Linux during the mid to late 90s (Windows 95 and 98 era)

Ah, the golden age. I dunno, I was running FreeBSD. It was awesome. It still is.

It was kind of an upstart thing and people were trying to find ways to monetize it.

My first Linux was Red Hat on a 486 in 1998 and it was different than I was used to. I was a kid who didn't know how to startx so I just emailed a developer using pine and they helped me figure out and choose a window manager. Nobody even got mad at this barely teenager just emailing dumb questions. I got lost with fvwm95 and afterstep. I tried every window manager, mlvwm, qvwm, IceWM, etc but ended up liking blackbox the most. I had 12MB of RAM on my first Linux system, 1MB of vram and 256 colors. We were all sarcastic in a cringe, adolescent way but everyone was friendly and helpful.

There was this fascination with monkeys in pop culture, but not real monkeys --chimps and gorillas. People would throw monkey in their username or in some random nu-metal song for some reason. There were monkeys you could download for your desktop. There was this thing by PC gamer called coconut monkey. I don't know what that's all about. And anyway I associate this period with the foot logo of Gnome, which was unprofessional but that was the point. Also, gimp was a funny name for an app (its cringe today), and PAN stood for pimp ass news.

I discovered Slashdot and Freshmeat and Sourceforge and kuro5hin. Usenet groups were great back then. So was irc. I trolled Slashdot and got negative karma and for the next 15 years before we all moved to SoylentNews, my comments started at -1.

Nobody knew how to pronounce Linux. Some people said Line-X because his name was Linus like on Charlie Brown, and some people said Leenucks.

At some point it became a corporate thing and the term Linux was everywhere. Randomly on magazine covers. There was also this divide, almost marketing driven, it seemed that people who liked warez and whatever started to love Microsoft and shit on Linux. So gamers especially started to shit talk and that's the first time that being a computer nerd wasn't like this unifying concept, there was an us versus them divide. People who could compile code they wrote and who were genuinely curious versus people who just wanted to download a bunch of shit and show you how big their start menu was and play games. I think this divide still exists.

There was a bunch of commercial software for Linux too. Metro-X, Accelerated X, Motif, Applixware, Star Office. Descent 3. One of the Quakes. Motif, the toolkit, looked amazing. I thought CDE with themes was the coolest looking thing ever. But I couldn't afford CDE so I used XFce which was an XForms knockoff. And then enlightenment came along and pushed the boundaries of what we thought a desktop would be. Also, I was able to drag console windows with transparency on that 486 on e16.

Debian kind of had an elitist community and talked down to people so I never used it. I liked Slackware the most and spent a weekend downloading the floppies over a dialup connection. That led to me discovering FreeBSD in 1999, which I stuck with for almost a decade.

Later, a comp sci student, I didn't see Linux at university in the labs. It was Solaris and macOS in the mid 2000s. Eventually, the Solaris computers were shut down and replaced with more Macs.

My girlfriend's Windows ME computer was so full of spyware so I installed SuSE with KDE on it for her in her dorm. And she was able to do her papers in AbiWord. And 20+ years later we are married and it all worked out.

I finally switched to Debian stable about 4 years ago and have no complaints. It's a lot easier now.

Edit: A couple more things: I started using Linux because I was very poor and it was free and Windows 95 was a mess on my system. I mean dirt roads and no water for long periods of time. My 486 in 1998 was sort of old already and it came with 8mb of RAM as a hand me down in 1995, but I was dumpster diving outside a community college when I was 12 and found an IBM PS/2 and stole the 30 pin SIMMs out of it. And one of them worked in my 486 computer so I ended up with 12mb of RAM. I overclocked it to 100mhz. That 486 got me through high school and into college where I ended up with an AMD system with a pirated Thai RM233 Windows 2000. But I went back to FreeBSD because I needed a compiler. So that kind of knowledge was useful and now that I have a good career from what I learned, I have donated a lot of money over the years to different projects. Also I make sure my kids have only ever known Linux and Gnome and it works fine for them.

It was a struggle. You went to buy some device and you had to check it was not one of those windows-only ones. Modems were particularly bad, for example.

You had to read the how-tos and figure things out. Mailing lists and newsgroups were the only places to find some help.

