Linux had its claws in me again.
I had burned the ISO myself — overnight, on a CD-R that smelled faintly of ozone and hope. The distro was Slackware, or maybe it was Mandrake. It didn't matter. What mattered was that this time, I believed. This time, I was ready. I had printed out forum posts. I had bookmarked obscure HOWTOs. I had even carved out a 4GB partition, like a sacrificial altar, waiting for enlightenment.
But Linux never welcomed me. It tolerated me. Barely.
First, the screen booted at 640x480 with 16 colors. My glorious Trident video card — unsupported. My Sound Blaster clone? Recognized, but silent. The mouse worked, sort of, if I held it like an old Ouija planchette and only moved in slow, north-south gestures.
The WiFi card? A fantasy. The printer? A tragedy. Mounting a flash drive required the kind of syntax that should come with incense and a blood offering.
I stared at the terminal like it was judging me. Which it was. Every solution I tried only broke something else. Dependencies cascaded like Jenga blocks. X wouldn't start. GNOME laughed at me. KDE ghosted me. Somewhere, I ended up downloading a driver patch from a punk FTP server in rural Scandinavia maintained by a guy named Otto who only spoke in Bash scripts and contempt.
I was left with a blinking cursor and the echoes of people on forums who said things like "just recompile the kernel lol."
And so, at 1:47 a.m., fingers stained with Cheeto dust and shame, I opened the drawer.
There it was. Windows 98 Second Edition. Its cracked jewel case glowing like a religious relic. The install disc, flawless. I held it up to the light like a communion wafer. I felt its power. I inserted it with reverence.
The hard drive screamed. The screen blinked. The setup began — cheerful, blue, confident. I didn’t have to Google a single command. It knew. It saw my hardware, and it loved me anyway.
Within an hour, my sound card sang. My video card stretched its legs. My mouse soared. The modem dialed — that sacred static hymn of 56k. I was online. I was whole.
I opened Paint. I opened Solitaire. I opened Internet Explorer and downloaded Winamp just to hear it say "It really whips the llama’s ass."
I was back. I was home.
Until next time, Linux. Until next time.