What was your first Linux distribution?
from midtsveen@lemmy.wtf to linux@lemmy.ml on 24 Apr 20:35
https://lemmy.wtf/post/20153719
from midtsveen@lemmy.wtf to linux@lemmy.ml on 24 Apr 20:35
https://lemmy.wtf/post/20153719
I’m new to #Lemmy and making myself feel at home by posting a bit!
My first Linux distribution was elementary OS in early March 2020. Since then, I’ve tried Manjaro, Arch Linux, Fedora, went back to Manjaro, and since early January 2023, I’ve landed on Debian as my home in the #Linux world.
What was your first Linux distro?
threaded - newest
Kali Linux. Because I was a kid who wanted to be a hackerman.
❤️ Ah yes, the hacker-man vibes!
<img alt="" src="https://media1.tenor.com/m/JFVk98vql5gAAAAd/linux-trash.gif">
After that I used Ubuntu with XFCE for 2 years, Now settled in Fedora with Gnome for like 4 years straight.
Watching something compiling is kinda like the reward for getting it to compile in the first place…
My monitor is visible to a public footpath and I honestly am waiting for the day that I get a knock on the door from the cops because Jo Public saw me do a system update
sudo pacman -Syu 💀
This, but backtrack 5 (the one just before kali). On a laptop that’d take several eternities to brutforce an md5 🤣
I played a bit with Suse around 2000, but I switched to Linux as my main OS with Ubuntu in 2005.
Now I use Manjaro, because I like the rolling release concept, and it’s easy to use different kernels, and it’s a good KDE distro IMO.
In my experience it’s also among the best for Steam games.
Ubuntu back in 2014. Followed by Elementary not long after
Nice 😀 ❤️
Still rocking Ubuntu myself, might give mint a try as I’ve had issues with updates bricking Ubuntu.
I don’t use Ubuntu anymore, and haven’t as my main in a long time.
My longest running distro is probably Arch, which I’ve recently switched back to after a year on Fedora and a year on NixOS
Red Hat, before the enterprise stuff, back in 1999. Installed from a CD found in a book from the library
Oh, back in 1999s, very epic! ❤️
Same for me, it was Red Hat Linux 6.1 (Cartman). I got it from a CD on the front of a PC magazine.
I’ve got a Red Hat from '99! Found in grandpa’s garage. <img alt="" src="https://feddit.dk/pictrs/image/07b1d7ff-691a-401d-a99f-e167e4526feb.webp"> <img alt="" src="https://feddit.dk/pictrs/image/67cc2316-ce65-494c-a69e-1d89266b8536.webp">
Nice! The one I found looked like this. I remember picking it up because I thought the logo looked cool. I think it was 5.2 though
<img alt="" src="https://reddthat.com/pictrs/image/5026eaf0-7dab-4b4c-a145-f6708572a0ff.jpeg">
This was very similar to the box I had but in my case it was mostly white. And the manual was waaaay bigger. Like almost the size of a phone book. I bought mine in 1999 too. Installed from CD. I bought mine for $110 from a stationary shop (since I lived in a student flat and my flatmates would have probably murdered me if I’d downloaded it over dial up that also had a monthly download limit). Good times lol.
YES! That was the same distro that was my entry, it came along with the book Linux for dummies. However mine came on a single CD. Must have been the “lite” edition 😄
Damn! Same here, red hat 99, but switched to Debian quite fast
It was DSLinux, Linux for the Nintendo DS. I tried it while hacking with the DS just to try that “Linux” everyone was talking about. I installed Ubuntu on my PC short after it.
Never heard of it, DSLinux looks very interesting! ❤️
Ubuntu, circa 2005ish I think. Played with all the *buntu derivatives back then, went back to windows for a while, then tried Manjaro, found it frustratingly unstable, and now I use PopOS.
am a simple noob who started with Mint, and remain on Mint on my main gaming machine.
i have fun distro-hopping on my other old, cheap laptops though
Mint is a favorite here too! It just works! ❤️
Real!
After installing and restoring Arch for the third time in 1.5 year I decided to go back to Mint. In the past 5.5 or so years, nothing needed to be reinstalled or restored; Mint’s more stable than Windows by now!
There’s something about simplicity that is underated.
Technically my first ditro was SuSE a loooong time ago but I didn’t stick with it. Then back when Ubuntu became he new hit thing I tried that, but again didn’t stick with it.
I have now loaded up Mint and that’s the one I’m running with. Mind you, all distros have come a long way since my prior Linux dealings but Mint is the one to make me permanently switch.
Dreamlinux :) 2.2 maybe.
SuSE in 1996. Then Debian between mid-1997 and late 2023, NixOS since.
I’m not a big distrohopper…
Why NixOS? I’ve been using Debian since Slink and am interested to hear, what made you move?
Not the guy who first commented, but NixOS is fun because you can have the whole config in a git repo, and can easily reproduce. Main drawback is that Nix as a language is insane and that a lot of packages still aren’t available
While I am not a fan of Nix the language, it is no more insane than ansible or kubernetes yaml soups.
As for packages… nixpkgs is by far the largest repo of packaged software. There are very few things I haven’t found there - and they are usually not in any other distro either.
I switched to NixOS because I wanted a declarative system that isnt’t yaml soup bolted onto a genetic distro.
By 2022, my desktop system was an unmanagable mess. It was a direct descendant of the Debian I installed in 1997. Migrated piece by piece, even switched architectures (multiple times! I386->ppc-i386->amd64), but its roots remained firmly in 1997. It was an unsalvagable mess.
My server, although much younger, also showed signs of accumulating junk, even though it was ansible-managed.
I tried documenting my systems, but it was a pain to maintain. With NixOS, due to it being declarative, I was able to write my configuration in a literate programming style. That helps immensely in keeping my system sane. It also makes debugging easy.
On top of that, with stuff like Impermanence, my backups are super simple: btrfs snapshot of
/persist, exclude a few things, ship it to backup. Done. And my systems always have a freshly installed feel! Because they are! Every boot, they’re pretty much rebuilt from the booted config + persisted data.In short, declarative NixOS + literate style config gave me superpowers.
Oh, and nixos’s packaging story is much more convenient than Debian’s (and I say that as an ex-DD, who used to be intimately familiar with debian packaging).
Thank you. Glad I’m not alone in this quest with that kind of history.
My current desktop is Wheezy inside a VM - also across several platforms, but VMware, by design , doing the heavy lifting.
Anything of note, essentially everything except Audacity, is running on a Bookworm Docker host with X11 forwarding and reverse mount sshfs, so all the container “sees” is the directory I give it.
I’ve made several attempts to move away from Wheezy, but there’s too many scripts in my ~/bin directory to make that simple.
The “fresh paint smell” experience for me comes from a docker pull or docker build, but it does require hardware capabilities that died eight months or so ago, when my 64 GB RAM iMac died. No data loss, just endless frustration.
At the moment I’m exploring EC2 on demand. I suspect that for the $10k I previously spent on hardware, I can always have the latest on tap, but I’m still trying to get real-time audio editing to not be a weekly disaster. Getting closer, but not quite there yet.
I’ll have a squiz at NixOS, seems like an interesting approach.
Much obliged for sharing your experience!
I can’t remember if it was MKLinux or Yellow Dog, either one of these around '97~99. At the time I was also playing with BeOS and NetBSD.
Forgot about BeOS (and NetBSD for that matter), and wonder what came of BeOS.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system)
Wow, that brings back memories. Forgot about the whole Palm thing. That was a wild ride at the time.
Thank you!
It’s funny seeing all the kids distro hopping around here. I was like that once, now it’s just debian everywhere. The one and only. Stable for servers, testing on workstations, properly selected hardware couldn’t be simpler.
Back then I really liked NetBSD cause they were the only one who had a native OpenFirmware bootloader, which meant you could boot PPC macs with it without requiring a mac partition to load the extension.
