Quake was amazing, but compared to many games of the period it barely ran on anything. Doom engine and Build engine games ran like crap on a 386, but they still ran. Quake needed an FPU, so it needed at least a 486, and as I recall at least a solid 486DX.
Quake actually was the thing that got me into Linux for the first time, because I assumed the fancy new OS everyone was talking about might be able to run it where archaic MS-DOS could not. Of course today I know more about instruction sets and the like and realize how absurd that idea was, but at the time miracles were regularly happening on PCs (imagine how mind blowing something like nesticle or zsnes was!) so it felt like anything was possible.
Incidentally, that first Linux distribution I used was incredible. It lived in a dos directory and you ran a batch file it would replace the MS-DOS kernel with the Linux kernel. It was pretty DIY after that -- I don't think it had a package manager or anything so if you wanted to try to make something run you were digging.
Quake actually was the thing that got me into Linux for the first time, because I assumed the fancy new OS everyone was talking about might be able to run it where archaic MS-DOS could not. Of course today I know more about instruction sets and the like and realize how absurd that idea was, but at the time miracles were regularly happening on PCs (imagine how mind blowing something like nesticle or zsnes was!) so it felt like anything was possible.
Incidentally, that first Linux distribution I used was incredible. It lived in a dos directory and you ran a batch file it would replace the MS-DOS kernel with the Linux kernel. It was pretty DIY after that -- I don't think it had a package manager or anything so if you wanted to try to make something run you were digging.