FOSS Setups of the WinXP Era

[solon_kitten]

Sitting here with my Windows XP VM open on my second monitor is making me think back to my own days with the OS. It wasn't really my daily driver OS, since I was still a Linux user at the time, but that also meant I was more likely to use FOSS software on Windows as well. And well... Yeah. I did.

Mozilla Suite, and Firefox when it was stable, were my go-to browsers. Thunderbird became my email client, and for a time, Sunbird was my calendar. I used Songbird (later Nightingale) for my music, and really liked Instantbird for IM during the short time it was being maintained. Same with Chatzilla for IRC. Same with nVu (later KompoZer) for my HTML editor. I was deep into the XUL universe for my applications at the time.

Of course, Gaim/Pidgin replaced Instantbird once the latter stopped being maintained, but I still like Pidgin on Windows for XMPP. I mean, I use Adium, and that's basically Pidgin for MacOS, given they're built on top of libpurple. Didn't replace my IRC client, though. I used it for XMPP, AIM, YIM, ICQ, and MSNM at the time, and if most of those were still around in some official capacity, I'd still be using them.

As far as productivity went, I used GIMP and Inkscape for my art and image editing needs, and OpenOffice (now Apache OpenOffice) for an office suite. I actually owned Microsoft Office 2003 because my online school at the time hard required it, but for that era, I actually preferred OpenOffice. Which is strange, given how much I dislike using all three of these applications now. GIMP feels like it's always shifting, Inkscape has worse UX, and LibreOffice...I just can't enjoy using that one anymore. NeoOffice on MacOS X is better for me, but it's one of those things where I think LibreOffice kinda forgot what User Experience really means in their attempt to one-up the competition.

I actually don't remember what text editor I used at the time, but I think it was Notepad++. I just remember that it was open source as well, and had a similar feature set to KDE's Kate editor (what I used on Linux at the time).

I can't think of anything else I used back then, but I was so deep into the koolaid of the FOSS world that it wouldn't surprise me if there was a lot more of it on my laptop (an eMachines M2352). By the blue, that was such a crap laptop, but I still loved it, factory defects and all.

Still, it's nice to think back on things like this every so often. To remember a time when technology didn't threaten me with a stress-induced breakdown just from thinking about using it.