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In the spirit of "how could I not have known that:" back in college there was a terminal in a room in the physics department basement where I could log in and check my email. Nearby was a bookshelf with a bunch of tattered books that seemed to have been left by former students. Some Asimov, some Douglas Adams, books about Fortran and C, and a book about Unix. Absent-mindedly flipping through those books one day (as one did before one discovered the web) I noticed that the Unix command line prompt looked like what I saw when I logged in to read my mail. Huh. I tried some things from the book, and they worked just like Unix was supposed to. This thing I had been using to check my email all year could do other stuff! That was really cool, but not all that personally useful to me, until I read something in the book that made me realize there was probably a C compiler. There was! Even better, there was a C++ compiler. From then on I was hooked. Programming for me had been a hobby before I came to college, a way of avoiding real work. I had heard of C++ and wanted to learn it, but I had read that the compilers were really expensive, and I was afraid of asking my parents to buy me one. Here was one I could use for free! So naturally I ended up spending a lot of hours writing C++ code in that basement instead of doing my math and physics work, and that's how I acquired the skills that landed me my first job.

As for Linux, there was a CS major in my dorm who installed Linux and BeOS on his PC and did his programming assignments on them, but I never had the courage to do that, because I was afraid that if I screwed up my computer and couldn't immediately fix it, it would mess up my work for other classes. I didn't take that risk until years later, when I no longer had to turn in writing assignments in Microsoft Word format.

Wow, very similar experience here with the email-terminal starting point, except instead of the C compiler, which was indeed a pretty awesome discovery, I discovered I could write shell scripts, just like those described by hacker-hunter Cliff Stoll.

I had been writing DOS batch files with the help of PC Magazine utils for years, and shell scripts looked absolutely amazing. From that point on I pretty much always had to know where I could go to get unix or Linux shell access...

I remember discussions back the day between Linux and Windows proponents. I was clearly in the Windows camp, seeing Linux fans as, well, bizarre sometimes arrogant pseudo programmers. That changed, now that Linux is probably the last OS I can run without a cloud account easily. Heck, I'd even pay for it!

Back the day I was a gamer, the main reason why Linux never really was an option. Later for work, it was Windows all the way for obvious reasons. Privately I am on Ubuntu now, along with LibreOffice. Won't go back, Windows turned into a major PIA when I tried to run different Teams and Office accounts not linked to the Windows 10 license due to home schooling and two kids. Gone were the days that a license key was all you needed. There is still a Windows boot partition, company hardware is Windows anyway.

The only thing I have a hard time getting rid of is Excel. I am so used to that...

> Linux fans as, well, bizarre sometimes arrogant pseudo programmers.

To be fair, some of us were smug as hell.

I once picked an argument with a guy simply because he was wearing a Microsoft t-shirt.

Almost everyone has been through that "mine is better than yours" distro war phase, adopting Linux (distros) as a religion is just stupid ;-)

Some of the gold I've accumulated over the years when converting Windows users and/or giving talks

  - All Linux distributions are the same: the Linux kernel, glibc and a bunch of GNU utils.
  - "Adopting Linux like a religion is stupid." - Thomas Cameron
  - "We've all been through my distro is better than yours" thing.
  - "The best Linux distro is the one that does what you need at the best cost."
  - Linux is NOT about the distribution but the kernel, it's about what the kernel can do.
  - Distribution is a way to wrap up what the kernel can do into a more manageable way.

Ah, in those days I remember friends referred to Microsoft as The Evil Empire.

I think there was also a little bit of "friendly" debate over the superior OS at the time. (I ran OS/2 Warp for a number of years myself.)

Oh the days of being on Slashdot and getting downmodded to -1 Troll because you dare to suggest that Windows is a usable operating system and not type Micro$uck or some other variant.

I was actually quite fond of WinNT4. Lean and stable.

Microsoft being the Evil Empire and facing antitrust for bundling Internet Explorer was, of course, cheered on... meanwhile very similar groups of geeks these days see no problem with Apple only allowing Safari to be the web browser engine on iOS...

Oh my gosh... that Bill Gates Borg avatar....

Unfortunately this trend continues in the Linux Desktop community. It seems it never outgrew its teenager mindset.

I think most of the teenager mindset moved towards the Apple camp. Apple has been far more restrictive and anticompetitive than Microsoft ever was at its worst. Mention something like how Safari being the only allowed web engine on iOS and get downvoted, don't agree that Google is the ultimate evil and point out they're open sourcing Android, Chromium and etc... get downvoted.

