The Solutor wrote on Today, 10:31:
Linux at the time didn't have any 3D stack at all, even if you had proper drivers installed, wasn't like you started to play 3d games like you did in the same days in windows (which still was plagued by competing 3d implementations, early immature D3D and alike).
Things started to change in the early 2000s, the DRI was somewhat working and 3D enable drivers started to be common, by 2006 or so even Compiz and Beryl were a thing.
At the time everything evolved fast, and mixing what happened in 98 with the situation of 2003, helps just to make the discussion confused.
A while ago you said that you just needed to install some ATi and Nvidia drivers, and it was smoothe sailing, but now that is not the case anymore? I don't know if you are arguing with yourself now, but that doesn't obviously change anything MattRocks, me or Trashbytes has said: Hardware support absolutely sucked and that goes with drivers as well. If your Riva, TNT or GF series cards could only use some generic 2D VGA compatibility modes with Linux, you might as well as use your Linux system with ISA VGA card from a decade ago by that point. It really is not a situation where a viable general use OS should be.
At the time there wasn't any 3D, games were at the level of minefield, videos were usually stamp sized, even the fonts were not antialiased. All you had to do was to show something on screen. If a specific driver was available it was obviously better, but if it wasn't ,all you had to do was to use generic ones, VESA, VGA, or framebuffer.
This is nonsense, by 97-98 3D accelerated graphics were quickly becoming a de facto and common with games, first with 3DFx Voodoo1 and then 1998 with cards like Voodoo2 and Nvidia TNT and so on. It was established technology by that point, supported by majority of games that could benefit from hardware acceleration. For consoles, accelerators had been thing like since 1994 starting with the release of Sega Saturn and PS1. They weren't that feature complete as V1 for example, but nonethless. Games had full screen pre-rendered or greenscreened videos for years, but I guess Linux with their bad hardware support couldn't properly scale videos to full screen or otherwise. And high resolution text in windows at least was a pleasure to read on a high resolution and good display.
To me it feels that you just confirm what everyone here is saying and your are describing the horrible state of Linux hardware support which also often meant a subpar or unnecessary complicated experience for majority of users. I never had to settle with "at least I had something on screen" level of display with windows, but that was apparently what Linux had to offer 😉
Bad hardware support and atrociously un-user-friendly Linux installation was one of the main reasons why Linux desktop was only used by poeple who really were into FOSS, often programmers or developers themselves and were equipped with a patience and knowledge to install and maintain such installation. Trying to paint linux as some mostly trouble free experience if somewhat quirky (while possibly claiming that modern Linux is somehow worse?) and people who didn't like this quirkiness or weren't ready to take up the challenge were just somehow spoiled by Windows in their mind, is just asinine. If spoiling means that with windows user could easily get his or her hardware working after running a simple setup.exe from a floppy or a CD manufacturer delivered owith the said hardware r you downloaded the driver package from the website, then I guess you are right. But what you didn't need to do is to live with hardware that doesn't work because there simply isn't a driver for it, find ways to mitigate or go around these problems or install 17 dependencies manually before you got it working. For majority of computer users it was just too much unncessary hassle without any actual reward, not something that is a fault of Windows. On the contrary, it was a fault of Linux and manufacturers at the time, but ultimately it was just a matter of time: Linux had too little users for many manufacturers to actually care. When this changed, Linux changed too.
Your downplaying of the state of Linux on desktop ~30 years ago really doesn't do a service to the developers who did a lot of work to bring the Linux to where it is nowadays or those users who originally went through the trouble and formed the small, but steadily growing user base of the OS. Which meant that in the long term it grew to a success and to an OS that even your average granny can use without much hassle instead of it being relegated to a sidenote of the computing history.