You had to find the shop willing to honour warranty on the parts and not on the whole system, as they had no knowledge of Linux at all. But once you found them, you were a recurring customer so they were actually happy. You might even have ended up showing them memtest86!

You would still be able to configure the kernel and be able to actually know some of those names, compilation would take several hours but it was a learning experience.

You could interact with very helpful kernel developers and get fixes to test.

You could have been the laughing stock of your circles of friends, but within you, you knew who'd have had the last laugh.

And yes, Loki games had some titles working on Linux natively, Railroad Tycoon was one. Too bad they were ahead of the times and didn't last much.

Everything was harder back then - even when using Windows. But you had to be a real masochist to run Linux.

Computers were still quite new that most people had no real use for them beyond "work things". Only nerds really used them for anything else. "Do you have an email address" isn't a question you ask today.

"Kids these days" don't realize how easy they have it when it comes to just general comparability. There weren't a lot of standards yet and vendors had proprietary drivers and offered no support AT ALL for "lye nux". You had to do a ton of research and fiddling to figure out if there was any support for your specific version of a specific chip used by any peripheral you used. And then to discover that you had to patch your kernel to add a driver that somebody had bodged together. So now you were running your own fun custom-kernel so you could get full-duplex rather than simplex audio! But it works!

Like - lets say today you want to buy an external IDE drive controller to plug in some old drives to for backup. You to to Amazon, search "USB external IDE enclosure" and buy the cheapest one you find. It probably works unless it's defective. In '95 USB and Firewire were in their infancy so you would probably buy a serial or parallel port device. You would need to find whether Linux supported the specific version of the thing you wanted to buy, what tools there would be for it, etc. There was no standard "bulk storage device" driver that you could rely on or hope the vendor would implement. Even if you were an early adopter and got a USB or Firewire device it might have some "basic" functionality that works with OSS drivers but you couldn't use all of it.

Vendors back then also shipped their own software with things, not just drivers. It was always just the absolute worst crap that was buggy as shit. But it would do a lot of the heavy lifting in working with their device. Like any Creative Labs audio player you wanted to get working. Sure it used USB but it didn't just mount as storage device, you needed to use the worst GUI ever put before mankind to use it (under Windows). Under Linux you had to find a specific tool that would support pushing/pulling media from it. These days it would just mount as a drive automatically and you'd use standard desktop tools to interact with it.

Even with DOS/Windows you'd buy a game and as you came home from the store with it in a box wonder "will this work on my computer and how long will I need to mess with it?" I had to configure a specific CD-ROM driver to be used by DOS just to run Tie Fighter vs. X-Wing for example. Had a special boot floppy just for that game since that driver didn't work with literally anything else I had.

Hardware just generally didn't "auto configure". "Plug 'n Play" was still very much in its infancy and you often had to manually configure hardware and install special drivers just for a particular card or peripheral.

IRQ 7 DMA 220. I probably just triggered some folks. If you were setting up a "Sound Blaster or compatible" then you had to know what interrupt it used (7) and what address it was on on the direct-memory bus (220). And you hoped there wasn't a conflict with something else. If there was then there would be a DIP switch you could use to change the base memory address or IRQ from the default. But you were telling your software where to find the card.

USB was a f'ing game changer for peripherals. Serial and parallel ports were so slow and obnoxious to use. Before that there was no real way to "probe" the bus to discover what was there unless you knew exactly what you were looking for (there's no lsusb for serial ports). So you just guessed at the driver you need and "modprob foo" hoping it worked.

It's amazing what 20ish years of just developing standards has done.

If you want a taste of that world I highly recommend LGR on YouTube. He's mostly Windows focused but look for videos where he tries out "oddware" to see how often he has trouble getting things to work on period hardware using the vendor-supplied software even. Then multiply that by 100x for Linux. :-)

Way back in the early 90s I needed to use LaTeX for university. The dos version was awful and couldn't handle large documents. So the options were (1) a nextcube for $$$$, (2) Nextstep 3.3 for PCs for $$$ (some faculty had this), or (3) linux. So I downloaded slackware on dozens of disks.

You had to configure the kernel, which wasn't too hard since the autoconfig walked you through it. The hardest part was setting up X11, which required a lot of manual config, and if you screwed up the timings you could destroy a CRT monitor. OpenStep was an option, so there was a moderately friendly windowmanager available.