The embrace of Apple on tech sites is something I'll never understand considering the attitudes that were prevalent when it came to Microsoft just a decade or two before.

Also compare the immense output of Microsoft Research versus the almost non-existent research output of Apple.

>Heck, I'd even pay for it!

I usually donate to FOSS projects I use since you can't pay for them in the traditional sense but I still want to support the developers. KDE is my favorite thus far.

I've always wondered why no Linux app store has risen to prominence? Can one make a living selling their Linux applications to end users?

> Can one make a living selling their Linux applications to end users?

There are companies that do this- DaVinci Resolve, IntelliJ IDEA, Ardour come to mind.

While I wouldn't quite call it prominence, nor can I imagine you could make a living with it exclusively, elementary OS has something of a Linux app store with their AppCenter. Flipping through the website it seems to offer developers the standard 70/30 split.

It's quite simple, the market for paid end user applications on Linux is tiny. Canonical was saying years ago that they were going to add paid applications to the Snap Store but seemingly never got around to it. Elementary's App Center has integrated payments but they are optional and ~99% of users do not pay anything.

You can certainly make a living selling a cross platform application that supports Linux, but it's probably quite difficult to make much of a living selling Linux-only applications.

I think an app store would be a great location to not have optional payments for open source software if developers do not want it. Users can choose to go get and compile the source, download a third-party binary and keep it updated themselves, or pay for it and know it's directly from the authors and automatically updated and getting a path to support and the interested customers know the only people submitting reviews are people who paid for it and not drive by opinionated users like is common in open source software.

I'd say the existing app stores plugged on distribution repos (apt) provide a very large amount of free software, thus reducing the incentive to look for paid software.

For the seller, being able to sell is one thing, having to run software in a tiny and extremely fragmented market (a large bunch of slightly different distros) is another one. Then osx happened, and the linux desktop never happened.

I'll put it on the list once my Office 365 about expired. Because that Eco system, open source alternatives to MS, Google and so on, are more needed then ever. Or I just started to recognize how important they are.

I remember this :)

I was using Coherent at the time, and Linux people was posting in comp.os.coherent how good Linux was. When MWC folded people from MWC suggested moving to a BSD because at least the BSD people did not troll the group.

I ended up with Slackware because the PC I had at the time was too lite for a BSD.

I never got used to Excel, most of the spreadsheet things Excel is used for can be achieved by awk

I do not know why you got down voted for this.

But same here, I never used Excel (and do not now) because the tools in UNIX type OSs are fine.

So I guess I will be joining you in the basement :)

Gaming is still a major sticking point when it comes to Windows alternatives. But for Linux specifically, another one is web streaming: some popular services will outright refuse to stream on Linux, presumably due to DRM concerns.

I have no problem with either one of those. I watch Netflix, YouTube, DailyMotion and Vimeo without issue, and game performance is quite good under modern Proton. If those were your two big sticking points, it's probably time to try Linux again.

Hulu was outright refusing to play anything a couple of months ago, for example.

Which platforms have you had issues with? All the ones I use (HBO Max, Crunchyroll, Netflix, Disney+, Amazon and Hulu) work fine, surprisingly. You do sometimes need to use a closed browser (Chrome, particularly) or enable DRM (Firefox), though.

They work fine only for SD contents. There are hacks that enable FullHD streams but they work only for Netflix.

MS really needs to release a Linux Excel.

Not sure if that's ever gonna happen. I could imagine, now that Steam tool care of a huge junk of gaming, Office is the main thing keeping a sizable number of people on Windows. Imagine if MS was reduced to MS Excel...

Microsoft is mostly reduced to the Office and Cloud teams. It's likely why the Windows UI is an inconsistent disaster.

It was always like that since the Windows days, Office drove the next UI improvements which would later appear as Windows common controls.

The current UI chaos is because the Windows team has become mostly the Cloud team, while the UI frameworks seem to keep rotating new people every couple of years.

They had to literally restaff WinForms and WPF teams from scratch, and then merged them with WinUI/UWP!

Seems reasonable. And to be honest, Teams is good for professional collaboration. And the MS Office suite isn't too bad. I used to be soslo founder until recently, and for that Office 365 was just perfect. No VPN, no really worries about it security. And even pricing was, I'd say, reasonable. Customer service is shit show, so.

