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Originally Posted by benjamin20 ya, all these things are from 1997. at that time, the DESKTOP market was completely windows and mac. i think Amiga had already collapsed and os2 was dead. Linux was only like 6 years old. and wasn't much use outside of businesses. oh sure, you could run it on the desktop, but you are mostly hobbying, not really desktoping. |
It sort of depends on your definition of hobbying/desktoping.
Let me see if I recall correctly:
Around 94-95 when I started using linux seriously (slackware+Xfree86) I got practically the same graphical desktop environment at home as at my University (some version of UNIX), so this quickly became my main working environment. Granted, I did most of my papers and my thesis in Latex because I preferred it to the WYSIWYG alternatives at the time, still do occasionally. I also did all development for projects & such on this system. Lots of people I knew (comp.science majors) did the same thing. Shortly after, the Uni. started using linux workstations as well.
By 97 I was working part time as an admin for a medium sized network. All critical servers (mail, dns, web, ...) where running linux (Red Hat at this point) but the internal network was still NT server/workstation based. After some research I replaced the functionality of the NT domain server with a linux machine running an experimental version of samba (turned out to be much less problems than with the NT server). I also had linux workstations installed along the NT ones (I think StarOffice for linux was out by this time) and these quickly became very popular. Had I not moved on to other challenges I would certainly had chucked the NT domain concept completely and gone for "native" linux all out to cut down costs.
...and I'm hardly a pioneer, other people where doing the same thing at the same time.
Given this perspective, the linux desktop has been 'just right' and used productively by a lot of people for quite some time.
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