Comment on Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever

• Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I don’t think you remember how insanely terrible Windows was in the 90s.

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  • rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    When I actually started doing hobby projects, I remembered that feeling with Windows 9x where you learn to avoid “wrong” actions which have a potential of hanging your PC. You don’t even think about it. Just get used that you don’t move the cursor after clicking there, you don’t click here again after a first double click, and other such.

    While things like editing config files were … more normal for the average person even, you’d have a paper manual generally. For everything, kitchen appliances and anything technical you could buy too. You wouldn’t expect everything to just work without reading it. Freezes and crashes were worse.

    Windows won because most people didn’t know of anything else.

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    • Croquette@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      And it is still true today. Windows has the lion share of the market because we were raised with Windows and the vast majority of people don’t want to learn a new OS.

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  • bobo@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Fair enough, but Linux was quite difficult for a normal user to install back in the 90’s. And you could literally destroy your monitor if you didn’t know what you were doing. I was responding to the notion that using FOSS was somehow easier to get into in the 90s than Microsoft products.

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    • Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I don’t think you remember how difficult was to install anything back then.
      I mean yeah, installing Linux was more complicated, and you couldn’t just google shit. Still, I was making pretty good money back then on the side specifically because regular user wasn’t able to do shit with their computer.
      Linux was harder, both were difficult, both required separate set of skills you couldn’t just get.

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      • bobo@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        You keep saying I don’t remember, which feels a bit dismissive. I do remember. We just have differing opinions on the barriers to entry for Microsoft vs. FOSS in the 90s.

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  • shroomato@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’m not sure that the alternatives were any better, everything was terrible back then.

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    • Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah, probably not. But the idea that Windows won because of how great it was just doesn’t hold up

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  • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Luckily they learned from it and redesigned the kernel from scratch – hold on, my producer’s telling me that no, it’s still the NT kernel under there. Outstanding.

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    • Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Most users neither know nor care what that is.

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      • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        good talk

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      • Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        They might care when their os showing the same problems it did 30 years ago

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