Unfortunately I can’t run Debian on my M3 MacBook Air :-(
forgot about Yellow Dog. I still have a BSD VM (Dragonfly) that I occasionally fire up
The first I used for any extended period of time was fedora.
Welcome to Lemmy stranger.
Slackware back in the early 90s on a Compaq 386/SX20 💾
Go Slackware!
Honestly it still feels like home. Because I was kind of a moron and figured it would mean less to figure out, I registered darkstar.org (the default domain Slackware came set up with).
I few years later I actually emailed Patrick Volkerding about something and he mentioned it… I felt this strange mix of pride and shame ;-)
Slackware 3.1 late 1996. Great fuckin’ year that was.
Well shit you got me beat I ran Slackware from 3.5 disks in the 90s on a 486dx2. I sent away for those disks to be mailed to me. I even did something crazy with that machine I had lots of ram so I sent them off to a company to combine them together. I want to say it 8 or 16 megabytes. Bit I can’t remember now.
That’s great, I didn’t even know that was a service you could get. I remember being really disappointed when I realized that a SIMM would not actually fit in one of my 386s ISA slots 😅
Also Slackware!
But I skipped from my 286 to a Pentium 133 (then went a bit backwards to a 486 dx100, then ahead to some cyrix and AMD).
It was such a cool time for CPUs. Going up a generation was like getting a supercomputer. And Intel had those cartridge CPUs…
Such a wild time… I started building PCs for people (even my gym teacher), it was so fun - and yeah, such a huge jump every time!
Now I have the same build for nearly 15 years with upgrades along the way, and my servers are all decom’d t/m/m PCs.
Edit: Jump had a typo
I overlocked my Pentium 133 to 150.
I was such a badass.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/ce2e84a2-48c6-45ac-bb0c-b29f5fff2e82.webp">
Floppy sets represent!
I used Vector Linux 3.2, which was Slackware based, mostly because it was a small(ish) download on my friend’s Cable internet connection. Shortly after I moved to real Slackware. This was probably 2003/4
The Alien repo was a godsend
Pop!_OS in early 2023, I used it for about 3 weeks before my bootloader broke so bad even Pops own recovery tool couldn’t fix it. I went back to Windows 10 for another month before trying again with EndeavourOS and haven’t had to use Windows since.
Funnily the thing that triggered me to install Linux on a spare SSD was I couldn’t play Battlefield 4 on my Windows install anymore because the EA app randomly stopped working even after reinstalling the whole thing, Got the EA app and BF4 working on Pop within an hour.
Hmm, the years are a bit faded but first install of Redhat in 1996-7 somewhere as a short experiment, then Slackware, SuSE, LFS, Gentoo, and since then lazy with Kubuntu… Might switch again soon with the Snap fiasco.
I guess technically, Raspbian.
Zorin OS because they said it was windows like
I dual booted Ubuntu originally, but I never used it. Had to really make the jump when I installed Arch on my desktop in ~2020 because I heard it would run games better. I’ve stayed 100% on Linux since! After trying quite a few distros (Fedora, Debian, EndeavourOS, Garuda, Archcraft, more I’m forgetting) I have finally settled on NixOS… it’s been over a year and I still haven’t switched, that’s gotta be worth something :)
Ubuntu in the mid 2000s, but it’s PopOS that made me a fulltimer ~2 years ago. I don’t use it anymore but I’ll always be thankful for it.
Started with Mint and stuck with that for a year. No issues, just felt comfortable enough to try something “fancier”, I guess Mint was a little too reliable lol. Went with PopOS a while for the native dock and tiling manager, loved it. Now I’m on a brand new PC build and enjoying gaming with Bazzite. No tinkering involved, it setup my 5070 Ti automatically.
Ubuntu, I hated it lol
<img alt="Slackware 96 CD Case" src="https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/349ddb4c-fcc8-418d-a042-9613c5685a22.jpeg">
Slackware96 from Walnut Creek purchased at Staples back when software came in boxes with manuals. Netscape Navigator 3.0 anyone?
I got a T-shirt from Mozilla in the early 1990’s and foolishly wore it to death. My Linux tie pin is somewhere, but I’m sure that my penguin tie has died, as have the Debian Potato CDs with boot disks for x86, PowerPC and SPARC.
Slackware back in '96 when It was the only option. Then tried everything else before settling on Mint and never having to worry about picking another distribution again.
Slackware in 1997.
I ran it on a 486SX/40 with 32MB of RAM and a 2GB harddrive.
It turned me into the man I am today.
Debian Slink
Before that, Windows NT, A/UX, Solaris and VAX/VMS.
Before that, Vic 20 and Apple II
Still using Debian every day whilst navigating the perils of MacOS.
The one I settled on back then was Mandrake.
Ubuntu > Mint > Manjaro > Arch > PopOS > Debian
(History, not ranking [Debian wins])
Testify, brother.
Same, but I skipped manjaro and popOS. And I used slackware at the college computers. Debian still wins for me, it came a long way.
WSL, Deepin for an hour, and then endeavourOS (easy Arch) ever since
I think mine was gentoo, waaaay back in the day. It didn't go great lol.
I'm loving opensuse rn though!
OpenSuSE that came with the Linux magazine
Knoppix on live cd which I installed later on hdd but a few days later switched to Mandrake, I think it was… 2001? Good times, good times. There has been a lot of distrohopping since then.
My first linux was Ubuntu 10.04. And I swapped to Arch only when Ubuntu added snap.
First attempt was Slackware, installed from a CD that came with a magazine because we didn’t have the internet in about 2001 or 2002. It worked for one glorious afternoon but I’d tried to dual boot with Windows and nuked that partition. Got into big trouble and was banned from the family computer for the rest of the summer. Couldn’t try again until a couple of years later when I got my very own laptop and paid my friend £5 to leave his PC on overnight downloading an ISO of dynebolic over dial up and burn it to a CD for me.
That was great but then I got my hands on a beefier PC and used Ubuntu thanks to the free CDs you could get in the mail. When I finally got a job and a broadband connection I switched to Mandriva, then Ubuntu again for a few years with most of that being Xubuntu and for like the last 10 years mostly Debian. I switched to Fedora a couple of times and tried a few others like MX Linux and Qubes. I also had a Pinebook Pro for a while running Manjaro ARM. I just always ended up going back to Debian. I can’t see myself ever changing distros again.
Leaving a PC to download software overnight sounds so early 2000s, I love it. 😎❤
I agree I love Debian for my servers but for my daily driver it is fedora.
Mint, then Ubuntu, then Kubuntu, elementaryOS, Manjaro, then I gave up Linux for a while because I needed remote desktop for my PC at work, now back on PopOS!
Some ancient version of SuSE Linux way back in like 2001. I did not stick with it back then.
I started with Mandrake 6 when the there were lots of 9’s or 0’s in the year
Then bounced from Slackware/opensuse/Red Hat/Debian/Gentoo/BSD
Now running Kde Neon and MacOS (Debian and BSD as server OSs)
I tried to set up arch, realized I didn’t want that kind of work for a gaming setup and swapped to debian, and i’ve used that since lol
Yellow Dog in early 2000s, and I think I switched to Debian PPC not long after. My memory of back then is quite hazy. A way while after that I had an Eee PC which I think I put Ubuntu on initially (the desktop was dog slow) and then changed over to LMDE. Have a feeling I had something else on it before Ubuntu… may have been the default Eee distribution, which I forget the name of (think it began with an X).
my first ‘distro’ was slackware, on floppy disks. then debian or a flavour of, mainly, ever since. i’ve never really strayed too far from debian and apt over the years but i have tried most everything.
Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 somewhere around 2000. Ran that for a year or two until the PC it was on died.
Next time I was able to run it was 2008ish on a pos dell laptop on which I installed Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). When that laptop died a year or so later I went macOS and was happy there until about 2022ish.
Now I’m running it across several machines for different purposes.
Arch dualbooting OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my tinkering laptop.
