Thread | Brutkey

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...

( screenshots 🧵 cont)

A photo of a CRT showing Morphix OS bootloader

It shows a collage of Morpheus from the Matrix with a cartoon penguin head, and says "Morphix. Unfortunately nobody can be told what the Morphix is..."

"Welcome to Morphix LiveCD" debug screen as seen on a CRT screen, with a huge penguin Tux as the background for the text

Gnome 2.4 splash screen with Morphix wallpaper

A photograph of a CRT that shows Morphix OS with Gnome 2.4. There are panels at the top and at the bottom of the screen, showing many icons - including GIMP, Open Office, Firefox...

Nina Kalinina
@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt

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!

( screenshots 🧵 cont)

"Debian mozilla package start page". A photo from a CRT. List of links, including Debian homepage, Mozilla homepage, and so on. (note: Most links are either dead or cannot be opened because there's no modern SSL)

Mozilla Firefox showing a page that was supposed to be Google's search for Linux. Except it's a 404, and there's a drawing of a broken robot. A photo from a CRT

A photo of a CRT screen. Gnome menu shows that there are quite a few programs available. There's Video LAN 0.6.2 running in the background, with horrific fonts that are barely readable

Nina Kalinina
@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt

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.

( screenshots 🧵 cont)

Screenshot of Gnome 1 desktop on Mandrake 6 DemoLinux, showing default desktop: a help browser, a file browser, a handful of icons on the desktop

Knoppix 3.2 screenshot running KDE3, showing many many programs preinstalled, including KOffice, Open Office, and AbiWord, and even Wine