I remember building the kernel with the NE2000 drivers and having a network card for just installation and getting the 3com or RTL driver source over to the new install, then compiling those drivers, installing them, and downing the system to put the proper card in. There was a very small subset of sound cards and video cards that worked reliably. The notion that Linux was the OS where hardware just worked out of the box was ludicrous.

The DEs were pretty horrible and the software to use on them was scant. So desktop Linux was a pipe dream. I used Linux entirely as a security/server appliance. I built a couple hundred iptable/ipchains firewalls for businesses out of recycled pentium type desktops until hardware firewalls became a thing, it was fairly lucrative for a while there.

Reading how-tos(may be the source code too) are all you needed. No need to listen random stuff from some random YouTubers. Ppl can read that time. Books and magazines did exist.

Just raw dogged linux and loved it. Lot more stable than windows 95/98

All I know is I wish I would've stuck with it when I first installed but...alas...I was lazy and too dependent on GUI

No audio, no WiFi, no well-established communities, sparse software selection, but total freedom on an alternate OS. I tried it out in the late 90s with Red Hat, left, came back about 5 years later in the early 2000s and stayed forever. SuSE 9.2 was amazing.

Well, I was an Amiga user. That was already unix-like, preemptive multitasking, etc. It was fading fast in the early nineties, and while i was already working in I.T., I was not interrsted in using Windows 3.11 and 95, so I began playing with Slackware Linux. I figured it was a good way to get comfortable with "real" I.T..

I learned Bash and had to compile most of the software i wanted to try. Since, like all programmers, I'm lazy, I wrote some simple scripts to build the code and make them into packages (tgz) for Slackware. This took tedium out of the work, and i could use the packkage manager to install and remove them.

Those were rough days for desktop users, though. I really had to use windows when i needed to pass output to "normies". I tried several window manager and desktops, and eventually landed on Ubuntu.

I was born in the 80s and never even though about Linux until very recently.

Back in my day we had to get our Internet at the village Internet well. I remember the dialup modem noises it made as you pulled the bucket up.