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
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