Is walking 8 miles particularly notable? Is it a typo and they mean 18 miles or something? For someone reasonably fit 8 miles is maybe a 2 hour walk. You’d leave in the morning and be back for lunchtime.

I regularly walk that far before breakfast.

Loki distributed alpha centauri if I remember correctly? Awesome game. The windows version is actually easier to run on Linux than the original Linux release nowadays.

From my perspective, anything pre-ubuntu was a colossal ballache for a desktop system. I played around with suse, mandrake, etc prior to that but getting things working often felt like a chore.