Learning Emacs was also fairly unpleasant, but that was the best option for editing TeX at the time.

Everything would work, until it suddenly would break. But nonetheless I was somehow able to get that thesis done.

Ugh, modern linux is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much better

Ah, yes, Linux around the turn of the century. Let's see...

GPU acceleration? In your dreams. Only some cards had drivers, and there were more than 2 GPU manufacturers back then, too... We had ATi, nVidia, 3dfx, Cirrus, Matrox, Via, Intel... and almost everyone held their driver source cards close to their chest.

Modems? Not if they were "winmodems", which had no hardware controller, the CPU and the Windows driver (which was always super proprietary) did all the hard work.

Sound? AC'97 software audio was out of the question. See above. You had to find a sound blaster card if you wanted to get audio to work right.

So, you know how modern linux has software packages? Well, back then, we had Slackware, and it compiled everything gentoo style back then. In addition, everyone had a hardon for " compiling from source is better"... so your single core Pentium II had to take its time compiling on a UDMA66-connected hard drive, constrained with 32 or 64 MB RAM. Updating was an overnight procedure.

RedHat and Debian were godsends for people who didn't want to waste their time compiling.... which unfortinately was more common even so, because a lot of software was source only.

Oh, and then MP3 support was ripped out of RedHat in Version 9 iirc, the last version before they split it into RHEL and Fedora. RIP music.

As for Linux on a Mac, there was Yellowdog, which supported the PPC iMacs and such. It was decently good, but I had to write my own x11 monitor settings file (which I still have on a server somewhere, shockingly, I should throw it on github or somewhere) to get the screen to line up and work right.

Basically, be glad Linux has gone from the "spend a considerable amount of time and have programming / underhood linux knowledge to get it working" to "insert stick, install os, start using it" we have now.

I tried slackwear in '94. Getting it running was no big deal, but I had zero experience and documentation / help guides were thin. Installing applications or getting peripherals to work was prohibitively difficult without having a pretty decent amount of knowledge about it.

My high school had a rather large dose/novell Network but there was no internet yet. BBS's were a thing and you could get a lot of installers and information from them. But they were all running in dos for the most part

My college had a VAX, it was more or less there just to get email and power a metric ass load of terminals in the library for research purposes. They really tried to keep you out of the CLI, everything was menued. I figured out that you could go for it to a South African University about seven times in a row and it would explode and give you a telnet session, but even then I wasn't really working with an OS shell. The school had a computer lab. It was all Windows 3 and Novell, No internet for the longest time.

My ISP had options to dial up into a terminal session. My home dial up line was awful. Trying to FTP over PPP was a fool's errand. I started getting used to connecting to my ISP and FTPing files down to their local node on with their T1 and then switching over to z modem to download the files to my house with the ability to auto restart on failure.

I didn't try to run a Linux based OS again until Gnome came out.

I remember running Slackware and having to recompile the kernel for just about any hardware you added. I configured a box to be used as a router before routers were something you could get commonly at Best Buy.

I was taking comp. sci. at university and all our work was done on Sparc workstations. Having a Unix-like machine at home was a great help during that time

You could buy box copies of the original suse Linux that had manuals in the box the size of a TI graphing calculator manual.

Once you got X working everything else was cake by comparison.

Hearing your monitor squeal when you got the modelines wrong was fun.

I used it in a university course in '95, not sure what distro, but customising your shell prompt, and setting automatic timed updates for the wallpaper in tvwm certainly felt like the future. Different and electric.

We would play the linux shareware first release of quake in 12-16 player. Hiding the executable by renaming it ekauq... didn't work, still got removed from our directories.

There were installfests at the local LUG, which were a fun way to share tips and help others.

One Linux support business existed in our town in the 90s, installing and fixing Linux boxen for businesses. Mostly home/hobby use though.

Slashdot.org was covering the majority of Linux news. Either MS FUD or the nonsense SCO lawsuit, amongst all the positive advances.

Linux conferences were a fun way to make it more real and see many of the big names behind the movement and technologies.

Installed RedHat 4 or 5.1 around 98 and then found the power of Debian. Currently running Trisquel GNU/Linux because it is a fully libre distro with no proprietary blobs or other obfuscated parts.

