I've been using Ubuntu since version 6.06, and I had the impression that Ubuntu is fairly stable and versatile. I have been very surprised to discover today that Ubuntu 4.10 did not compare to other LiveCD Linuxes all that favourably.
Morphix 0.5 booted on my Pentium 3 machine just fine, and found the internets, and had OpenOffice working (a bit later on that). But Ubuntu required me to run DHCP client manually, and its OpenOffice never fully loaded, even after I played a long match in Solitaire.
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I guess one really cool thing about Ubuntu is that it comes with Windows goodies on the CD: AbiWord, Audacity, Firefox (!!), GNU IMP, OpenOffice, GhostScript...
But because of this, it doesn't have nearly as many goodies in the system itself.
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Well, let's check out the experience of the original Morphix and compare it with Ubuntu, then?
I choose Morphix 0.4 instead of Morphix 0.5 so it'd be a bit more fun to see what we could have had, if Ubuntu became a thing a bit earlier, or relied on Morphix a bit more...
This version is a few months older than Ubuntu 4.10, so it has an older Gnome.
Looking at this splash screen, I wonder if THIS was the reason normies got Ubuntu instead of Morphix...
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Morphix 0.4 doesn't even try to pretend it isn't Debian. Debian's start page still works; XChat happily loads and connects us to FreeNode. Imagine this: you boot your 20+ year old computer, and it just connects to the Internet as normal, and the chat apps work as normal, and... uh... it just works.
Except for Google, Google doesn't work anymore, they broke the support for "old" browsers. Lame. Boooooo!
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So, in this thread I just must say a few words about Knoppix. Back in the days, Knoppix was a ground-breaking Linux Live CD that spawned many other Linux Live CDs. It ended up being so influential that it is almost an expectation today for a Linux distribution to have a Live CD/DVD.
Of course, nothing ever stopped people from building a Linux system capable of using a CD disk as its root file system. In fact, one of the early Linux systems, Yggdrasil, did exactly that for the installer CD. So, how Knoppix was different from Yggdrasil or DemoLinux?
The secret sauce was in a special kernel module implementing CD-ROM friendly compressed block device. Without it, the Live CD experience was subpar, and the amount of software that was shipped on the LiveCD was minuscule. Compare 1999's DemoLinux 1.1 shipping Mandrake 6 with basically just Netscape and Gimp, and Knoppix 3.2 that comes with hundreds of tools, two full office suites, and even WINE - all on one CD.
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Nina Kalinina