this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2025
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Right? I started futzing with different distros (all two/three of them, lol) in the mid to late 90s. Had zero clue how new all of this stuff actually was at the time. It felt like a super power to run something other than DOS/Win9{5,8}/NT4. No stupid software keys. Could easily run network services, etc.
The thing is in my memory it wasn't that special because at the time computers came in a lot more flavors than now. There were a ton of semi-recent computers that used just some variant of Basic, others some variant of DOS, DOS and Windows were different things and both in use, Apple-IIs were a thing, but also Macs...
I remember the first time I gave it a shot it was a bit of a teenage nerd challenge, because the documentation was so bad and you had to do the raw Arch thing with Debian and set up things step by step to get to a semblance of an X server, let alone a DE. And then after spending a couple nights messing with that I didn't think about it much until a few years later when Ubuntu sort of figured out making things easy.
By the mid 2000s I remember people my age laughing at older normies for not having heard of Linux already, so it all moved relatively fast. It was maybe less than a decade between it coming into being and then it being something you probably don't use but you've heard of, which is faster than I would have said if you asked me.
It got so big so fast. You're absolutely right. The movie Antitrust (basically a david/goliath allegory between FOSS and Microsoft) came out in 2001! Linux and FOSS had become mainstream enough to end up in a hollywood movie where even the onscreen time of the computers showed legit shells and stuff. Now Linux literally runs on billions of devices, and powers the backend of a majority of companies. Even Microsoft did a 180(-ish) and maintain their own distro for their cloud shit, made .net cross platform to run on Linux, etc.