Many thanks to RMS and all FLOSS contributors, there is such an incredible spectrum of tools available for free use. It has been great to see the progression and expansion over the decades.

Slackware and Red Hat were the two distros in use in the mid 90s.

My local city used proper UNIX, and my university had IRIXworkstations SPARCstations and SunOS servers. We used Linux at my ISP to handle modem pools and web/mail/news servers. In the early 2000s we had Linux labs, and Linux clusters to work on.

Linux on the desktop was a bit painful. There were no modules. Kernels had to fit into main memory. So you'd roll your own kernel with just the drivers you needed. XFree86 was tricky to configure with timings for your CRT monitors. If done wrong, you could break your monitor.

I used FVWM2 and Enlightenment for many years. I miss Enlightenment.

Ah, Linux from scratch...

Also, hardware was... Harder back then, on Linux (mostly modems).

Beside that, software wise there was less stuff on Linux than today, so you had to check carefully you had what you needed.

But I was already a Linux user, and a linux-only user at that.

In the early 90s all the "cool kids" (for a techie definition of "cool", i.e. hackers) at my University (a Technical one in Portugal with all the best STEM degrees in the country) used Linux - it was actually a common thing for people to install it in the PCs of our shared computer room.

Later in that decade it was already normal for it to be used in professional environments for anything serving web pages (static or dynamic) along with Apache: Windows + IIS already had a lower fraction of that Market than Linux + Apache.

If I remember it correctly in the late 90s RedHat started providing their Enterprise Version with things like Support Contracts - so beloved by the Corporates who wanted guarantees that if their systems broke the supplier would fix them - which did a lot to boost Linux use on the backend for non-Tech but IT heavy industries.

I would say this was the start of the trend that would ultimately result in Linux dominating on the server-side.

Heard about linux from someone at school in -95, I was 15 at the time. No idea where he had heard about it. Brought a stack of floppy disks and downloaded slackware on a school computer. Of course some of the disks had read errors so had to copy them again the next day but eventually I got slackware installed. In spring of -96 redhat 3.0.3 was released which I for some reason bought the full version of, still have the box in my bookcase. Since then I have been a pretty much 100% linux desktop user. Well 95% since I was dual booting windows for games for a long time.

I spent a lot of time back then learning linux by experimentation and hanging out on IRC talking to people about linux. As others have said, you had to compile the kernel because there were no kernel modules (had forgotten about that!) and I remember being quite fast in navigating the kernel configuration menus. I wouldn't even know where to start nowadays! :)

This was me, you're talking about me. 😂 In the 90's Linux was barely getting started but slackware was probably the main distro everyone was focused on. That was the first one I ran across. This was probably late 90's, I don't remember when slack first came about though.

By the time the 2000's came around, it was basically a normal thing for people in college to have used or at least tried. Linux was in the vernacular, text books had references to it, and the famous lawsuit from SCO v IBM was in full swing. There were distro choices for days, including Gentoo which I spent literally a week getting everything compiled on an old Pentium only for it to not support some of the hardware and refuse to boot.

There was a company I believe called VA Linux that declared that year to be the year of the Linux desktop. My memory might be faulty on this one.

Loki gaming was a company that specialized in porting games to Linux, and they did a good job at it but couldn't make money. I remember being super excited about them and did buy a few games. I was broke too so that was a real splurge for me. I feel like they launched in the 90's (late) and crashed in the early 2000's.

It was prominent in smaller businesses that wanted or needed a Unix but weren't going to pay what sun or IBM or HP and friends wanted for their hardware+software.

It ate the proprietary Unix market awfully quickly and I don't think anyone really misses it.

For me, educational stuff was all windows with a small amount of macs and I don't think I ever saw a Linux system in actual use anywhere.

I used it on the desktop but that was super rare because hardware support was nowhere as good as now - even getting X up was a challenge (go read up on mode lines if you want some entertainment).

I can't remember if it was 99 or 2000, I got a copy of Red Hat 6.0 (Hedwig) on the cover of a magazine and installed it. I remember the Lilo boot manager giving me trouble and then it was multiple days of dialing up the internet on my dad's PC to find info on getting X11 to run correctly on my graphics hardware. Once I got that going it was my win modem that defeated me in the end, couldn't get any internet. So was back to Windows for another couple of years.

