I’m not that person, but most smaller distros back that weren’t the major ones (RedHat, Suse, Mandrake) had issues. Driver support from distro to distro was also very spotty, I remember having to hunt through three of them in 2002 to finally get one to recognize my Ethernet chipset. Yes, Ethernet, not Wifi, which would have been understandable.
This is why Ubuntu was such a big deal when it came out, it was one of the few where things more or less “just worked” without having to chase proprietary or reverse engineered drivers down
Yes, Ethernet, not Wifi, which would have been understandable.
Back in the day there was ‘software NICs’ on the market which required separate (driver-ish) software to do anything. Also there was RTL chips which required propietary parts from a driver and all the fun stuff. On wifi it’s still a thing now and then, but everything works far better today, and it’s at least partially because hardware is better too. Of course even in late 90’s when ethernet started to gain traction you could just throw something like 3c509 or e100 to your box and call it a day, but standards were far less mature than they’re today.
@tourist I tried it back in the time and it didn’t really work well. It was just a pain. None of the hardware I owned worked well enough. Graphics card only VESA mode, lack of compatibility issues, Wine was crappy at the time, a better approach was SuSE Linux which was the start for me to dive into the Linux world. Since then I took the hard tour and enjoyed playing around with SuSE on a second partition. Nowadays I use Linux only, except for company’s PC at the office, there I’m bound to Win.
Must really have been super shit if you remember how awful it was 20+ years later
Anything in particular that sent you over the edge?
I’m not that person, but most smaller distros back that weren’t the major ones (RedHat, Suse, Mandrake) had issues. Driver support from distro to distro was also very spotty, I remember having to hunt through three of them in 2002 to finally get one to recognize my Ethernet chipset. Yes, Ethernet, not Wifi, which would have been understandable.
This is why Ubuntu was such a big deal when it came out, it was one of the few where things more or less “just worked” without having to chase proprietary or reverse engineered drivers down
Back in the day there was ‘software NICs’ on the market which required separate (driver-ish) software to do anything. Also there was RTL chips which required propietary parts from a driver and all the fun stuff. On wifi it’s still a thing now and then, but everything works far better today, and it’s at least partially because hardware is better too. Of course even in late 90’s when ethernet started to gain traction you could just throw something like 3c509 or e100 to your box and call it a day, but standards were far less mature than they’re today.
I remember that even a graphical Installation was rare amongst distress which is why I briefly used Mandrake as one of my first.
@tourist I tried it back in the time and it didn’t really work well. It was just a pain. None of the hardware I owned worked well enough. Graphics card only VESA mode, lack of compatibility issues, Wine was crappy at the time, a better approach was SuSE Linux which was the start for me to dive into the Linux world. Since then I took the hard tour and enjoyed playing around with SuSE on a second partition. Nowadays I use Linux only, except for company’s PC at the office, there I’m bound to Win.
@tourist See this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=K9LjvXKA0DM&feature=shared 12:42