And back at that time if you installed any flavor of Linux you were lucky if the OS install didn’t fuck itself over
I was using Linux religiously back then, and this is false. As long as there’s a driver for all of your hardware, it generally worked fine.
But that “as long as” is doing some heavy lifting. The usual suspects were pretty much the same as now: Broadcom, NeoMagic, and NVIDIA. Some cheap printers and modems were problematic as well, but if you paid for good hardware, it would probably work.
And that’s the rub. You have to very specifically choose your hardware for Linux. Or at least you had to back then. It’s not quite so bad now, but back then it was a real showstopper. Especially broadcom. That caused me no end of issues back in the day.
I was using Linux religiously back then, and this is false. As long as there’s a driver for all of your hardware, it generally worked fine.
But that “as long as” is doing some heavy lifting. The usual suspects were pretty much the same as now: Broadcom, NeoMagic, and NVIDIA. Some cheap printers and modems were problematic as well, but if you paid for good hardware, it would probably work.
And that’s the rub. You have to very specifically choose your hardware for Linux. Or at least you had to back then. It’s not quite so bad now, but back then it was a real showstopper. Especially broadcom. That caused me no end of issues back in the day.