In 2003 my university course had a Linux Administration subject and the lecturer had built a live cd of Fedora Core 2 (this was in the days before live cds were a regular thing) it was a revelation and it worked with much less setup. We had a Linux lab, but the livecd allowed us to work on Linux on our personal machines. I'd dabble with Linux and explore distros for a few years, depending on hard ware compatibility, I'd always have at least one Linux box. I remember attempting to get HalfLife 2 running in Cedega (a commercial fork of wine), even played the original left4dead with friends, this was in 2008. I was there when pulse audio launched before it was ready and when KDE moved to version 4 and was an absolute resource hog. I bought the unreal and tournament games on disc to play on Linux. Was Disappointed when the UT3 release got delayed and then eventually canceled. I remember going to the id software ftps to get the Linux binaries for all the quakes. There were a few other Linux adventures in there, like a misguided attempt at compiling Gentoo in 2007 and working out mythtv server as a media pc and pvr.

Was excited when I got beta access to steam in 2012, and I haven't had Windows on my personal computers since then.

the first contact i had with linux back in mid-90's brazil was with my isp's login terminal, which displayed some arcane text reading "red hat linux version x.x". after that, during my father's final years working in bank of brazil he had to deal with cobra's homemade distro in his workstations (cobra had developed an unix in the 80s that run on m68k's, so no surprises here). it was an absolutely esoteric system to those who only knew the dos/windows 3.11 duo, since w95 only arrived in our country in numbers only in 96. the thing really caught on during the early to mid-2000's, with faster and cheaper adsl connections, and with them, abundant knowledge and downloads available to any script kid.

Driver support was so dicey. If you had anything even remotely not mainstream, you would be compiling your own video driver, or network driver, or basically left to figure it out for any other peripheral. So many devices like scanners and very early webcams just claimed zero Linux support at all, but you could at times find someone else's project that might work.

I tried to switch to Linux as a desktop system several times in the late 90s but kept going back to windows because hardware support just wasn't there yet.

Well, if is now, was back then.

My linux experience:

1993 - Hey, there's a new Unix-like thing for the PC. You can check it out down at the university computer club.

1994 - Wow, I finally managed to get X running

1996 - It was somewhat normal for more nerdy software developers to run linux full-time on their desktop at work.

1998 - Linux was taking over servers to the point where you rarely saw Solaris, HP-UX, AIX around any more.

2002 - Everyone agreed that linux was pretty much ready to take over the desktop as well.

Not a veteran, but... During the 90s, while still in primary school, a friend of mine bought a Chip magazine with a CD attached and instructions inside the magazine how to install a mysterious thing called "Linux" from said CD. It was supposed to be something like Windows 95, but new, better and it had a Penguin on it, so we decided to try it.

We followed magazine's installation guide to the letter (or at least we thought so) until the installation stuck at error saying KERNEL PANIC!!! and wouldn't let us finish. We didn't understand English much back then, but we found the panicking kernel hilarious. Anyway, we figured it's been enough h4Ck!nG for that day and got back to playing Diablo 1.

There's already a ton of great examples which I can relate (I've been using linux since 1998 or 99) but maybe the biggest difference today, apart from that everything is SO MUCH EASIER now, is that the internet wasn't really the thing it is today. Specially the bandwidth. It took hours and hours over the phone line to download anything, on a good day you could get 100MB just under 4 hours. Of course things were a lot smaller too back then, but it still took ages and I'm pretty sure I now have more bandwidth on my home connection than most of the local universities had back in the 90s.

If you weren't at a university it was generally a challenge to get hold of disks. Downloading at home took forever on a 28.8 or even 56k modem (ie. 56 kilobits per second).

Slackware and Redhat disk sets were the thing, in my experience. But generally that only gave you the compiled code, not the source (although there was an another set of disks with the source packages).

If you wanted to recompile stuff you had to download the right set of packages, and be prepared to handle version conflicts on your own (with mailing list and usenet support).

Recompiling the kernel with specific patches for graphics cards, sound cards, modems and other devices (I remember scanners in particular), or specific combinations of hardware was relatively common. "Use the source, Luke!" was a common admonition. Often times specific FAQ pages or howtos would be made available for software packages, including games.

