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!
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.
Slackware. About 1994 or so.
Same! With the stack of disks!
Luckily we could FTP
Look at fancy pants over here with ftp and internet access!
Slackware2 or maybe 3 in 95.
RHL4.x from 1998 . Looked at debian, but a local snob convinced me halfway through explaining “the debian way” to steer clear. Didn’t even learn of the validation glitch in the .deb format by then.
Now it’s Rocky. But if PCLinuxOS had a better installer (like a good kickstart) I’d be there in an instant. Its massive versatility in having so many versions of apps available without the appstream bullshit - it’s just Alternatives and proper naming - really makes it stand out.
Now let me packer some templates and I’m SO done with ELs and the shit RH has done to their crown jewels.
Sounds like me. I ordered it from a magazine and installed it from 3.5 floppy disks also. After that it was Debian and i used that for years.
Back Track 5. Now Kali Linux.
I had not suitably prepared. I was a Windows Vista power user who heard how I could crack some Wi-Fi and gave it a whirl.
My chips went into one basket and me, oh my, was the transition ever so uncomfortable. What was dual booting? Who knows. Long story short, I made a mess for myself. I went through a significantly steeper learning curve than most, though it introduced me to script kiddie tools, programming, and eventually exploits.
Now a decade or so later, I’ve settled away from Arch to Debian. Though I miss the bleeding edge, my update frequency has lost much of it’s zealous edge.
It was slackware 2.0.
It was the only distro I could get my hands on because who would download a distro on dialup. Also there were no CD burners nor USB sticks yet. So whatever your friend had on CD waa the option. I guess the only other possible option would’ve been red hat back in those days.
It was the only distro I could get my hands on because who would download a distro on dialup.
I would, I downloaded Slackware through dialup, sometime late 1994.
Then in 3 weeks you would have a usable system
Seriously, Slackware at that time was wonderfully well planned and optimized, the stack of floppies needed for a fully usable system was remarkably small and downloadable.
For me it was Ubuntu on a laptop in early 2000 my family was going to trash because it had viruses on it.
I’m fairly sure it was Scientific Linux because that was the distro used in the labs of my first programming course.
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.
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Slackware in 1998, installed from DOS with a series of diskettes. Then Debian, Red Hat Linux (not Enterprise!)… and so on.
Someone asked this over on linuxmeme a week ago: https://lemmy.world/post/13355277
I started with Pop!_OS, because it was pretty and I was told that it was made for programmers. I was overwhelmed with the options and couldn’t get Twitch to work properly (because of missing codecs), so I switched over to ZorinOS, which helped me to familiarize myself with Linux. Later I returned to Pop!_OS.
Someday I got fed up with the major version updates, so I switched to Manjaro and later to Arch btw.
Ubuntu back in 2013 (I think?) to get the exclusive TF2 item. Good times! :D
Ubuntu 11 netbook remix. Currently on Fedora Onyx on my laptop and Kinoite on Desktop.
messed around some with slack 0.99.
but first one to actually see some regular usage was buzz, which progressed over time through to potato.
and the first to get its own dedicated box long-term was woody.
