Driver support was so dicey. If you had anything even remotely not mainstream, you would be compiling your own video driver, or network driver, or basically left to figure it out for any other peripheral. So many devices like scanners and very early webcams just claimed zero Linux support at all, but you could at times find someone else’s project that might work.

I tried to switch to Linux as a desktop system several times in the late 90s but kept going back to windows because hardware support just wasn’t there yet.

Anybody seriously believing this has a misunderstanding of how little people care about what OS they use and how much they care that it works the way they expect.

This whole thing happened 30 years ago now. Wow. These two must be in their 50s now. It was such a media circus at the time.