The two main problems I ran into were 1) software support at the application layer, and 2) video driver support. There is a herculean effort on the part of package maintainers to build software for distros, and no one has been building 32 bit version of software for years, even if it is possible to build from source. There is only a very limited set of software you can use, even CLI software because so many things are built with 64 bit dependencies. Secondly, old video card drivers are being dropped from the kernel. This means all you have is basic VGA "safe-mode" level support, which isn't even fast enough to play an MPEG2. My final try was to install Debian 5, which was period correct and had support for my hardware, but the live CDs of the the time were not hybrid so the ISO could not boot from USB. I didn't have a burner so I finally gave up.
So I think these types of projects are fun for a proof of concept, but unfortunately are never going to give life to old computers.
It baffles me how usable Office 97 still. I was playing with it recently in a VM to see if it worked as well as I remembered, and it was amazing how packed with features it is considering it's nearing on thirty. There's no accounting for taste but I prefer the old Office UI to the ribbon, there's a boatload of formatting options for Word, there's 3D Word Art that hits me right in the nostalgia, Excel 97 is still very powerful and supports pretty much every feature I use regularly. It's obviously snappy on modern hardware, but I think it was snappy even in 1998.
I'm sure people can enumerate here on the newer features that have come in later editions, and I certainly do not want to diminish your experience if you find all the new stuff useful, but I was just remarkably impressed how much cool stuff was in packed into the software.
The point being made was that for many people whose lives doesn't circle around computers, their computing needs have not changed since the early 1990's, other than doing stuff on Internet nowadays.
For those people, using digital typewriter hardly requires more features than Final Writer, and for what they do with numbers in tables and a couple of automatic updated cells, something like Superplan would also be enough.
Just please don't gaslight us with some alternate Amiga bullshit history. All that shit was super slow, you were begging for +5Mhz or +25KB of cache. If Amiga had any success outside of teenage gamers, that stuff would have all been historical, just like it was on the Mac.
If you were from Humanities and worked for a newspaper design layout you would use a Mac at work. That's it.
That is absolutely not a valid generalisation.
I worked on Macs from the start of my career in 1988. They were the standard computer for state schools in education here in the Isle of Man in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The Isle of Man's national travel company ran on a Mac database, Omnis, and later moved to Windows to keep using Omnis.
It's still around:
I supported dozens of Mac-using clients in London through the 1990s and they were the standard platform in some businesses. Windows NT Server had good MacOS support from the very first version, 3.1, and Macs could access Windows NT Server shares over the built-in Appleshare client, and store Mac files complete with their Resource Forks on NTFS volumes. From 1993 onwards this made mixed Mac/PC networks much easier.
I did subcontracted Mac support for a couple of friends of mine's consultancy businesses because they were Windows guys and didn't "speak Mac".
Yes, they were very strong in print, graphics, design, photography, etc. but not only in those markets. Richer types used them as home computers. I also worked on Macs in the music and dance businesses and other places.
Macs were always there.
Maybe you didn't notice but they always were. Knowing PC/Mac integration was a key career skill for me, and the rise of OS X made the classic MacOS knowledge segue into more general Unix/Windows integration work.
Some power users defected to Windows NT between 1993 and 2001 but then it reversed and grew much faster: from around 2001, PowerMacs started to become a credible desktop workstation for power users because of OS X. From 2006, Macintel boxes became more viable in general business use because the Intel chips meant you could run Windows in a VM at full speed for one or two essential Windows apps. They ran IE natively and WINE started to make OS X feasible for some apps with no need for a Windows licence.
In other words, the rise of OS X coincided with the rise of Linux as a viable server and GUI workstation.
So, A/V production, something I said too. My point still stands. Macs in Europe were seen as something fancy for media production people and that's it. Something niche for the arts/press/TV/cinema world.
Like I said, and you missed: but not only there.
People often mistake "Product A dominates in market B" -- meaning A outsells all others in B -- for "A only sells in market B."
Macs were expensive. Clone PCs were cheap. Yeah, cheap products outsell expensive ones. Doesn't mean that the expensive ones are some kind of fancy designer brand only used by the idle rich.
No one got Macs at school either. First DOS, then Windows 95/98. Maybe in some Universities they used Macbooks well into the OSX era, as a reliable Unix machine to compile legacy scientific stuff; and even in those environments GNU/Linux began to work perfectly well recompiling everything from Sparcs and the like with a much cheaper price.
Forget about pre-OSX machines in Spain outside of a newspaper/publishing/AV producing office. Also, by the time XP and 2000 were realiable enough against OSX (w9x was hell) that OS was replaced for much cheaper PC alternatives.
I mean, if w2k/wxp could handle big loads without BSODing every few hours, that was a success. And as the Pentium 4's with SSE2 and Core Duo's happened, suddenly G4's and G'5 weren't that powerful any more.
Whereas I lived (and am back, sadly) in an offshore tax haven.
The rich used Macs. Musicians used Macs. They were not some dedicated tool only found in certain places. Entire industries, big important industries, ran on them.
What killed Commodore and Atari was that in the end although they had niches, they didn't conquer whole sectors.
This is why Sinclair Research tried to push into the business market with the QL. Sir Clive knew that the home/games sector was about thin margins and price battles, while in rich America, you could get fat on it, you can't in Europe.
He carved out an early niche as the cheapest home computers that were good enough and were competitive, but it was low-margin/high-unit-count.
The business market will pay for good tools. Bits of it paid extra for Macs for decades because they were good at some things.
That is a viable long-term market: "the best cheap home computer for the money" is not.