Ubuntu Server 22.04 on my server (started with 18.04)
Fedora 41 on family computers/laptops
Asahi on the last bit of Apple hardware left in the house
Raspberry Pi OS on a number of PiS serving different purposes.
I started with Ubuntu back when you could put in your parent’s home address and they sent you free CDs. I’m on Arch (since about 2010), and I can’t change.
My first was Ubuntu 06.06, but I was only messing around using a live CD. I tried it again with Ubuntu 12.04 when Steam added Linux support, but went back to Windows because gaming on Linux wasn’t really there.
Finally decided to dual boot and distro hopped a bit in 2015 between Mint, Kubuntu, then KDE Neon for a bit before settling on Manjaro some time in 2017. Eventually I switched to Arch in 2022 after Manjaro forgot to renew their certs again.
If just using the Live CD counts, Lubuntu 12.04, to copy files off a broken Windows machine
Then Ubuntu, followed by Deepin (looked cool), UbuntuDDE, Arch, Xubuntu, and finally settled on Debian in 2022.
elementary os in 2016. I still use eos on my desktop machine, mainly because it’s kinda ubuntu but not quite. Running Fedora on one of my laptops, the rest are running macos
Nice to see EOS in the wild! ❤
in order (2000-present): red hat, slackware, debian, ubuntu, arch, manjaro, nix
Lubuntu about 10 years ago, then Mint, openSUSE, and I’ve stuck with Debian for the past eight.
Someone installed Fedora for me somewhere around 2006, then I switched between Ubuntu and Windows until permanently settling for Ubuntu a couple of years ago. But I'm thinking of switching to Debian..
Ubuntu… Then Slackware… Then Fedora… Then Arch I still dont know why tf I went to Slackware… It was painful, but worth it
Arch Linux, on an old Compaq pizza box server when I was 16. It took me 3 months to install Arch because there was a DIP switch on the motherboard that somehow prevented you from updating the MBR or some shit.
I basically never used it and didn't touch Linux again until 7 years later, when I used SLES 11 SP2 at a job.
I think it was Slackware sometime in the early 2000s
For me it was elementary OS. Dual-booted with Windows back in 2015/2016. Maybe 1 year later, I installed Linux Mint Cinnamon and gradually used it more than Windows. Now I am using EndeavourOS XFCE and only using Windows virtually… when I am bored or need to use Adobe Lightroom Classic.
Ubuntu 8.10 in early 2009, after Windows Vista otherwise bricked my laptop. I’ve distro-hopped on a few occasions but most of my 16 years of Linux have been on Ubuntu. That said, I moved away from Ubuntu after a failed upgrade to 22.04 LTS, to OpenSUSE and then to KDE Neon, now I’m on Nobara and couldn’t be happier.
Knoppix. I didn’t see it listed yet so I had to chime in.
I saw it and was confused that computers could run something that wasn’t Windows and wasn’t Mac. Then I was handed a Knoppix LiveCD and suddenly MY computer was Linux. Absolutely blew my mind.
I then explored Mandrake (now Mandrivia?) for a while but it never really stuck.
A few years later Ubuntu was handing out LivdCDs to everyone running Warty Warthog and soon after window managers started to use Beryl (?) which let you have a fancy cube desktop. Absolutely pointless but that’s how it all started.
If I remember correctly I had the same start: tested Knoppix, tried Mandrake for a short time, then Ubuntu which I used for several years until Gnome 3 when I switched to Xubuntu for several years, but when snap happened I tried Debian, then Mint for a while, but I’m now trying MX.
Red Hat 8.0, the Linux Starter 2003 double cd edition. From there I tried my first Ubuntu when they where still sending out free cd’s which was version 6.06 LTS. After that I dabbled a bit jumping from distro to distro to try out different flavors, tinkering a bit for fun and even tried to build my own with Arch. All the while keeping my Windows (XP, 7, 10) daily driver as my main rig. Finally switched over to Pop_OS! a few years ago as my daily for work. I’ve been thinking about switching over my gaming rig to a Linux distro but haven’t figured out which one is the best one and requires the least amount of tinkering.
Whatever version of Red Hat there was in 1999. 6 point something if memory serves.
I was running Quake 3 servers a few PCs.
My first Linux install was Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy. Got those wobbly windows going and felt like a fucking king.
Mandrake 2003. Followed by Ubuntu server 5.10 in 2005.
Switched to Debian in 2020, been on Debian since.
Redhat, in 1997. A group at my college was burning CDs and giving them away, along with some “extra” goodies like whatever version of Enlightenment was new at the time, I remember being amazed by that. Or maybe it was just some E themes, don’t remember exactly. I think Redhat still came with FVWM95 and maybe OpenStep. I spent so many hours editing those damned Xfree86 configs just to get basic VGA graphics to work.
Raspbian (modified Debian Jesse) on a raspberry pi 2B (which I am still using over a decade later to host some discord bots). Also now using Debian 1Bookworm on an old optiplex as a media server.
Yggdrasil In the mid 90s.
Ubuntu had a thing for a while where they would send you a CD if you asked for it. Friend of mine from school gave me one.
Mandrake. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. But I did get it installed.
Fedora
Mint cinnamon
Ubuntu all the way! :) Before I learned there were other ones, then wound up back on Mint again after a trip around the houses. :)
Slackware 3.1.
Void linux
.
Still shopping for one when I make the switch. Mint looked pretty user friendly.
I am not a computer unfortunately, only a ungabunga caveman
Mandrake 6.0 in 1998. The kernel was still 2.2, and KDE 1.1.1.
Me as well. I don’t remember where / how I got the CD. Linux as a desktop has come so far since then!
This brought back some memories: www.mandrakelinux.org
I first got to try Kali Linux while getting my degree.
Mandriva Linux, then RHEL, the Debian and fedora.
In the early 90’s I downloaded Slackware to floppy disks. It took me several days to make them. Slackware holds a special place in my heart.
To this day I still use Linux full time. Arch is my go to, but I like and recommend Endeavor often.
Ubuntu – the one with the Nelson Mandela video and the picture of people holding hands in a circle.
Sometime in maybe 2021-22 I messed up something on a shitty laptop of mine at the time. Changed something on win10 and was trying to fix it to get admin privileges back on the single account on there. Some website recommended flashing Ubuntu onto a thumb drive and entering some commands on the live boot. Didn’t work out and I didn’t wanna go through with a fresh win10 install for close to, if not, $100 for everything. Ended up with Ubuntu 20.04 installed because I wanted to use that laptop.
I’ve since tried many and currently have MX on a better laptop. At some point I’m gonna try to either find something new I can learn so that way by October I can make my desktop have a priority Linux boot with an internet disconnected win10 partition, or just go with Mint or MX. Definitely got a small list of distros I might wanna try, so we’ll see.
Ubuntu 6.06 I always come back to Arch now-a-days.
My first was Slackware in the 90s after a friend introduced it to me. He set up a system to use it as a proxy for our network at home to use but would frequently redoing that system so we didn’t have internet for sometimes days. It wasn’t a good time. Took years to use Linux again.
Installed Ubuntu back at 2012 on my Surface. Since then, I’ve hopped to CentOS, OpenSUSE, and Fedora. For now I’ve settled on Arch Linux!
Mandrake 9
OpenSuse sometime around '07
It didn’t click, ended up moving to Ubuntu almost immediately. A few years later I moved to Fedora. Circa 2020 I dove into Archlinux and managed that for a couple years. Nowadays as I’m learning server stuff I’ve switched to Mint.
Slackware, of course, but when Debian was first released two years later I obviously switched (and it’s been Debian since then).
Ubuntu sometime around 2010. It definitely wasn’t what I was looking for so I didn’t try another distro until 3 years ago. Linux Mint’s working well for me but I’m curious about Bazzite.
Ubuntu in about 2007 when my windows desktop crashed. A friend installed it in place. Never looked back
Ubuntu 16.04, dual booted on my laptop before I knew how much of a hassle that could be! Fortunately, never had any of the infamous issues.
