What was the first ever distro you installed and used? For me, it was Mint as I seemed like the closest thing to Windows minus all the forced updates and chappy changes.
Currently on Fedora GNOME now but what about you? What made you choose your first distro diving into the world of Linux?
I wanna hear your thoughts!
My first distro was Ubuntu because it is a beginner distro and it looked interesting.
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I first installed mint on a pc, but only for homebridge. First distro I really used was openSuse tumbleweed and after that I shortly switched to Arch because I liked the way the AUR work (using yay) better, than the community repos of openSuse.
I still recommend openSuse TW to anyone that wants to try a rolling release distro. You don’t even need the Terminal in that distro.
My first non-family PC was a Acer netbook with Linpus [Lite] Linux. I was 12, so my first priority was trying to get Rollercoaster Tycoon to work. Eventually I realized how silly that prospect was and instead managed to install Windows XP via a bootable USB. I used XP for a while until Vista came out, and then I gave Linux Mint a try and really liked it. These days I’m using NixOS and Fedora.
I ordered a laptop (five years ago) that had Ubuntu/Gnome preinstalled, but soon replaced it with Debian/Mate, mainly because of what I read about it on Distrowatch. My new laptop (one year old) shipped bare metal and runs Fedora/Cinnamon.
Fedora Linux thanks to some random YouTube video. I liked it, slowly made it my daily-driver, and still use it today. It just works, often, at least.
Mint of course, then Manjaro and MXLinux. The weird stuff people recommend. Then Kubuntu, KDE Neon, Fedora KDE and now various Fedora Atomic variants.
- mint crashed randomly
- manjaro is very shady but was awesome, convinced me of KDE
- MXLinux was great but horribly outdated. Will never use a “stable” distro as desktop. Nextcloud was incompatible so I needed to switch
- Kubuntu crashed and many Ubuntu .deb apps where horrible, Flatpaks where awesome
- KDE Neon was an unstable mess and likely still is
- Fedora KDE was nice but also had KDE blackscreens
- Fedora Kinoite also gave me issues but either they are hardware related, or upstream KDE issues, or upstream Kernel issues, etc.
Slackware. 3.x. I was studying computer science and wanted to have a similar system at home as in the lab.
My first distro was Suse Linux 8.1. I had to buy the box as downloading was not an option with my dial-up connection back then. However, the first distro that I fell in love with was Fedora Core. The original one. I bought the book which had the DVD with the full installation. I was hooked. That was more than 20 years ago.
This is really cool man, its wild how much things have changed but those are super endearing.
Mine was an obscure, short-lived distro called LibraNet. It was well done though, by just a father and son team. Unfortunately that was also why it was short lived, because the father passed away.
As for why I picked it, I didn’t really know much about how to choose a distro at the time, so I picked it based on the name, and its description of being easy to use and set up, which it was.
Slackware in 1998, installed from DOS with a series of diskettes. Then Debian, Red Hat Linux (not Enterprise!)… and so on.
Red Hat back in the 1990s. I had to buy it from a local stationary shop because being in a small, isolated country and the internet being in it’s infancy, it was all I could find. Came with a manual bigger than a phone book and cost about the equivalent to these days $200.
Either Slackware or Red Hat Linux 5, can’t remember. I do remember that when I first installed RH5 I used “Hick” for my language.
Ubuntu Late 2000’s. I wanted it because of the CUBE. But left because the only game which worked was TF2.
Ubuntu back when it was decent lol. I picked it because everyone said that was a beginner-friendly distro, and I had already used it anyway as my parents had an Ubuntu ASUS laptop when I was little (though atp I didn’t really remember much from using that laptop).
