I remember dealing with migrating from LILO to GRUB when I was in high school, maybe 2005ish? It's been a while. I remember the migration from ipchains to iptables, too (which is happening again now with the iptables to nftables migration)
I used Ubuntu at the time... It was a great distro back then. I only had dial-up so couldn't download large files easily, and Canonical or one of their local partners would mail you a CD for free regardless of where you lived in the world. I think that helped a LOT of people get into Linux.
Similar experiences here. I remember waiting for the free CDs bundles with monthly magzines, and add then I'd the CD as a mirror in my repos to update my packages lol
It's funny because the first time I read it, I thought it was serious and was just written by a tech-illiterate parent. Saying that Comet Cursor and Bonzi Buddy are hacker software kinda gives away that it's just satire though.
oh I guess that's also something that younger people may not know about... In the late 1990s / early 2000s, it wasn't uncommon for people to install spyware to get things like custom mouse cursors, emoticons, and purple gorillas that help you navigate the web.