Started with Soft Landing Systems (SLS). Pre-Slackware. Many hours downloading floppy disk images at school.
Moved to Red Hat (pre-Fedora and pre-RHEL) until I think 7.3 or so and then Mandrake. I did trial runs with many distros over time but none of them really stuck. Fedora for a release or two. Spent a few years on Manjaro for desktop and CentOS for server. Have been on Arch for many years now (or EndeavourOS). Never used Ubuntu really.
Moved to Proxmox for server. Although I never used Debian historically, quite a few of the containers I have on Proxmox now are Debian based as is Proxmox itself.
Lately, I have been using Chimera Linux for desktop though I have an Arch Distrobox on it so I guess I am a bit of a hybrid at this point.
Lycoris in 2002. It sucked. I think I tried it because it was pushed towards newbies. I tried Mandrake with KDE not long after and that is when I really became a Linux fan.
ubuntu some time in 2010, but I eventually switched to fedora in 2011, went back to commercial operating systems (windows and macos) in the mid 10s, but returned to fedora some months ago, and that’s what I’m using now (I do still have a macbook running macos lol 🤷♀️)
strangely I don’t think I’ve tried other linux distros all these years, I may have tried to install gentoo and/or arch for meme reasons but gave up and went back to ubuntu and fedora
In the fall of 2006 my friend in high school (shout-out to treyx.net) donated to the Ubuntu people and they sent him a stack of Ubuntu live CDs, must have been 5.10 or 6.06. I remember being so excited when I got it up and running on my computer
Raspbian Wheezy.
Ubuntu was my first when I started poking around with it. Not sure which version, but it was during the Unity era. Pop!_OS was the one I started using when I switched full time. I’m still using it on my main computer, but I’m also using Fedora, Ubuntu, NixOS, and Mint on other devices because I like variety!
Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron. I miss loving Ubuntu
Same! I remember getting Warcraft 3 to run with wine. Ubuntu used to be exciting…
Same, really nice distro back then.
My first Linux was Gentoo. It took several tries to get code compiled and working on that Pentium 4, but I will say, the process taught me a lot about Linux in general. It was the ultimate crash course. I’d recommend Gentoo for all beginners who don’t mind digging in to the point of frustration, because it’s a great learning experience.
SUSE Linux, back in the 1990s. Because you could buy it for cheap, and you got not only the huge stack of floppy disks to install it from, but also a set of thick fat detailed handbooks (these things made from paper full of pictures and letters and glued together, like your grandparents may have had). I spent many nights with them books instead of my wife…
It was a bear to install and terribly complicated to configure back then; at least for me. But in the end, I had a nice server running well for a while.
Mklinux on my powermac G3
Gentoo, sometime in the early 00’s
I grew up a windows user, as was my father before me. I first started with Linux in my teens, initially on Raspbian as I was gifted a raspberry pi 2b with a camera, and I wanted to try goofing around with python and computer vision (which was the style at the time.) Once I entered university, I dual booted Windows 7 and Linux Mint, since my professor suggested moving to Linux for C++ homework to make things simpler. I was scared of jumping to a new desktop OS due to my upbringing, so I couldn’t abandon Windows, not yet anyway. Following that I had a cheap Summer fling with Kali as it was a requirement for a cyber security course I took. This replaced my Mint install. After college I got into self-hosting, and my server ran Debian for stability (and still does to this day), however I was still scared of leaving the safety of my littlr Windows garden I called home. But then Windows betrayed me by putting ads on my taskbar, and I got fed up. I installed EndeavorOS on my main machine which was a laptop. I immediately fell head over heels for the AUR, and not needing a deep understanding of linux during the install was a plus. I got comfy with the ins and outs of linux over the next year and a half or so, and when I finally went to build myself a new desktop PC, I made the switch to Arch. It’s been great, and I felt like I understood all the decisions I made during the install. That was 6 months ago. If Arch ever fails me catastrophically,(which would be pretty hard as I am using an os snapshot manager, and backing those snapshots up to my server) I will move to either Debian or Mint for stability, as I am kind of tired of hopping around at this point.
Ubuntu 6.06 was my first Linux install. I still remember the pain of ndiswrapper to get Windows WiFi drivers working on Linux.
Pop!_OS since January of this year \o/
Slackware in 1998 I think, from a cd that came in a book I bought while in university.
It didn’t stick, but it demystified it and I’ve used a lot of flavours of *nix since then.
I remember not being able to get sound to work at all on my pentium computer.
Slackware gang!!!
Slackware was my first intel Linux. First linux ever was red hat for DEC alpha. Quite weird after OSF/1.
Still use slackware, though mostly now actual work is done on debian, arch, and alpine.
Welcome to Lemmy!
For me the first Linux distribution I used was Ubuntu 8.04 - though I never had installed it on physical hardware, just a VM - VirtualBox IIRC (that didn’t occur till Ubuntu 8.10). I was in my early teenage years and had discovered Linux and found it interesting, I used the
WUBItool to install it through Windows and updated the bootloader to keep Windows as the default (with a one second timeout) since it was the family computer, I think my family would’ve shat their pants if they randomly rebooted the PC and was greeted with Linux heh.Though a few years later on an old secondary family laptop (it was the “someone else is using the other computer” spare/backup) that was running Vista, it had gotten so buggy and bogged down that I installed Kubuntu for my family and they happily used that until eventually that laptop was retired. It never got them to really look into permanently switching to Linux, but I think that’s more than fine - I’ve never been one to “proselytize” Linux: If it is the right tool for you, fantastic - if not, no hard feelings is how I see it. In the aforementioned case, it was the better tool over the bogged down and buggy Vista.
As for nowadays, its CachyOS on my desktop (I’m not married to it, but its been working alright for me for about a year now), SteamOS on my Deck, Fedora on my secondary laptop (an old intel macbook), and then Bazzite on my ROG Ally. Windows is still installed on a secondary drive on my desktop, but I very rarely have to boot into it.
BackTrack 5 because I was too poor to pay for my own Wi-Fi back then, so I had to become creative heheh
It’s hard to remember but it was some version of Mandrake probably in the early 2000’s. At the time, they were one of the only distros (along with Red Hat) to offer an installation GUI. As a first time user I found partitioning a hard drive too complex to do on the command line.
I only used Mandrake for a short time before reverting to windows but it wasn’t long after that when I came back and then started using Debian. Since then I went back to Windows then to OpenSuSe, then Debian, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, and now Pop!_OS.
Way back: Ubuntu live CD. More recent history: Pop!_OS > Zorin OS > Fedora.
Happily been running Fedora for like 2 years now.
Raspbian if that counfs
I believe it was slackware. it was gifted to teenage me ca 1994, was on the CD of some magazine.
I wanted to try it, so went dual boot. it (or I?) partitioned my 800MB hard disk into a 300MB and an 800MB partition. stupid young me thought this was great and I just gained 300MB. when I noticed date corruption, stupid young me started to copy over important data to the assumed good partition. things didn’t end well.
I took a two year break from Linux afterwards 🤣
Red Hat 5.0 “Hurricane” from 1997. I still have the CD.
I guess it was suse or red hat somewhen end of 90s or beginning of 2000. Anyhow I didn’t like KDE back in the days and haven’t touched it since. Although the screenshots I’ve seen of the latest kde looked kind of good. But I’m mostly running arch or manjaro today and prefer gnome or some tiling manager like herbstluftwm.
Red Hat, way back in the 90s - must have been 5.0 IIRC.
Since then I went through Ubuntu and now landed on Fedora.
Similar here: Red Hat 6 > Ubuntu > Debian > Fedora Silverblue
I am so intrigued by Silverblue but given how stable Fedora is I’m not really sure I’d gain anything
Ubuntu lol
I started using Linux this year. I first tried out Debian, but then switched to mint. Has been very happy with mint every since, so I don’t think I will switch again in the near future.
