[fChk]

Ironic: I would have said the same thing about linux.

When I was in high school in the mid 90s I tried to take computer programming but I wasn't allowed to because we had no computer at home (they had a cost in the thousands back then, as you probably remember). While I'm certainly not as knowledgeable by some by a long shot, everything I've learned since has been self-taught.

Fast forward a couple years. I acquired my first pc: a frankenstein made mostly of hand-me-downs. It has an error-riddled installation of win95, which is always giving me bluescreens and crashes daily. The total cost for components of my first pc was 400$ - a great price tag for the time, and I saved over a year for it. To upgrade this pc with win98 would have added I think 300$ to the cost? For me, the price of windows was not something that opened a door to computing. It was something that would have prohibited me if not for the discovery of FOSS.

Fortunately, when windows was expensive and out  of reach, a friend came over with a copy of redhat spanning several floppies, and helped me set up a dual boot system, so I wouldn't have to suffer with the broken installation of win95. I haven't had a need for windows since and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Interesting experience but you're in the minority as the 99% of the World population that discovered 'computing' in the 90s did it via M$$, unfortunately!!.. and they are still stuck with it in their majority, I would bet!

Linux (in the 90s) was the rising star in the Server market never in the desktop one, which I was referring to in that quote of mine.

My first Linux installation dates back to 2003 but I've always used it as a server never as a desktop... till fairly recently with the demise of WinXP.

Yes!.. It became possible to set up a decent desktop on top of a Linux system but that was never popular and needed a lot of marketing gimmicks from Ubuntu to create that missing niche in the late 2000s.

Being an early RedHat adopter, and being allergic to the Ubuntu approach (reminds me of M$$'s quite a lot!) I opted for the Fedora distribution as my production OS and never looked back to anything else on the market.

There is an interesting documentary that "traces the history of GNU, Linux, open source, and the free software movement" called Revolution OS, for the interested people: