The intensity of feeling within the Linux community towards Windows and Microsoft back then was intense. I remember turning up to my university CS course and witnessing the formation of a Linux clique - if you ran windows you weren't really welcome! Dual-booting might get you reluctantly accepted though.<p>I wonder if the same thing still goes on. It probably was quite an effective filter for the nerdiest and most obsessive people back in 1999, and it probably still is, but somehow that kind of mindset seems a bit outdated today. If it does still exist I'd be interested to know what kind of status macOS has! Literally nobody on the CS course had a Mac, despite the very cool and colourful iMacs being very popular.
If only SGI had made that darn laptop, we'd be rocking SGI Linux these days, and the fruity company would be a minor consideration to most nerds.<p>Alas, 'twas not to be. SGI, you glorious bastard, why did you have to make that deal with the devil ..<p>IMHO, the tech industry completely changed when nerds could by tiBooks, have an amazing Unix experience in a portable form, and still rip and play DVD's alongside the shell ..
By then I had moved on to FreeBSD, I think starting at 3.?. The main reason for that move was internet access. FreeBSD CD set came with additional CDs of their ports collection. No more downloading via my flaky and very slow phone connection (via kermit).<p>I went back to Linux around 4.8 because FreeBSD started having issues with my hardware. By then I had "real" internet thanks to the company I worked for.<p>I remember seeing items about this, but the BSD people tended not to care about these things. But a nice look back
I use Linux daily (command line only) alongside Windows. It's amazing to think that after all these years, Linux on the desktop (with GUI) still isn't even close to windows in terms of functionality.<p>I've tried it over they years and finally gave up. It would work for awhile, until some random change would break something I used every day and I wasn't interested in spending many hours trying to research a fix and manually hack some .c file to make it work.<p>MacOS essentially became a form of Unix with a fantastic GUI. It's what Linux could have been. I like to use Linux with the windows WSL and I get the best of both worlds: a nice GUI and the ability to run all of my favorite Linux apps.