Mandrake, Slackware and then Gentoo. KDE was the best! Also compiling my own kernels :D Running 2 CRT and one LCD screen with 3 VGA cards was fun. IMs were actually in better shape as you had plugins for every network and could use one native client (Kopete or Pidgin were a thing) to communicate with everyone. Konqueror was totally usable as a browser as sites did not relay on JS, and well integrated in KDE. Plenty of media content shared between friends on disk caddies.
Mandrake, Slackware and then Gentoo. KDE was the best! Also compiling my own kernels :D Running 2 CRT and one LCD screen with 3 VGA cards was fun. IMs were actually in better shape as you had plugins for every network and could use one native client (Kopete or Pidgin were a thing) to communicate with everyone. Konqueror was totally usable as a browser as sites did not relay on JS, and well integrated in KDE. Plenty of media content shared between friends on disk caddies.
I just wanted to add that you can still use Pidgin to connect to every major IM protocol today if you don’t mind installing extra plugins :)