4.10
Welcome to my first blog post, I figured I would start out with something fun but educational.
In 2004, the first public Ubuntu version was released. Today Ubuntu is at version 24.10 and is one of the most popular Linux Distributions. Being a computer nerd, I was curious and decided to throw it into a virtual machine and see what using desktop Linux, (as well as computers in general) was like back then!
Linux has had a reputation for being difficult, finicky and hard for basic users. Nowadays, this could not be further from the truth. It can be a bit temperamental on occasion, but so can MacOS and Windows. I actually found the initial install process to be very simple and straight forward, which is how modern Linux Distro installs are as well.
After the install process, I was greeted with a very simple login screen which logged me in extremely quickly. The specs I had setup for this machine was a single core CPU, a gig of RAM, no internet card (security), and 5GB of disk space. This VM feels smoother than some modern, real computers which is what impressed me the most with this experiment. The desktop I was greeted with after logging in (picture 1) is clean and simple, and given it is 20 years old, actually looks pretty nice!
I then launched a few of the built in apps (Photo 2). They all opened instantly, and were very responsive, again very impressive given this is literally a computer running inside another computer. After looking around for awhile, I have to say I am quite impressed! We have made a lot of progress in 20 years, but there was definitely some cool stuff happening back in 2004!
10 out of 10 experience! I will definitely be setting up some more VMs based on older operating systems to explore them and their features!
Thank you for reading this blog on my tiny corner of the internet!