XFree86 was very powerful on hardware it supported, but was very finnicky. See the other posts about the level of detail that had to be supplied to get combinations of graphics cards and monitors working without the appearance of magic smoke.

Running Linux was mostly a enthusiast/hobbyist/geek thing, for those who wanted to see what was possible, and those who wanted to tinker with something approaching Unix, and those who wanted to stretch the limits of what their hardware could do.

Many of those enthusiasts and hobbyists and geeks discovered that Linux could do far more than anyone previously had been prepared to admit or realise. They, and others like them, took it with them into progressively more significant, and valuable projects, and it began to take over the world.

I got a copy of Turbolinux 6 (released in 2000) from somebody at a Hamfest, but couldn't get it to install and run.

Two years later, I was successful in running Debian and Gentoo.

My community college(1997) had a Suse linux computer lab that I learned on. It was mostly used as a networking/server and programming platform.

Loki was the leading porting developer at the time.

The thing that sticks with me is video card support. Back then (before Nvidia, 3dfx, etc) you had VGA cards that had one of a number of chipsets on, but it would be paired with a video timing chip and a RAMDAC. Buying a card required knowing which combination of parts it used and which combinations had support in XFree86. Then writing the configuration required knowing the video timings supported by your monitor. Not just frequencies, but blanking periods and such like.

EDID solved that last problem.

I started playing with Linux in the late 90s while I was in grad school. Slackware 3.x. I think I might have tried one or two others, but since I was somewhat familiar with Unix, Slackware was the easiest for me to learn.

I got them via CD ROMs; I'm pretty sure they came with a book on Linux (I think it included several distributions on CDs). I don't think I have that book any more; I likely got rid of it long ago as it was badly out of date. But my memory is that it was published by Que, a publisher that I had good experience with on other topics. (dBase III, for example) I'm pretty sure it was this one...leave it to Amazon to still have it.

I recall recompiling kernel because it was "so much faster" (I cringe at myself now for thinking that - it probably wasn't even true on my Pentium 133 machines). I also remember spending time trying to get X-windows configured, but I was successful. I think I was using fvwm95 window manager, a Windows-like experience. I started using Linux essentially full time pretty quickly.

A few times I got frustrated with Linux and tried to switch back to Windows, but the headaches of Windows always quickly drove me back to Linux. Linux is not perfect, but Windows is even worse.

I went to college in 93, and they ran a Unix mainframe with thin clients connected to it in the computer labs.

I didn’t really know much about any computers then, but I learned quick and had nerdy friends teach me a lot. Home computers ran DOS, but this fancy thing called Linux had entered the scene and nerds played with it.

I remember it being a bear. My comp sci roommate did most of the work, but he’d dole out mini projects to me to help him out. You had to edit text files with your exact hardware parameters or else it wouldn’t work. Like resolutions, refresh rates, IRQs, mouse shit, printer shit - it was maddening. And then you’d compile that all for hours. And it always failed. Many hardware things just weren’t ever going to work.

Eventually we got most things working and it was cool as beans. But it took weeks - seriously. We were able to act as a thin client to the mainframe and run programs right from our apartment instead of hauling ourselves to the computer lab. Interestingly, on Linux, that was the first time I had ever gotten a modem and a mouse working together. It was either/or before that.

It was both simultaneously horrific and fantastic at the same time. By the time windows 95 rolled out, the Unix mainframe seemed old and archaic. All the cool kids were playing Warcraft 2 and duke nukem 3D.

I started with Suse 5 when it came out, as something I was interested in fucking about with. I didn't have internet access at that time, but I did had a couple of books about it (the distro came with a book as well). It was a couple of CDs and a boot floppy disk (booting from CD wasn't really a thing).

I used it for years for software development and simple tasks like Word processing. Getting my printer working on the thing was a chore, as was basically anything. Especially without internet solving issues was sometimes simply impossible. My scanner simply didn't work. Getting the desktop environment to run was very hard, I struggled with it for a long time. And once I got it working properly, I got a new videocard and it broke the whole thing again.

The system was very painful to use, it was super cool, but almost nothing ever worked right. And trying to fix shit usually made it worse. But once you did get it working right, it was simply awesome. And the feeling of accomplishment was awesome after finally getting something right. For software development on the terminal it was pretty awesome though. Back then I did almost everything in text mode, as I was used to DOS before that. Going into Windows was something you did only sometimes with Windows 3.11 (and even 95) and I did the same in my Linux environment. The desktop environment used up a lot of memory and was pretty slow, so I preferred the console. It was only later booting into the desktop became the norm (around the Windows 98 era).

