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Re:The Amiga Demoscene Mixtape Vol. 1 [video] on Saturday January 16, 2016 @04:31AM (#10914845)
Linux was horrendous on PCs in 1995. First of all, OP is talking about hardware support: switching OSs doesn't give you a copper, or a soundcard with four voice wavetable synthesis.

Linux was slightly convenient on PC in 1995 if you really cared about: (1) a basically Unix-y userland, with all the good and bad that implies. Shells and stuff worked better than cygwin (2) tcp stack (3) gcc

That's really it. X was a fucking nightmare to get to work "correctly" and then, as now, "correctly" on X means "it handles a remote networking case no one cares about better than the alternatives but still poorly, and everything else about it is totally broken."

Hardware support for every feature that was becoming interesting in PCs in 1995 (basically anything where economies of scale were making interesting stuff cheap) was absolutely terrible on Linux. Drivers for PC hardware, even the kind of PC hardware nerds liked (SCSI CD-ROM drives) were super flaky or non-existent. Application software was horrendous. There was no support at all for anything that still had a licensing regime around codecs, which, at the time included all the media software.

Linux was "quite good" in that you could set it up in a corner of your house and run httpd. That was dope in 1995. But compared to Amiga as a user-facing hacking desktop, it sucked shit. Hell, it sucked shit compared to a PC running Windows or a Mac.

Seriously, find a 486SX/25 w/ 4MB ram, a 160MB disk, a decent modem, and an S3 video card and put like, Yggdrasil on it. It will be way less fun to fuck around w/ than an old Amiga/Mac/NeXT/BeBox/SGI....at least in 1995 an Intel machine running DOS could run DOOM. It's probably the least-fun hardware/os combo from 1995 you could dredge up to play with.