Ubuntu, like a lot of people my age (2000s)
It’s crazy how much Canonical has trashed their reputation.
I still respect the work they did back in the day but I have negative respect for Canonical and Shuttlesworth (sp?) today
Mint
Lubuntu — what a horrible experience (back then)! Now I’m happy with openSUSE Tumbleweed, Void Linux, and Nobara (for my wanna-be gaming PC, lol; trying to get just enough frames for CS2). Every once-and-a-while (I feel like hyphenating that), I do a fresh install, just to get rid of the cruft. Nowadays that makes me wonder if I should be switching to immutable…
Ubuntu, as they used to send free CD packs to distribute. Was fun booting into live CD on computers.
Arch in like 2019 maybe.
I still like Arch, I tried all sorts of distros in VMs, most feel clunky to me.
Tiling manager, GUI file explorer, minimal status bar and I’m set.
For my laptop this is swaywm, swaybar, nautilus.
I also use drun-like programs
Ubuntu in 2009 or so. Booting school computers onto the live DVD felt like hacking. I think around 2016 I installed some spin of Ubuntu on my laptop and used it somewhat regularly. Prior to that it was just random times I felt like using the dual boot function. I mostly used Windows. It took until 2025 for me to switch my desktop to Cachy OS.
It was Slackware… Back in the late 90s. Do not ask me about how kid me managed that, all I recall is endless terminals, kernel panics and eventually getting a desktop through some arcane means I can’t remember.
I didn’t return to linux for many years after that experience.
I still have the 1996 edition of Slackware Linux Unleashed and the CD in my bookshelf as a reminder.
Technically I first experuenced Linux as a very small kid in 2009 in my school computers, but my first time trying Linux for my personal desktip usage was in December 11, 2021, when I first tried Linux Mint. My setup was a very humble, 14 years old, ddr2 board, and I was amazed at how much faster Cinnamon was compared to Windows 10. Since then, I already helped about 5 people to move to Linux too 😁
Ubuntu, the release right before unity was the one I started actually using.
After that I switched to arch for a very long time, and now i’m on nixos.
I had Slackware running on a couple of 386 machines with 200MB hard disks. It was impossible to do almost anything as it was all compile from source but I didn’t have the disk space to install all the compiler tools and what I was trying to run on them. I was originally going to use them as part of a distributed system for my degree, but in the end I didn’t use them and did something different instead.
I used CentOS at work a lot for several years and liked it, but only fully switched form Windows at home 10 years ago and I went to Ubuntu at the time. Installed KDE on it, messed around with i3 and had a great time. I then went hopping and landed on Endeavour OS which I’ve been really enjoying for many years now and have no intention of moving from. All my servers still run Ubuntu LTS Server as it has been unbelievably solid.
One of the first slackware (so many floppies) on my mighty 486 DX 50. Linux wasn’t at 1.0 yet at the time.
Linux (many versions) has been my daily driver ever since, with windows as a gaming backup a lot of the time. I still have it on a single machine in a small partition because of VR :‐/
Redhat 4.1 back in 97. I even purchased the CD from PC World, seems wild now to buy a CD/DVD of a distro.
First PC I installed it on was a work laptop, had to compile a bunch of kernel modules and then the kernel to get everything working but get everything working I did, Thinkpads being good for Linux even then.
Ubuntu. But I think that will be almost everyones answer who started with Linux in the late-mid 2000s.
Edit: Oh wait. Might have been Knoppix to resuce some data from a broken windows installation.
I guess Ubuntu when I tried to make a minecraft server a couple of years ago. I first started actually using Linux as my desktop with bazzite.
I started with Lubuntu, because of Minecraft. My PC was so slow that even Minecraft had improved performance, compared to it running on Win 10.
Slackware, in the 90s, installed from floppy disks. I also used SuSE, Debian and now stick with Fedora.
Ubuntu - > Mint - > Manjaro - > EndeavourOS - > Nobara - > Arch
Those are the main ones, I’ve tried others too but all of those were my daily for a while
Red Hat 9 in 2004
Red Hat 7
I guess Ubuntu? 10 years ago or even more? can’t remember… Tried it for a bit but didn’t stick at first and went back to Windows until 2020.
Installed my first homelab and selfhosted application on my old spare laptop with Debian (only over command line).
So I gave Linux desktop another try… Ubuntu for a few days => Manjaro for a few days => EndeavourOS !
Got hooked and are now a proud EOS user for about 3 years and never will I look back into Windows !
I’m still in the learning process, but in the long run I will probably switch to bare bone Arch.
SuSE, about 1999, although I didn’t really start ‘getting’ Linux until I tried Slackware a couple of years later. After that I’ve just been bouncing between trusty old Debian and different distros based on it.
Edit: I’ve also tried Gentoo, Arch and Mandrake briefly many years ago.
Ubuntu at the start of my college years, dabbled with Arch in the senior year. Huge learning experience, but ultimately I went back to Windows because gaming support was nonexistent at the time. Kept the dual boot up and kept it running Arch during the day for coursework, Windows when I was all done.
For the past decade since then I was entirely back on Windows. Aside from an Ubuntu VM for my last job, I didn’t really get back into it until the Steam Deck launched a few years ago, and at the start of this year I decided to set up a dual boot again once I got a new full new desktop build. Tried Bazzite, really didn’t like how restricted I felt, immediately wiped it and tried out CachyOS instead, and that’s my daily driver today.
And just this past week I finally decided got into selfhosting, something I’ve been eyeballing for ages but never really got around to. Proxmox on the host, Debian VM, pretty standard and works amazingly.
I ran slackware in college with fluxbox. I thought I was pretty darn cool.
Probably Knoppix on some Laptop my dad brought home at around 2001-2002. Still remember tinkering with it and having no idea what I am doing haha. Good times.
Casual Deck owner here. Arch Linux is my answer.
Chrome OS, obviously. jk
xD 😆
Ubuntu 8.10 in late 2008. while I didn’t use Linux for that long due to a lack of understanding I did come back to it in in a few years to check out I think Ubuntu 10.04 in 2010 or and then Fedora 36 a few years ago and never plan to leave
Corel Linux in the late 90s, but didn’t actually go full time until Ubuntu in 05,followed by arch for a few years, now on mint.
Corel Linux… that’s a while ago. I remember thinking that it was strange that Corel would come out with a Linux distribution.
OpenSuse with compiz going hard on an old laptop
The first was about 1995-ish Redhat on school computers, after that was Suse on a 2000s laptop, and currently Mint+Mx on a self-built pc. Hardware support and ease of use has come a long way since then.
Sadly, Ubuntu. I quickly moved on to debian…and ultimately landed with Arch, my true love for many years. I use Arch, btw.
Nowt wrong with a gateway distro if it gets you out of windows land
Agree. To its credit, it made the transition smooth.
All the old timers are coming out. In the summer of ‘98 I switched to Red Hat Linux.
🫂
I used slackware, btw
Oh yeah well I still boot Bell Labs Unix that I load off of punch cards
^^^That’s ^^^awesome ^^^that ^^^you ^^^used ^^^Slackware, ^^^I’m ^^^just ^^^joking
Slackware was the shit in the 90’s. I bounced around slack, Debian, and a bunch of other floppy based distros. My first install was onto my Amiga, before I got a new pc. Good times
The first one I saw was Debian 3.1 (Sarge). I was in school and our objective this time was installing debian + getting a working Xorg session. Never heard of Linux before, didn’t get a working Xorg session, but wow man, there’s something other than Windows and MacOS. I couldn’t have imagined.
The first one I actually used on a desktop (laptop for school, in that case) was Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake).
I’ve tried oh so many different linux distributions over the years, I probably forgot most of them. Maybe some don’t even exist anymore. My goal was always Arch Linux, having seen it on a schoolmates laptop. I really fell for the “here’s a pretty minimum base, do whatever” thing.
In the end, I exclusively used Arch from 2020 until this year. Actually using Arch and reading the ArchWiki were probably what taught me most of what I know about linux in general and how things work.
