alt Hacker NewsIn some part it was more advanced, I think windos 95 lacked TCP/IP in its first version, as microsoft tried to do a "Novell" on the LAN. To connect to the Internet there were 3rd party applications like trumpetsomething.
At that time there was the Xfree X11 implementation, before the Xorg coming, and you had to create your configuration for your GPU and monitor combination, using scripts or from scratch, the famous Xconfig. I recall the scary warning in the documentation to not mess with your monitor modelines as you could literally burn your CRTs; monitors at that time were already equipped with builtin protections, so wrong config would only result in a black screen, but every time it happened I held my breath.
There were already at that time a lot of different window managers, like FVWM, TWM and at least one or two desktop environments. I think CDE was already available for Linux in 95...
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I used Trumpet WinSock with Win 3.1, but with most ISPs you had to use an emulated SLIP/PPP connection anyway. Otherwise you'd be dialing in to a shell so the advantage of the GUI was mostly lost (from the perspective of being able to use Mosaic or whatever, that is).
I think the first release of Windows 95 did include TCP/IP networking support. I remember using it. But I think it wasn't installed by default, so you had to go and install it separately via the control panel.