Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:18:57 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu thusly wrote: > Same here! And the step looked unconceivable just a couple months > earlier. I remember how a friend who was in the beginning stages of > Linux asked me several times and very incredulously: "What do you mean > you don't have Windows at all on your laptop?"
Linux has matured a lot since the early days. When I first tried it, it took me 4 years and 2 PC upgrades to get a compatible graphics card which was able to display anything other than the 80x25 text mode and 320x200x4b on xfree86. No, I don't want to manually type some weird bit counts and internal clock frequencies ever again! I bought my first nvidia card in 1999 and everything has worked almost flawlessly since then. And that's not even the worst part, 10 years ago there was no ntfs write support, many sound drivers sucked, hotplug sucked, 56k internal modem drivers sucked, even the mouse drivers acted randomly, fscking ext2 (ext3 didn't exist yet!) was dreadfully slow, and the distro cds came with broken compiler packages. The fresh new installation was mostly useful for learning bash and perl, but not much more, a graphical desktop would have been something awesome.
