems!) and my experience has been nothing but ‘shit just works’, but yeah, I know that there’s probably edge cases where that’s not true.

For what they’re doing, though, it should be fine, since there’s a relatively low amount of complexity and grub really doesn’t care where the drive is as long as it has the UUID at this point.

Because I don’t sit down at my Linux destop and feel like the product. There’s no ads or suggestions or popups or apps installing themselves or shit copying my files around in ways I didn’t really want or AI bullshit or anything even remotely suggesting I buy more shit, just… whatever the fuck it is I was intending to do.

The value in not having my computer act like a damn slot machine trying to get me to insert more quarters is, frankly, immense.

As a side note: the grub and root filesystem issues are mostly an issue of the past. If you’re on a modern distro (and haven’t mucked with things) they no longer use device names, but rather rely on UUIDs, which is good: those don’t change even if you move the drives around.

As long as grub is in the boot sector and you’re using UUIDs in your grub.conf and fstab, you should almost never have any issues moving drives around the same system.

I was doing english lit stuff in that era so what showed up on the tech side was a little different. Ended up spending my entire career actually in IT (25 years now ugh I’m old) because it turns out uh, there’s not any money in a english degree.

Lol, I haven’t thought about that site in a long, long time. Shocked it’s still there, in all it’s perl glory.

windows-only ones. Modems

And, of course, they’d almost never actually SAY that on the box, so you had to see if you could look at what exact chip was on them and explain to a retail employee why you needed to look in the box, and that no, you certainly weren’t doing something sketchy, you just use Linux instead of wait why are you calling security…

It was prominent in smaller businesses that wanted or needed a Unix but weren’t going to pay what sun or IBM or HP and friends wanted for their hardware+software.

It ate the proprietary Unix market awfully quickly and I don’t think anyone really misses it.

For me, educational stuff was all windows with a small amount of macs and I don’t think I ever saw a Linux system in actual use anywhere.

I used it on the desktop but that was super rare because hardware support was nowhere as good as now - even getting X up was a challenge (go read up on mode lines if you want some entertainment).

Oh that’s nice. Hadn’t seen their stuff before but that looks like a MUCH better option than Matrix, if you want a shiny gui app and that kind of experience. And can’t argue with the pricing if you’re running an open-source project with it, though I suppose you can make a comment that it’s still got a vendor lock-in problem.

And 100% agree that email is the gold standard, still, and yeah, nobody has really come up with an amazing web UI for searching list archives.

I don’t agree with the whole list, but the CLA requirement and corpo projects pinky-promising they’d never do a bad thing and then going to do a bad thing as soon as their investors demand returns is certainly a major risk and harm. I’ve started self-hosting everything for my personal use, and if it’s not AGPL, then I assume at some point I’m going to get fucked and shouldn’t rely on it.

Also, the endless stupidity around everyone using Discord as their primary means of communication, discussion, issue reporting and whatnot. Politely, fuck Discord, and fuck anyone who thinks Discord is the right way to make anything accessible to the public.

There’s lots of other alternatives, including ye olde IRC and forums and even simple mailing lists - and no, I don’t mean ‘sign up for our newsletter!’ nonsense, but an actual real mailing list. And, if you want something a little more modern, there’s always Matrix which is probably feature-complete enough to compete with whatever you’d want to use Discord for anyways.

Agreed. I’d say that, if you have the option, then the libre option is the one you should pick whenever you can. But, realistically, software is a hammer, and you should pick the hammer that does what you want, and ignore the internet hollering that you’re somehow impure if you use even a single piece of proprietary software.