I honestly like them. Those that “stay open”, of course… They just stay out of the way, never get lost, and works pretty nice.
At first I disliked them, but quickly found out they are actually… Very practical. Even not considering the “green” twist, why didn’t we adopted them before?
Ah, Linux from scratch…
Also, hardware was… Harder back then, on Linux (mostly modems).
Beside that, software wise there was less stuff on Linux than today, so you had to check carefully you had what you needed.
But I was already a Linux user, and a linux-only user at that.