Just to add to this, early on there was no such thing as kernel modules, so you had to compile your own kernel with the hardware support you needed for anything beyond basic (if I remember it correctly, it was only basic processor stuff, keyboard and text mode VGA) hardware support.
CRT monitors internally use an electron gun which just fires electrons at the phosporous screen (from, the back, obviously, and the whole assembly is one big vacuum chamber with the phosporous screen at the front and the electron gun at the back) using magnets to twist the eletcron stream left/right and up/down.
In practice the way it was used was to point it to the start of a line were it would start moving to the other side, then after a few clock ticks start sending the line data and then after as many clock ticks as there were points on the line, stop for a few ticks and then swipe it to the start of the next line (and there was a wait period for this too).
Back in those days, when configuring X you actually configured all this in a text file, low level (literally the clock frequency, total lines, total points per line, empty lines before sending data - top of the screen - and after sending data as well as OFF ticks from start of line before sending data and after sending data) for each resolution you wanted to have.
All this let you defined your own resolutions and even shift the whole image horizontally or vertically to your hearts content (well, there were limitations on things like the min and max supported clock frequency of the monitor and such). All that freedom also meant that you could exceed the capabilities of the monitor and even break it.
In the early 90s all the “cool kids” (for a techie definition of “cool”, i.e. hackers) at my University (a Technical one in Portugal with all the best STEM degrees in the country) used Linux - it was actually a common thing for people to install it in the PCs of our shared computer room.
Later in that decade it was already normal for it to be used in professional environments for anything serving web pages (static or dynamic) along with Apache: Windows + IIS already had a lower fraction of that Market than Linux + Apache.
If I remember it correctly in the late 90s RedHat started providing their Enterprise Version with things like Support Contracts - so beloved by the Corporates who wanted guarantees that if their systems broke the supplier would fix them - which did a lot to boost Linux use on the backend for non-Tech but IT heavy industries.
I would say this was the start of the trend that would ultimately result in Linux dominating on the server-side.
That was the time before kernel modules, so compiling your own kernel was definitelly required for anything but the most basic setup (no graphics, no audio).
Must isn’t better that can - to have choice taken away from your, there’s always Windows or, even better, MacOS.
When it comes to Corporates it very much is like the Nazi Bar allegory: you let one Nazi stay because he’s beheaving rasonably and not being nasty, and sooner or later the place is going to be full of his friends and turned into a Nazi Bar.
It’s the same dynamic only with corporate logos, advertising, hypercommercialism and eventual enremovediffication instead of swasticas, racist messaging and violence.
Certainly in my eperience of it since the 90s, the Internet changed very much this from its early days and spirit as commercial interests from their original foothold almost entirelly subverted it to serve their interests.
At the level of microcontrollers there is an entire range with the necessary radio HW and enough computing power and memory to have WiFi and a TCP stack but not enough to fit Linux (stuff like the esp8266, which has only 80KB user data memory).
Those things essentially run just the one application on top of some manufacturer provider libraries (no OS, though if you really want to there’s an RT OS) and which can be something that gets commands via the network and activates some hardware via GPIO ports.
For example, smart LED lamps that can be controlled from a smartphone are made with this kind of HW.
Mind you, recently somebody managed to get Linux to run of a top range model of the most recent of these things (an ESP32-S3).
So I wouldn’t presume that a syringe driver can be made to run Linux, given that it’s functionality is simple enough to be implemented by a simple program that can fit in that kind of microcontroller.
I was already a dev in a small IT consultancy by the end of the decade, and having ended up as “one of the guys you go to for web-based interfaces”, I did my bit pushing Linux as a solution, though I still had to use IIS on one or two projects (even had to use Oracle Web Application Server once), mainly because clients trusted Microsoft (basically any large software vendor, such as Microsoft, IBM or Oracle) but did not yet trust Linux.
That’s why I noticed the difference that Red Hat with their Enterprise version and Support Plans did on the acceptability of Linux.