How far things have come

Kaitain

Kaitain

Active Member
One advantage of a little bit of absence is it lets me see things from a fresh perspective. As I'm looking back at old threads here and elsewhere (and remembering a few from forums now shut down), I'd just like to take a moment to point out how bloody good Linux desktops are in 2025. That's not to say that "this will be the year of the Linux desktop" - that'll only happen if it starts being preinstalled on mid-range laptops in Walmart.

My first abortive venture with Linux was in the year 2000, with a copy of Red Hat Linux 6.2 (codename Zoot) - not to be confused with RHEL, this was when Red Hat was still young and staffed mostly by basement dwelling geeks with beards and BO, and not the current slickly corporate enterprise we know today. It was abortive because I couldn't get the softmodem in my PC to work, and didn't have the money to go out and buy a hardware modem. So I scrubbed it and sat on Windows 98 for a couple more years. Subsequently, I did install SuSE 7.3, and others later on, including getting my modem working. However, fglrx was always a complete dog to install on binary based systems, and I'd turned to team green long before I first tried Gentoo.

For the sake of nostalgia, I spent a few hours setting up my first Linux failure, Red Hat Linux 6.2 (codename Zoot), into a virtual machine... as you may imagine, it was not a smooth experience, and took longer to to get running than Gentoo did a few weeks back. It's also essentially useless... but have some screenshots anyway - this from the Gnome desktop of the time. This version and KDE were almost indistinguishable - later, Gnome went cartoonish, and I just didn't like that.

View attachment RedHat6_2.pngView attachment RedHat6_2_2.pngView attachment RedHat6_2_3.png
 
The thing that struck me with installing RH6.2 was both how new everything was, and how sophisticated it had already become. Although the Linux kernel itself was only 9 years in development, Gnome and KDE were even newer at 3 and 4 years old, respectively.

If you had supported hardware and accepted that if something didn't work out of the box, there wasn't a nice dialogue box, well written error message, or customer support line to help you, it was roughly as functional as Windows 98. If you had any combination of unsupported hardware, nervousness around the console, or sensitivity to being called an idiot, then it was roughly as functional as Windows 95 on launch day. Not bad for a hobby project.

In terms of the virtual environment, trying to play any sound results in the virtual environment immediately aborting. I suppose next I'll upgrade through my own little nostalgia journey until I find the earliest version that's actually usable in 2025...
 
Kaitain said:
One advantage of a little bit of absence is it lets me see things from a fresh perspective. As I'm looking back at old threads here and elsewhere (and remembering a few from forums now shut down), I'd just like to take a moment to point out how bloody good Linux desktops are in 2025. That's not to say that "this will be the year of the Linux desktop" - that'll only happen if it starts being preinstalled on mid-range laptops in Walmart.

My first abortive venture with Linux was in the year 2000, with a copy of Red Hat Linux 6.2 (codename Zoot) - not to be confused with RHEL, this was when Red Hat was still young and staffed mostly by basement dwelling geeks with beards and BO, and not the current slickly corporate enterprise we know today. It was abortive because I couldn't get the softmodem in my PC to work, and didn't have the money to go out and buy a hardware modem. So I scrubbed it and sat on Windows 98 for a couple more years. Subsequently, I did install SuSE 7.3, and others later on, including getting my modem working. However, fglrx was always a complete dog to install on binary based systems, and I'd turned to team green long before I first tried Gentoo.

For the sake of nostalgia, I spent a few hours setting up my first Linux failure, Red Hat Linux 6.2 (codename Zoot), into a virtual machine... as you may imagine, it was not a smooth experience, and took longer to to get running than Gentoo did a few weeks back. It's also essentially useless... but have some screenshots anyway - this from the Gnome desktop of the time. This version and KDE were almost indistinguishable - later, Gnome went cartoonish, and I just didn't like that.

View attachment 26099View attachment 26101View attachment 26102
Click to expand...
It was just so ugly!! may as well be windoze!
 
happiness comes per-installed with Mint Linux!

it sings in my memory like a first date or a slice of ice cold watermelon on a hot august day.
 
Daniel~ said:
It was just so ugly!! may as well be windoze!
Click to expand...
Aw D~, at the turn of the millennium, nothing computer related was beautiful. Computers were beige boxes, screens were flickery CRTs with enough UV output to damage eyesight, and all desktops - be they Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Mac OS9, and Unix's CDE, as well as outliers like Amiga Workbench (still being supported by an enthusiastic community), were all dog ugly. Both Gnome and KDE initially started out as (mostly) FOSS copies of CDE (1), and looked practically identical both to it and to each other for their first few revisions. (OK, Apple, predictably, did manage to release something pretty if you had deep pockets and only wanted to use two applications.)

