Yeah but Suse linux existed

WinLinux 2000 (the first distro I ever installed) was a pretty painless experience. It installed as a Windows "app" which rebooted into Linux, and used UMSDOS to share a single filesystem.

If you're comparing RedHat Linux 7 against Windows XP, you're thinking in terms of the release date of XP. Windows XP was not very good when it came out, and it wasn't until it got the service packs.

So if you're going to start with something like Windows XP service pack 3, meaning that you were someone who didn't jump straight to Vista (I'll be a Vista apologist, but people were being reasonable when they didn't jump from XP), at that point, you're comparing it to Linux distros of 2008. That would be something like Fedora 8, Ubuntu 8, or Debian 4. This was the GNOME 2 era and it was a pretty damn smooth experience.

If you're thinking a bit deeper in terms of user experience for the early, early 2000s, then you would probably put FreeBSD high up on your list rather than treating Linux as an assumption.

I vaguely remember trying to install Gentoo back in the early 2000s. It took more than 24 hours and eventually failed with an inscrutable C compilation failure in some random package. That was quite the eye opening experience. Certainly gave me an appreciation for the relative polish of Red Hat and other packaged distros, despite their warts.

You couldn't get Slackware or SuSE to install ... ever? or recently?

that is missing the point.

people want to use windows XP in order to run old software that doesn't run on newer systems. (or because they are nostalgic, but those are not helped with linux, so we can ignore them)

a modern linux distribution is way more likely to run old linux and windows software than a modern windows version.

hence that's why the world needs linux, because it doesn't have the problems that windows upgrades have.

you may argue that new linux distributions don't have old libraries either, which is true, but getting older libraries to install and run is way easier than on windows. and it's possible to put an old linux binary (even one for which there is no source) into an environment and make it workable on a modern linux distribution, and with things like flatpak it is also possible to make such an environment easily installable for a non-technical end user. getting old windows binaries to run is even easier because that's exactly how wine works.

I recall installing linux wasn't the difficult part, it's getting your peripherals to work after that.

IIRC Linux installed pretty well, as long as you were dedicating the whole drive to it.

It was dual booting that would get you every time.

I used to install Slackware with a bunch of floppies... I think it was easier then Arch today (although I can do both)

I remember trying to get red hat 5 installed. Epic fail.

By 2002 I managed to get some district installed, but all I accomplished was having my distro eat my lab report (umount? Wtf?).

I didn't really get into Linux until grad school, and then only because i had to use an SGI daily

Linux 2.4 released in January 2001.

I remember circa 2004 I set up my non technical brother with one of the earliest versions of Ubuntu, after he kept getting malware on XP, and he didn't have difficulty with it. I was kind of surprised how easy it was. I was a debian and OpenBSD user at the time.

Never had problems installing any major Linux dist, but 15 years ago I still remember the boring and time consuming on patching the kernel with custom patches so that my wi-fi card or gfx card could work.

I stopped trying to use Linux as a desktop OS since then. But recently I tried for fun installing Ubuntu and everything just worked out of the box.

I still feel Linux is too fragmented, too many package managers, too many UI managers etc...but that's part of the beauty of it I guess.

For people unfamiliar with that era, here's a 1999 installation procedure for Red Hat 6 for a specific site (university lab), including configuring for their particular infrastructure setup (directory service, network filesystem including automounting, email, printing, clock-syncing):

https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/

My first Linux was Caldera OpenLinux 2.3[0] in 1999 that i got from a magazine and even at that time the installer was literally a "wizard" where you typed a few things like username, password, etc, selected which graphics card and monitor you have, what you wanted to install (full install ~1GB) in a series of Next, Next, Next, Done.

It even had a tetris game you could play while waiting for the packages to be copied in the background.

As a kid at the time i installed it on pretty much any PC i could get my hands on - my own, relatives, friends, etc, nobody was safe :-P though they found it interesting anyway since it was chock full of applications and games to play around - and i don't remember ever having issues. I tried it recently in 86box (which emulates old PCs) and it worked as good as i remember.

Though in a way it was probably an exceptional case, IMO that CD was basically the best well-put together distro (especially when you consider that KDE was basically beta software at the time).

[0] https://archive.org/details/OpenLinux2.3CD

I vaguely recall installs back then revolved around choosing compatible hardware more than anything else.

windows XP wasn't easier to install, especially if you had some hardware (scsi hard drives) that required providing a floppy for the drivers. On linux it is and has always been about choosing hardware that is supported out of the box. Slackware wasn't particularly difficult to install, it was regular step by step based and the defaults were sane. What made it difficult to people was trying to setup a dual boot without deleting their precious data.

FYI: XP installed on my 700mhz Athlon, clock chipped to 950. Redhat was hard, Slackware was an absolute nightmare. Gentoo took weeks. We recompiled everything and discovered that Intel does not create good amd binaries. Never went back to Linux on the back burner for 8 years on an Intel.

Microsoft wants your money and your loyalty.

I have yet to discover what Linux geeks want except for you to join them in some weird reality distortion field.

Two iMacs. One with Mint and one with Ubuntoo. Both just literally crawl. Alpine is so much faster, and we are gaining speed by hook and crook.