As for Linux, there was a CS major in my dorm who installed Linux and BeOS on his PC and did his programming assignments on them, but I never had the courage to do that, because I was afraid that if I screwed up my computer and couldn't immediately fix it, it would mess up my work for other classes. I didn't take that risk until years later, when I no longer had to turn in writing assignments in Microsoft Word format.

I had been writing DOS batch files with the help of PC Magazine utils for years, and shell scripts looked absolutely amazing. From that point on I pretty much always had to know where I could go to get unix or Linux shell access...

Back the day I was a gamer, the main reason why Linux never really was an option. Later for work, it was Windows all the way for obvious reasons. Privately I am on Ubuntu now, along with LibreOffice. Won't go back, Windows turned into a major PIA when I tried to run different Teams and Office accounts not linked to the Windows 10 license due to home schooling and two kids. Gone were the days that a license key was all you needed. There is still a Windows boot partition, company hardware is Windows anyway.

The only thing I have a hard time getting rid of is Excel. I am so used to that...

To be fair, some of us were smug as hell.

I once picked an argument with a guy simply because he was wearing a Microsoft t-shirt.

Some of the gold I've accumulated over the years when converting Windows users and/or giving talks

  - All Linux distributions are the same: the Linux kernel, glibc and a bunch of GNU utils.
  - "Adopting Linux like a religion is stupid." - Thomas Cameron
  - "We've all been through my distro is better than yours" thing.
  - "The best Linux distro is the one that does what you need at the best cost."
  - Linux is NOT about the distribution but the kernel, it's about what the kernel can do.
  - Distribution is a way to wrap up what the kernel can do into a more manageable way.

I think there was also a little bit of "friendly" debate over the superior OS at the time. (I ran OS/2 Warp for a number of years myself.)

I was actually quite fond of WinNT4. Lean and stable.

Microsoft being the Evil Empire and facing antitrust for bundling Internet Explorer was, of course, cheered on... meanwhile very similar groups of geeks these days see no problem with Apple only allowing Safari to be the web browser engine on iOS...

The embrace of Apple on tech sites is something I'll never understand considering the attitudes that were prevalent when it came to Microsoft just a decade or two before.

I usually donate to FOSS projects I use since you can't pay for them in the traditional sense but I still want to support the developers. KDE is my favorite thus far.

There are companies that do this- DaVinci Resolve, IntelliJ IDEA, Ardour come to mind.

You can certainly make a living selling a cross platform application that supports Linux, but it's probably quite difficult to make much of a living selling Linux-only applications.

For the seller, being able to sell is one thing, having to run software in a tiny and extremely fragmented market (a large bunch of slightly different distros) is another one. Then osx happened, and the linux desktop never happened.

I was using Coherent at the time, and Linux people was posting in comp.os.coherent how good Linux was. When MWC folded people from MWC suggested moving to a BSD because at least the BSD people did not troll the group.

I ended up with Slackware because the PC I had at the time was too lite for a BSD.

But same here, I never used Excel (and do not now) because the tools in UNIX type OSs are fine.

So I guess I will be joining you in the basement :)

The current UI chaos is because the Windows team has become mostly the Cloud team, while the UI frameworks seem to keep rotating new people every couple of years.

They had to literally restaff WinForms and WPF teams from scratch, and then merged them with WinUI/UWP!

Ahh wow, this brings me back.

I bought, or rather had my parents buy, this exact same package from Best Buy when I was in high school or maybe the end of middle school. I remember thinking in the store that it was impossible for there to be something that wasn't Windows or Mac, and the packaging was so cool.

These were also the "10,000 Best Windows Games" shareware CD-ROM days (anyone remember the Aztech Cube pack? [1]) I was fascinated by the fact that Red Hat came with thousands of "packages" that weren't shareware. And that thicc documentation, wow so sexy. A printed catalog with info on each package. I remember feeling a sense of limitless possibility while flipping through its pages.

Installed Red Hat on a Pentium 1 Baby-AT tower that I picked up from Goodwill for $20. My friend and I spray painted it that summer and I slapped a 52x Creative Technologies branded CD-ROM drive with a cable that connected directly to a genuine Creative SoundBlaster sound card for music CD playback. I remember thinking how cool I was to have a Creative CD-ROM drive working with my Creative SoundBlaster playing Vertical Horizon's "Everything You Want" on Linux. All I needed was a KVM switch to play Civ 2 on my junkyard Win 95 Gateway pizza box sitting next to it.

Wild times.

[1]: https://www.mobygames.com/company/aztech-new-media-corp

Anyway, I had a friend whose mother ran a small data processing business, and it was known in our circle of nerd friends that she was in possession of a "real Unix machine". And what a machine it was - a beige box the size of a small car, with intriguing lights and cables and powerful hums and clicks. Anyway, I told her about this "Linux" thing, and she dismissed it as fantasy, so I brought my computer around to her office and gave her a demo.

The only comment I recall her making was something like, "Well, looks like you got yourself a $100 Unix machine." I could tell in her eyes, though, that she was feeling the world shift, heavily, from one epoch to the next.

I also picked tcsh for my main shell based off some blurb I read and spent a few months unlearning what I learned when I was actually given a task to maintain a Linux system a few years later.

Tricky part was it was a dual boot Windows installation on a single hard drive, I was always worried I would screw something up that I couldn't recover from since I needed the computer for school. Somehow I didn't mess up anything I couldn't recover from.

Compiling your own kernel was kind of a rite of passage back in the day. Now I cannot remember when I last did that. Must have been 14 years or so, when I was still using Gentoo.