I’ve been searching for a less DIY-solution which is still up-to-date (especially with kernels and mesa) and I landed on Fedora Workstation, which is what I’m currently using on my work latpop and desktop at home. I do miss some things from Arch, but Fedora has been pretty good to me and I, for the meantime, intend to stay here.
Fedora is a pretty damn solid distro, I like it a lot
Yes it is. Though after using arch for a few years, I miss the abundance of packages.
If a package wasn’t in the official arch repos, it was probably in the AUR. If you use arch, you don’t need other package managers like homebrew on linux.
Ubunutu for a server in ~2019.
Arch for my workstation Jan 2025
I bought one of those Guide to Linux books back in like 2008 that came with an Ubuntu install disc. Installed it on an old family PC but I didn’t really know what I was doing so I didn’t get far.
Then in college I used Mint on my desktop and Peppermint on my Acer Aspire netbook. Around graduation I bought a Chromebook and ran Xubuntu in Crouton.
Went a few years without Linux and recently dual-booted with Pop OS on my gaming PC. Feels good.
Debian 3.1, but was not successful in getting X to work, but didn’t put a lot of effort into it. Then I got Mandrake running with X, but went back to Windows. On a small computer, I got FreeBSD running as a server but never used it, so that went away again. Knoppix a couple of times to recover data from failed Windows installations.
Yeah, it’s not until recently that I installed Debian 12 on a old work laptop and was very impressed. Now I’m on the fence of having a stable distribution or sumthin with newer packages. I love the philosophy of Debian and the wide usage on servers but Arch is personally also up my alley, however I have not used it at all.
Oof. I am pretty sure it was Mandrake in 97. I bounced around trying what was around before settling on Gentoo for a decade plus. Then both my laptop and desktop got too long in the tooth to make distcc even worthwhile and migrated to Arch. I figured it was the closest distro to Gentoo that I wouldn’t have too many problems. I don’t know howong it’s been now, but I’m an Arch fangirl. I’ve installed it many times since on work computers as well. For remote systems though, it’s always Debian stable.
Bodhi Linux. It had to be something that could run on a 32 bit laptop, because that’s what I used as a testing ground before committing to Linux.
I came in just about as Debian Woody was coming out, in 2002. (Main reason I can even date it beyond “Idk, about 20 years ago?”).
Tried Mandrake a while after that, often recommended as pretty much the equivalent of Linux Mint at the time in terms of noob friendliness. I did enjoy that but stuck with Debian for my main system for years, though.
Whatever Ubuntu was available in 2015. I only dabbled in Linux over the past 10 years. More seriously switching over in the last year or so.
I have Unraid as a server OS (
Debianslackware based, running a lot of docker containers and a couple VMs). Debian on my laptop. And Bazzite (fedora based) on my Lenovo Legion Go.Still need to swap my gaming PC from windows. May try Bazzite on that as well. I’ve also tried Mint, Manjaro, and Zorin
Also Ubuntu for me. It had a golden age, I want to say 2006-2015ish.
Yea I’m running a much leaner Debian on my laptop now. Base OS was very bare, slowly adding only what I need because it’s a 2016 laptop and noticeably slower on some more bloated OSs
Isn’t unraid based on slackware?
Whoops, you’re right. I was thinking of proxmox, used to run that for a bit too
Mandrake
Samesies
Same herr😀
Corel Linux.
It started with Red Hat 6.1 in 1999 and ended up with NixOS.
Linux Mint XFCE, it was easy to setup and could run on my really old laptop.
My first steps were with Debian 2.0 and a Suse Version from about the same time. But that was not very successful so I went back to Windows for about a year and then really got into Linux with Gentoo. I had a year of not much to do, had to wait a year to get into University, and I decided to install the complicated Linux Distribution that I could find.
Reasoning was: It will break a lot if it is so complicated, due to this I am forced to learn while repairing it.
Manjaro -> openSuse tumbleweed -> Fedora (Desktop) and tuxedoOS (Laptop)
My first linux distribution was Linux From Scratch (LFS). I printed like 300 pages at the school library so I could run it at home. My first real distribution was Gentoo or Damn Small Linux.
I started with mint because of ppl recommending it. Absolutely hated it. Luckly I watched a YouTube video about installing arch. So then I tried it and loved it. Then manjaro for about 2 years. Then back to arch. Then finally Nixos, and I dont plan on ever switching again. I have Nixos on every system I own now, and a few friends machines. Those are just the main ones. I tried all the other popular ones out on my laptop. Except gentoo.
TLDR: Mint🙁>Arch😄>manjaro🙂>arch😄>NixOs😁
Ubuntu Feisty Fawn.
Ubuntu Lucid Lynx
Currently, I use Arch BTW.
redhat 4.1 or maybe 5.2 back around 1996-1998 (plus a freebsd release around the same time). I got a pile of probably 15 discs from walnut creek and they were the only two I could get running. I didn’t have internet access at the time.
I first tried Mandrake for a couple days in the late 9ps because I heard it was easy. It was definitely easy to brick my system and have no idea why!
So I switched to Slackware and never looked back. I’m still daily driving Slackware all these years later.
I actually wanted Arch but everyone was saying that you HAD to do a manual install first and I had been miserably failing at doing it in a WM for a few weeks. I had finally decided to try it directly on hardware so that I had no choice but to complete it if I wanted to use my laptop, and just as was about to burn the ISO on a USB stick the power went out and my hard drive died 😑 On a saturday evening, obviously…
All I had was a Haiku USB I had made to check it out, and a Linux Mint USB a friend lent me that I hadn’t tried because I assumed I would hate it. So I used Haiku for about 30 minutes (let’s say it had a few bugs), and Mint for the rest of the weekend and did, in fact, absolutely hate it (Windows PTSD 😭 ).
So until the computer store opened on Monday, I spend 48 hours browsing the web to find a better distro and when I got my new SSD I installed AntiX, because it was very light and likely to run well on my potato-grade laptop, it came without a DE and 7 different window managers to try (which seemed cool at the time, but I didn’t actually try any of them except the default one IceWM and after a few weeks I installed i3 😅 ) and also because YouTube had convinced me that systemd was the Antechrist (thanks YouTube 😑 ).
After two months I decided to try Manjaro on my other laptop… it didn’t go well : incompatible dependencies preventing updates, Nvidia + Wayland making games not display correctly, and if I had to fix all that manually what’s the point I just might as well use regular Arch. So I gave up after 48 hours and decided to install Arch, and just as I booted from the Arch ISO the laptop died (fan malfunction) and I had to send it back 😑.
After three months, the third laptop, bought with the refund from the second one, did actually allow me to install Arch without throwing a fit 🥳 using archinstall to preserve my mental health this time.
Arch has been really great but I need to switch to a bigger SSD and I am probably going to try Nix because it seems really cool 🤩
As an Arch user who spun up NixOS for a few months; it’s worth it. It will take weeks to perfectly set up and it could take months to properly learn nixlang, but what you get is a solid, unbreakable, reproducible distro. Move over your dotfiles, home-manager, and nixconfigs and you essentially have the same setup on any other PC (though you may have to alter the video driver config).
I had my nixfiles all modular. My nouveau video drivers for the ancient laptop I was using? Imported from a separate config. That way I could leave anything hardware related behind and draw up new hardware configs for the system I was moving to when the time came. Don’t like your DE? Comment it out and write in whatever else you want to try.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love and use Arch on my main machine. Its just that my dive down the NixOS rabbit hole was really fun and I haven’t even tried flakes.
Some random shitty distribution for netbooks.
Then Ubuntu 11.04 and I have very fond memories of it. But now Ubuntu sucks.
Using Debian 13 with KDE currently.
I remember 11.04 was it when they introduce the unity de and sidebar with Amazon integration?
Yeah, it was the first version with Unity, but I think Amazon integration was introduced in some later version.