Once they have ported it to Electron ...

They're basically trying to with Office 365. The OS is a commodity, so move everything into the browser. Then you can sell to the shops that are running Chromebooks, and support Mac without a separate team.

> A friend of mine bought the RedHat 5.2 distro from Best Buy

Ahh wow, this brings me back.

I bought, or rather had my parents buy, this exact same package from Best Buy when I was in high school or maybe the end of middle school. I remember thinking in the store that it was impossible for there to be something that wasn't Windows or Mac, and the packaging was so cool.

These were also the "10,000 Best Windows Games" shareware CD-ROM days (anyone remember the Aztech Cube pack? [1]) I was fascinated by the fact that Red Hat came with thousands of "packages" that weren't shareware. And that thicc documentation, wow so sexy. A printed catalog with info on each package. I remember feeling a sense of limitless possibility while flipping through its pages.

Installed Red Hat on a Pentium 1 Baby-AT tower that I picked up from Goodwill for $20. My friend and I spray painted it that summer and I slapped a 52x Creative Technologies branded CD-ROM drive with a cable that connected directly to a genuine Creative SoundBlaster sound card for music CD playback. I remember thinking how cool I was to have a Creative CD-ROM drive working with my Creative SoundBlaster playing Vertical Horizon's "Everything You Want" on Linux. All I needed was a KVM switch to play Civ 2 on my junkyard Win 95 Gateway pizza box sitting next to it.

Wild times.

[1]: https://www.mobygames.com/company/aztech-new-media-corp

Vertical Horizon's "Everything You Want" specifically spoke to me here because that was the EXACT era!!! I know I ripped that song using a connection of Perl scripts, then used LAME encoder in connection with some lyrics fetching script to encode the lyrics into the mp3 metadata.

I used Linux for the first time around 1993, and had it installed on a 386SX(?) with a satisfying amber monochrome screen, both of which I got for less than $100 total, IIRC.

Anyway, I had a friend whose mother ran a small data processing business, and it was known in our circle of nerd friends that she was in possession of a "real Unix machine". And what a machine it was - a beige box the size of a small car, with intriguing lights and cables and powerful hums and clicks. Anyway, I told her about this "Linux" thing, and she dismissed it as fantasy, so I brought my computer around to her office and gave her a demo.

The only comment I recall her making was something like, "Well, looks like you got yourself a $100 Unix machine." I could tell in her eyes, though, that she was feeling the world shift, heavily, from one epoch to the next.

I didn't use Linux proper until 2000. I had used Minix in around 1988/89 for an operating systems class. Never struck me as odd to be running a unix on my 8088 PC with 1 floppy drive. At the time it just seemed like a more powerful DOS.

I had a very similar "I can get a whole operating system for free?" eye opening experience when I got Slackware on a bunch of floppies.

I also picked tcsh for my main shell based off some blurb I read and spent a few months unlearning what I learned when I was actually given a task to maintain a Linux system a few years later.

I knew about Linux before trying it, so the free part was no surprise. My uncanny valley was being able to recompile the kernel with any options I wanted to; that felt both cool and unnatural, like "why aren't protecting their source code?".

Building from source was the fun part when I first got into Linux. Trying to get the modules down to the smallest subset possible that would run on my machine just to see how fast I could get it to boot.

Tricky part was it was a dual boot Windows installation on a single hard drive, I was always worried I would screw something up that I couldn't recover from since I needed the computer for school. Somehow I didn't mess up anything I couldn't recover from.

Ah, that brings back memories.

Compiling your own kernel was kind of a rite of passage back in the day. Now I cannot remember when I last did that. Must have been 14 years or so, when I was still using Gentoo.

I did that a few years ago for a semi-bricked WM8850 netbook which I can't reflash with Uberoid, a custom Android for these ARM machines. So I set up a VFAT partition with the kernel, a boot image file, and maybe I'll add some Void Linux root filesystem on an ext3 partition tomorrow. It's worse because booting from an SD card is not very realiable, but it's better than nothing.

The most single life-changing purchase of my life was probably a Linux magazine that included an Ubuntu DVD from the bookstore.

I had a teacher I was talking to (he looked kinda young to me) and he said he remembered when he first used linux when it had come out. What was mind blowing to me was that it was in his lifetime right after I was born.