Wow thx for the trip down memory lane! I was a 3rd year student back in college back in '99, and well, the academic environment was quite anti-Microsoft back in the day, so Linux was quite popular. So we tried all Linux distros under the sun, as well as the different windows managers. Pretty sure i had this exact version of KDE at some point (perhaps with a darker theme, but still, all icons match what i remembered), and i'm also sure i used KDevelop for more than a couple of my course projects. Of course half the fun was finding out a graphics card that supported 16-bit color, otherwise you were stuck with very basic 256 (or was it even 16?) color mode. Which means this was probably before fbdev, or at least before it became popular. Fun times!
Usually that would have been more like mid-90's. As I mentioned by 1999, you may have had a Matrox and even doing some GLX, see a blast from my past here: www.ntlug.org/archive/tp/glx_ccox/glx.html
@cjcox ah indeed, fun stuff there :D I definitely remember GLX (edit: GLXGears, rather) being the "gold standard" (if you can call it that ) of the time to check if 3D acceleration was working under Linux :) I definitely recall reading about 3D gaming starting to be not only a possibility in Linux, but even being faster than windows (unsure if i read your article back then, or someone else pointing similar results, but i definitely remember it). I think by the early 2000s or so I was compiling Quake 2 from source after iD software released it, the Linux build was maintained by Icculus, if I recall? Nothing beat the feeling of playing Q2 under Linux back then :) For me personally, it was then that the switch flicked in my brain indicating "this is more than a toy, it's a real OS, and viable alternative to Windows" (queue the old memories of having to dual-boot into windows in order to perform certain tasks you couldn't reliably do otherwise)
Wow thx for the trip down memory lane! I was a 3rd year student back in college back in '99, and well, the academic environment was quite anti-Microsoft back in the day, so Linux was quite popular. So we tried all Linux distros under the sun, as well as the different windows managers.
Pretty sure i had this exact version of KDE at some point (perhaps with a darker theme, but still, all icons match what i remembered), and i'm also sure i used KDevelop for more than a couple of my course projects.
Of course half the fun was finding out a graphics card that supported 16-bit color, otherwise you were stuck with very basic 256 (or was it even 16?) color mode. Which means this was probably before fbdev, or at least before it became popular.
Fun times!
Usually that would have been more like mid-90's. As I mentioned by 1999, you may have had a Matrox and even doing some GLX, see a blast from my past here: www.ntlug.org/archive/tp/glx_ccox/glx.html
@cjcox ah indeed, fun stuff there :D I definitely remember GLX (edit: GLXGears, rather) being the "gold standard" (if you can call it that ) of the time to check if 3D acceleration was working under Linux :) I definitely recall reading about 3D gaming starting to be not only a possibility in Linux, but even being faster than windows (unsure if i read your article back then, or someone else pointing similar results, but i definitely remember it).
I think by the early 2000s or so I was compiling Quake 2 from source after iD software released it, the Linux build was maintained by Icculus, if I recall? Nothing beat the feeling of playing Q2 under Linux back then :) For me personally, it was then that the switch flicked in my brain indicating "this is more than a toy, it's a real OS, and viable alternative to Windows" (queue the old memories of having to dual-boot into windows in order to perform certain tasks you couldn't reliably do otherwise)
It’s the Silver Age of Documentation.
Rofl yeah i had a crack at suse back in the day.