My first was Ubuntu in a VM because everyone recommended it, I distro hopped in VMs until I just ended up using Mint in a VM almost exclusively. It was when I complained to someone about the issues with the VM when locking the laptop and they asked me “Why not just run that system as-is?” that I installed it for real.
I’ve also used Manjaro for half a year, a very minimal Arch+i3 install (without the install script because I wanted the “real experience”) for about 1.5 year, and dual booted Bazzite and Mint on my gaming PC for a year (it’s just Mint now), all the while trying out other distros big and small on older hardware or in VMs.
I don’t feel I’ve found “the one”, but somehow I keep coming back to Mint… Although, perhaps NixOS is it… Who knows?
Andromeda Linux around 2009. It had cool astronomy based theme and animation.
Debian 🥔
It was Ubuntu 14.10 (still had Unity) installed on a Mac mini to run a Plex server. I actually really liked Ubuntu then, it was all new and very different to Windows. I had it hooked up to a TV and used the DE to maintain it I.e console, update app etc.
There was this really annoying error that would occur every time it would boot which drove me to look elsewhere. Ended up trying Arch and didn’t put a DE on there because I started to get comfortable with the terminal and SSHing in.
I eventually installed Arch on my desktop and dual booted for a couple years using XFCE. Once I discovered KDE there was no going back.
I haven’t used Windows on any of devices for years, all running Fedora and KDE.
Mandrake Linux
Pretty sure tails os :P
redhat 5.5
Ubuntu, installed on a 256 gb flash drive as an experiment back in 2020. My first daily driver distro was Mint last year, then KDE Neon, and finally Kubuntu today
Distro doesn’t matter to me anymore, I just like the Plasma DE and will use anything that uses it. Eventually I’m gonna have to try Arch with it and make my own Steam machine
Redhat.
Stuck with redhat on the server, had another server with Gentoo, and then Mepis and Debian for desktop.
Now days its arch and fedora.
Yggdrasil in 1998 or so.
When I took my Linux class in 2007, he gave us a mountain of distros we could choose from. Ubuntu got picked first and Fedora second. This was mostly due to already having easy installs and a gui to boot with. It was also due to him having shown us these distros beforehand.
I was third pick. I knew what I wanted right away. My teacher, an extremely smart man with photographic memory, seemed fairly bored with the proceedings. That was until I chose Damn Small Linux as the third overall choice. The grin on his face as he knew he found a student that would be fun to teach and wanted to learn.
I was fairly sure he expected me to pick openSUSE. It was the third distro he’d shown us installations for and had us play around with. And boy, am I glad I chose Damn Small. I learned so much more than the other teens that were in there just to get an easy credit. He was an easygoing teacher. He didn’t fail people really, he let them hang around and play WC3: FT DOTA on LAN if they wanted and still passed them. But boy would he teach you if he knew you really wanted to learn it.
After that, we had to group in pairs in PC Repair class (same teacher) to take old student’s orders to help fix their computers. I was allowed to work alone and he just let me do what I wanted. I stuck to the code, repaired computers, and never snooped through anyone’s files. He knew I already could find my way around the Windows Registry (something Microsoft is thinking hard on how to stop you from doing now). He’d also do IT for the school during classes. Whenever he was away, I was allowed to be secondary IT if he was busy. It was easy stuff, mostly printer drivers and wifi troubleshooting.
It was really thanks to Damn Small Linux. My first project was to get Windows Solitaire running on it. He set it for us to research as homework. When he came over to me that same day, I had already looked up the info and was playing it on the GNOME 2 DE (MATE is still one of my favorite desktops). I just said, “WINE?” and he put a finger to his lips and grinned.
Thank you for letting an old man waffle on. Those were good times.
Nice I wasn’t old enough (at least my parents thought so) to have my own computer at the time but I remember my dad showing me a long index of distros around then and thinking it was cool that there was puppy Linux and with “damn small Linux” that you could curse in the distro name
Debian 💖
What’s the wallpaper?
Found it; hips.hearstapps.com/…/luca-micheli-455516-unsplas…*
SuSE in 2003
Ubuntu
openSUSE
Ubuntu, before Unity and eventually Gnome desktop 🫢
debian
scientific linux. I failed to get most things running and switched to ubuntu. this was about 10 years ago
My first distro was the Asahi Linux Beta which was using Arch Linux ARM. EDIT: Now I use Void Linux
Mandrake -> Whatever came on the Linux Magazine CD -> Backtrack -> Arch
Mine was slackware in I think 1997?
Beat you by couple years but that was mine too. My next were redhat which seemed to not be very good at the time other than a nice installer. After that suse for year until I switched to irix to finish the 90’s. Back to suse in the 2000’s, bsd in 2010s, and Mac now. What was your patch from Slackware?
Hell if I remember so long ago, redhat was in the mix, then mandrake… I ran Gentoo for years on a server, until I got bitten by some upgrade woes, then switched to Debian, then arch, now truenas. Meanwhile on my desktop I bounced around even more… Ubuntu until the stupid wannabe metro UI, then switched to mint, which I used exclusively (as in without dual-booting windows) for a while… Meanwhile my laptop dual boots Manjaro alongside windows 11…
Ubuntu. For Work purpose in 2020 as a development VM.
Since then i moved privately to Zorin and now to Nobara. At Work it still is Ubuntu for me, but hopefully i will soon change positions and can shelve that stuff.
Started in 2022 on Kubuntu, moved to Fedora in October 2022, switched back to the Fedora KDE Spin in 2023, and been there since.
Deepin in 2019 or so. Yeah don’t ask…
Debian 1.3, Bo - 1997
slackware, from floppy circa 1996
Mklinux. It was the only thing you could run on one of those jank-ass PowerPC/nubus Macs.
Yellow Dog Linux ~2004 or so
XanderOS way tf back in 2005 or 2006, but mostly just messed around and had no clue what I was doing with it… After that I did a Gentoo install. Been kinda off and on with Linux since, flirting with the possibility of switching to it fully but never actually making the jump until last year when I built a new machine and put Mint on it.
Knoppix circa 2004-2005, It was in a cd that came from chip.de. I had no clue what linux was back then. I know even less now.
arch linux since december
I use arch btw
and I use hyprland btw
It depends how you define it. I first installed Slackware at work on a retired IBM PS/2 in '94 or '95, because somebody was working on MicroChannel bus support. (That never materialized.) Later, we checked out Novell Linux Desktop, maybe Debian, too. At a later job, we had some Red Hat workstations, version 5 or 6, and I had Yellow Dog Linux on an old Power Mac.
At home, I didn’t switch to Linux until Ubuntu Breezy Badger. It was glorious to install it on a laptop, and have all of the ACPI features just work. I had been running FreeBSD for several years, NetBSD on an old workstation before that, and Geek Gadgets (a library for compiling Unix programs on Amiga OS) before that.
Ubuntu Karmic Koala. To be fair, I was a kid and that was, according to people on the Internet, the most likely to work. And so it did - it had out of the box support for my wifi adapter, which some other distros I tried later did not, I had to use something called ndiswrapper. Of course I did not yet know about compiling my own configured kernel, that came a month or 2 later.
I only stayed on Ubuntu for a while, then tried Mint, used that on and off for years, dabbled with Arch at some point, too. In the last 5 years I’ve used PopOs, Gentoo, OpenSuse, NixOS. I’m not gonna bother with capitalization and punctuation on some of these.
My first Linux install was Slackware sometime in the late 90’s. I didn’t really use it though, as I never managed to get it working with my dial-up Internet. Stupid winmodems.
The first distribution I actually used was Mandrake. Others I’ve used since then include Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS. I’ve landed on using Manjaro on both my main desktop and laptop, though I have secondary machines running Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, and EndeavourOS.
Elementary OS
Mandriva. Yes, old and no longer exist. Forst distro i started to to use permantly on desktop is Fedora. The server has always been Ubuntu since the Mandriva time when I first learned about Linux. I think 2005. CS server etc. Desktop was 2024 when MS screwed up Windows too much
I think it was SuSE 5.1, we’re talking 1997. We got a CD at a show but I can’t remember which or where.
