This was my first exposure to Linux - one of the PCs in high school had it installed. (I had read about Linux before then, but not had a chance to try it)
It had a little foam Tux in the box, and I got to keep it:
The only flaw in Corel's logic was that as soon as you're running Linux, you lose all desire to run WordPerfect, and develop an irresistible need to align yourself with vim or emacs...
Linux was the NFT or Blockchain or AI of 1999, so every tech company was jumping on board.
The sales pitch, as I remember, was that you could run your Wordperfect or CorelDraw shit on it, and not need to have Windows to use it and instead could join the future, which was Linux. Though, amusingly, their version of the future was running Windows binaries via Wine on Linux which, eh, okay but...
Of course, nobody used Wordperfect or CorelDraw at that point in history so I'm not entirely sure how that was supposed to sell you on buying not-Word and not-Photoshop.
Corel was, and still is, used in a lot of industries, like signmaking, embroidery, etc. It has been losing share in the general vector graphics space for years though.
they were trying to make a windows alternative since microsoft was using their leverage w windows to make corel lose money and courts were doing little more than slapping microsoft on the wrist for doing it.
I find it reminiscent to what Valve is doing with SteamOS and Proton today. That is, establishing a viable alternative to MS Windows through using Wine/Proton in order to not be reliant on a competitor for running their software.
Specially for people coming from windows, this was normal. The appeal of mandrake and corel and suse was this kind of graphical control panel à la windows where you needed root privileges in a graphical interface.
I myself didn't learn about sudo until years later, and su just from debian 3.0.
It was a serious issue back then. People were wandering around on the Internet with root accounts. A lot of #linux IRC channels were kicking&banning anyone with "~root" or "root" ident with educational sentence like "Do not use root account as your ordinary account, check instructions". We don't see the issue widespread today since distros did very good intended "dark patterns" to push users to regular user accounts.
Linux (or UNIX) "root" account is true god mode. E.g. infamous "rm" as root joke (!) could even affect Windows running WSL2, so MS had to implement special workarounds.
Oh man, what a throwback! I had completely forgotten about this. It made a splash and then I never heard anything more about it. One of my coworkers installed it on his Toshiba laptop and ran it for a week or two before giving up.
This was my first exposure to Linux. I had no internet at the time so I left it on my computer for a couple of weeks and played with the settings and Snake, then reinstalled Windows so I could play my games again.
@richardisaguy@lemmy.world It mainly competed against Windows 98 and Windows 2000 by Microsoft so I guess they were trying to jump on the hype with using a similar interface
Qt1 came with two default themes. One of them mimicked Win95 and the other mimicked Motif. KDE1 defaulted to the former in order to look more familiar. To this day, the "Windows 9x" theme still ships with Qt and can be selected on any Plasma 6 install. Starting with KDE2 they started using their own custom themes for everything, tho.
GNOME 1 actually looked very similar, which isn't surprising because its main goal at that point was to offer a replacement for KDE that didn't depend on then-proprietary Qt. GNOME 2 and KDE 2 is when they really started building a distinct identity.