OT - Which Linux?

[language_fan]

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:18:57 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu thusly wrote:

> Same here! And the step looked unconceivable just a couple months
> earlier. I remember how a friend who was in the beginning stages of
> Linux asked me several times and very incredulously: "What do you mean
> you don't have Windows at all on your laptop?"

Linux has matured a lot since the early days. When I first tried it, it 
took me 4 years and 2 PC upgrades to get a compatible graphics card which 
was able to display anything other than the 80x25 text mode and 
320x200x4b on xfree86. No, I don't want to manually type some weird bit 
counts and internal clock frequencies ever again!

I bought my first nvidia card in 1999 and everything has worked almost 
flawlessly since then. And that's not even the worst part, 10 years ago 
there was no ntfs write support, many sound drivers sucked, hotplug 
sucked, 56k internal modem drivers sucked, even the mouse drivers acted 
randomly, fscking ext2 (ext3 didn't exist yet!) was dreadfully slow, and 
the distro cds came with broken compiler packages. The fresh new 
installation was mostly useful for learning bash and perl, but not much 
more, a graphical desktop would have been something awesome.