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!