I used Suse till version 6.1 (still have that box). I bought version 7 (still have that box as well), but never really used it.

Back then I used Debian to create small internet routers for my friends. I got an old compact computer, put in a floppy with Debian, a couple of network cards and created small NAT boxes like that. This was before NAT routers were the norm, people just had internet on 1 machine, connected directly. But as computers became cheaper, a lot of folk had more than 1 computer in the home. With no real way to share the internet connection between the different computers. Microsoft created the Internet Connection Sharing feature, but that was pretty slow, disconnected often and ate resources on your "main" PC. So my little boxes worked great, I helped people setup a home network, connected my magic box to get every system online. Also helped them setup some port forwarding for the stuff they used.

Because I used Debian a lot, I switched over to Debian for my main rig when Suse 7 released. Used Potato, Woody, Sarge and Etch a lot. Switched around between Debian and Ubuntu in the Lenny and Squeeze era. Have been using Ubuntu ever since, never really had a reason to switch. Debian compared to Suse was so nice, I really liked the way Debian did things. It made a lot more sense for me in my head compared to Suse.

As I fucked around with computers a lot, I always had both Linux and DOS/Windows machines running and even had a couple of dual boot systems. For any kind of gaming DOS/Windows was required back then and I did love to game. I do think Windows 10 will be my last Microsoft OS, since Windows 11 absolutely sucks (use it at work, I hate it). Work stuff has become less and less of an issue to get stuff done on Linux just as well as on Windows. And gaming has come leaps and bounds due to the work on the Steamdeck.

So hope to fully ditch Microsoft in the near future, even though my first ever computer in 1984 ran Microsoft firmware with Microsoft Basic being the default user interface.

I am a 90s child, so I don’t completely fit your timespan, but I remember the first PC with SuSe Linux that I built with my father from old server hardware he got from his job.

Back then his job used unix and it was pretty common in his field of work. So Linux was the natural choice for a home pc. SuSe was popular back then, I think mainly because it came on CDs and had books available.

One of the main things I remember is the hassle with network drivers, having to download them on a working pc first.

You have several long and comprehensive answers so please allow me to add an emotional one:

Fucking compile error in hour six of what you estimated to be a four hour compile job because of a mistake you made that you found within 5 seconds after the error!!

Fucking why doesn't this compilation start I can't find my mistake for hours?!

Where does this module come from?! What do you mean "root kit"? Learning was fun!

It all was fun! :)

Linux was in use on some university machines although I lot of them were still running Sun hardware OS. The main distribution I used at the time was Slackware.

I'm not sure I consider myself a "veteran" since I still used Windows most of the time back then, but I used it in the late 90s. This is all anecdotal from my perspective, but the late 90s Linux experience was pretty rough on the desktop side, especially installing it. I actually rarely saw Debian in use, it was usually Red Hat for the sane people or Slackware for the lunatics. There were a few notable Linux game ports, but generally speaking, gaming wasn't something most people did or even expected to do in Linux. I think I had a small handful games that weren't terminal roguelikes: Doom, Quake, Tux Racer, and Alpha Centauri ( this one might have been early 2000s, hard to recall ). I can't say I personally saw anyone openly using it at the university level in almost any form when I attended, I saw a lot of Unix though. Everyone I knew that was using Linux was younger and did have a slightly hobbyist leaning, with the more serious people usually using OpenBSD or FreeBSD.

I got a disk of suse Linux from a library book. I put it on my laptop and it worked-ish.

I didn't know what partitions were so I messed up my laptop pretty bad. But I learned more in that little bit than my undergrad degree.

Loki distributed alpha centauri if I remember correctly? Awesome game. The windows version is actually easier to run on Linux than the original Linux release nowadays.

From my perspective, anything pre-ubuntu was a colossal ballache for a desktop system. I played around with suse, mandrake, etc prior to that but getting things working often felt like a chore.

Was it mainly a hobbyist thing at the time

Yes, I'd say so. Lots of tech geeks were playing with it but no Normals. Getting audio running was not always pleasant....