I inherited a Sony Vaio in 2009 which was really slow with windows, but unsurprisingly was ok once I swapped that out for Ubuntu 9.04. Took me a while to get the brightness up as the buttons didn’t respond, but I kept that machine running for 7 years, the HDD controller died in the end so it stopped detecting any HDD.
OpenSuse 5, I think it was called suse Linux back then.
Enlightenment -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Pop
My first distro was Debian, probably back around 2008. I used that and Ubuntu for years without having even looked at a desktop environment. For me, Linux was a server OS and I had to teach myself how to use it to spin up Teamspeak/Mumble, webservers, VPNs, etc.
I first started using Linux as a desktop OS in 2016. Tried SUSE and Fedora, but really liked Manjaro and eventually gravitated to Arch. I tried out NixOS a year or so ago and liked it, but I still go back to Arch with KDE Plasma.
Took me a while to dig up the posts on distrowatch, but I’m pretty sure that the first Linux distro that I used heavily was Mepis Linux 8 back in 2007-2009. I loved that OS.
Intrepid Ibex
Turbo Linux in the late 90s. It didn’t go well.
Later I gave Redhat a shot - 5.0 or 5.1, I forget. Stayed with RH and now Fedora.
litterally arch btw
Ubuntu back in the Gnome 2 days.
9.04 was mine haha. Still on Mate DE to this day.
RedHat, I had to recompile the kernel to be SoundBlaster compatible so that I could play Doom with sound on my 486.
Mine too. I had to compile the drivers for a win modem (popularly called linmodem). Then switched to mandrake, mandriva, then Ubuntu 6 or 7, whichever came via mail for free.
My first was Ubuntu 14.04. and then 16.04. at school 💀. as early as 2015 iirc
Though Blackbox or Kali might be a contender too (one of the distros my father had installed for fun)
I had rly cool CS teachers, which also administered our infrastructure
then we used Linux Mint in the “Linux” club run by one of said teachers
For personal use, my first one was Manjaro in 2018 (I switched to it with a Windows dual boot, I got rid of Windows entirely in 2020 I think?). Somewhere I switched to Endeavour OS, tried out OpenSuse Tumbleweed on my laptop and eventually settled on Fedora bc of the Grub fiasco Arch had. Am using it to this day.
Though it’s in the form of Nobara on my desktop; I also plan on switching to Bluefin eventually
Red Hat 5.1, which I quickly abandoned after learning the hard way about winmodems
Cool, so I’m not the only one here 😁. Mine was also RHL 5.x, can’t remember the exact minor version, whatever they sold on CDs in 1999. I then switched to FreeBSD for a year or so.
First:
For a long time, I thought it was Fedora Core 4. I did use that, but I recently found my old burned CDs of Mandrake 8.1. That really took me back. I might install it on a VM for some nostalgia.
Ubuntu 6 on a Samsung laptop I had lying around 2006ish. The webcam and trackpad wouldn’t work, but a mouse and not caring about the webcam made that tolerable. It was the only OS I ran for a year or so. I went back to Windows for gaming shortly afterwards, but have been using Linux off-and-on in some form ever since.
Kurumin, a brazilian offshoot of Knoppix, sometime in early 2007 I think. The distro has been discontinued back in 2008. I was completely amazed that the whole OS would boot and work straight out of the CD, without needing to install anything.
That I played with on an old Pentium II rig? The now-defunct Crunchbang (Bunsen Labs is that distro’s successor).
That I actually used as a daily driver? Ubuntu 12.10.
I’ve been daily-driving Linux for well over a decade at this point and have pretty much settled on Arch now after multiple distro-hops in that timespan.
Manjaro. It broke a few times. Then I used plain arch ca 2 years without anything breaking. (Their was no guided installer yet)
The last 2 years I have been happy with opensuse Tumbleweed. Of course I have experiment a bunch of others too. Including running distros on servers.
Ubuntu, and the experience was crap lol.
Then I got to try Debian on a server and it was much nicer.
Then I saw Torvalds uses Fedora, and given that he also disliked Debian and Ubuntu for their lack of end user ease, I switched and have been happy ever since.
Seriously though, GNOME 40 really should not be the default DE. It made me think Linux UI was years behind Windows when it was actually the opposite with proven DEs like XFCE, KDE, and GNOME 3/2 etc.
Red Hat Linux, about 2002 from a CD I got from somewhere.
Mandrake Linux. I couldn’t tell you what year but I remember booting into it and thinking it was the coolest thing.
Mandrake was my second distro, I think, I think I had knoppix before that. Used neither for long, switched to Ubuntu in the first or second major release. I was on Ubuntu until gnome 3 was released, then I threw up a little in my mouth and dustro hopped s bit until I landed on arch, which I also had for almost 10 years,
Now I am on NixOS,
No I am not sadomasochistic for using arch or nixos. There are benefits and trade offs, and I would not have used them for so long if it didn’t make sense for me.
I’m against distro shaming, and DE shaming. Everyone can like what they like for different reasons. That makes Linux better!
BTW, fun fact, both Arch and NixOS is older than Ubuntu, just fun to think about
My parents had some of the ancient ubuntu (or ubuntu based?) distros that they let me play with, I myself tried Manjaro in 2017 for a month (very scuffed back then), and then full Arch Linux since March or Apr 2021
Haven’t bothered switching since, but if I did, I’m lightly curious on the NixOS hype. Why yes, I just installed Arch Linux for the archbtw, but also it feels like it just works for me at this point (yknow, till the next fuckup akin to the grub2 fiasco)
Puppy Linux. On very old hardware.
The first was Redhat Linux 7, but not for long. I moved to Slackware soon after.
Ubuntu 5.10 back when a random Finnish teenager could ask Canonical for free install CDs and they’d just mail them to you no money asked.
.
Ubuntu 6.06. It came on a CD with a PC magazine. I’ve used it to convince my parents to allow me to spend as much time as I want in front of the computer because “there are no games on Linux”.
WoW worked on it.
CentOS
Slackware in the early mid-nineties. But of course there was other Unix variants before that. And what was it called, OS/2 or something like that?
I think Ubuntu 10.04 or whatever mint version around then
Knoppix live cd
I think I learned about knoppix from the TV show “the screen savers” in the early 2000s. Played with it a few times on old laptops, scanning for open Wi-Fi lol
Red Flag Linux 3.0,
taking the RedNote route decades before it was cool,
but did not get much further than the installation screen,
After that it was Ubuntu -> Mint -> Arch -> Manjaro.
I think the first I used was Fedora Core 5, but the first I installed myself was Fedora Core 6.
I had a friend back in the day that was a big Linux geek. He got me hooked when he showed me this crazy system that let me just type in a command and within a few minutes or an hour (internet wasn’t super fast in my house in 2002), I could have something installed without having to search the internet for some potentially cooked installer.
That’s the long way around to say I started with Gentoo, installed over the course of 3 long Saturdays with my friend over my shoulder and the install guide printed out on a stack of papers because neither of us had a laptop to look at.
I moved to Debian after a few months, but man portage was life changing.
SuSe Linux, I got a CD in the (late?) 2000s and installed it on my old PC. But reality got me pretty fast, I iust wasn’t invested yet. Years later I started from scratch on Debian.
My first was Ubuntu in the early 2000s, I think CDs were being distributed by the IT department in one of the faculties, then SUSE but Linux didn’t stick with me at the time. In 2018 I installed Manjaro which helped me make the switch to arch. I’ve also got Debian on a server and fedora on a laptop
I think I tried to compile Gentoo about 20 years ago for some reason… Took many hours, and I don’t remember even getting it running. Later I tried dual booting Ubuntu, but ended up using Windows all the time since that’s where my games were. Started using Linux only (Xubuntu) some time around 2010.