Beauty requires resources, and my computer at this time only had 256MB RAM and an 8MB video card, with a 333Mhz Intel Celeron (first gen) processor, so beauty was too expensive to worry about. Now even an entry level system has enough oomph to handle pretty much any desktop effect, transparency, pretty animation or whatever that we care to throw at it.

(1) though KDE was reliant on a free release of commercial toolkit Qt - FOSS licensing for which took years to sort out.
 
Daniel~ said:
Excuses excuses!

It's still ugly and have a kind and loving mother didn't help at all":O)
Click to expand...
Well it had many loving mothers and fathers over the years. All early desktops were fugly, but all infinitely customisable in ways that Windows couldn't be - not least because you could choose the window manager to begin with. Both KDE and Gnome (and xfce and lxde and Enlightenment and a few others) stayed close to the window-icon-mouse-pointer with taskbar school of desktop design. Fluxbox and Blackbox were there if you wanted to make something completely custom. Then there's that strange tiling window manager that TR likes. I've tried a few of them.

I found a few screenshots on an old hard disc - none very exciting, I've never wasted much effort customising the desktop environment, preferring to use the software instead. Screenshots of my experiments with Blackbox, IceWM, xfce and a couple of others were on AOA, and so also lost. Also, these are just desktop snapshots and don't cover any of the good stuff going on under the hood.

Anyway, from about 2004 to 2008, KDE 3.x was my desktop of preference. Seen here, KDE 3.2 with its out of the box theme - names blurred to protect the guilty:

snapshot1_blur.jpg


KDE 3.5 was the last major point release. The underlying kernel, which I think was 2.6.10, also marked the first time I actually got AMD/ATi's fglrx kernel module to insert without segfaulting. It was quite theme-able, though as themes relied on bitmap graphics rather than vectors or rules, it did rather limit the dimensions and positions of toolbars and menus.

snapshot3.jpg


snapshot4.jpg


KDE 3.5 was a very well put together package: DCOP for inter-process communication was polished, aRts was a very efficient sound server, its settings were sensible, and its various applications fitted together properly. Unfortunately, all good things must end, and while KDE 3.5 still lives on as the "Trinity" desktop environment, the main branch switched to KDE 4.

In a lot of ways, this went backwards. KDE 3.5 was a very well put together package: DCOP for inter-process communication was polished, aRts was a very efficient sound server, its settings were sensible, and its various applications fitted together properly. In comparison, dbus wasn't as feature complete for a long time, while Poettering's PulseAudio shambles made sound annoying. Here's a fresh KDE4 with dark theme, showcasing the ridiculous cashew in the top right corner, for which the devs were rightly ridiculed:

snapshot21.jpg


2008/9 was also when desktop compositing became interesting. Here's KDE4 with the kwin window manager swapped for compiz. On one side of the cube, a VM is running Windows XP:

View attachment snapshot18.png

Anyway, the best thing KDE4 did was get replaced by KDE Plasma 5. KDE Plasma 5 kinda looked and behaved almost identically to Windows 10 - dull and functional, though without the ongoing costs of commercial virus checkers and constant badgering by M$ for OneDrive. Here, happily running XCom2 in Steam on the Raven Ridge (first gen Ryzen APU) platform, though paused for reasons I don't remember. This from 2020 (couple of blurry bits are just to keep my real name off the public boards):

Screenshot_20200314_122251.jpg


I've not really spent any time customising Plasma 6 yet. Yes, this is (almost) out of the box. Yes, I run 3 screens.

Screenshot_20250718_151815.jpg
 
Actually, AOA still exists on our drives, it's just that it requires PHP 5.6 to run, and I haven't felt like putting in the effort to either convert it to something more modern, or build a docker container to throw it into. I've kept the files because I have it in the back of my head that someday I might put it back up, just for historical reasons. Also, it's only 10GB, and in the age of multi-terabyte drives that's a drop in the bucket.
 
I figured you'd have a backup - the more it ages, the harder it'll be to restore to the point it's just not worth the effort anymore, though. I suspect it's already well past that point, hence, "lost."
 
Oh, yeah, it got well past the point of being worth the effort YEARS ago. But that doesn't mean I won't put it back up eventually.

Probably

Possibly...

Maybe???
 
Daniel~ said:
Yeah, but have you tried Mintt?
or do you just like suffering? ":O)
Click to expand...
I have indeed tried Mint - it's good for toothpaste and mojitos, and to add a little interest to a salad.

As a Linux distribution, though, I've always found it a little bit underwhelming.
 
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