Comment by iaw

In 1997-ish I failed to install Slackware from 16 or so floppies repeatedly. In 2000 I had a system up and running but could not get connectivity. In 2005 almost everything "just worked" out of the box. In 2013 everything just worked.

I have recently started reflecting on how easy it is to do things now for free compared to the proprietary landscape we had before. Virtually every proprietary software has a (or multiple) free open source alternatives. The potential for human intellectual productivity has never been this high.