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?
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Slackware in 1996(?), then SuSE when they came up.
I then tried a bit every once in a while, but really never got fully comfortable with it on a desktop.
A few weeks ago I bought a new Desktop PC, which is now running with the Arch-fork #endeavouros and I really love it.Arch, btw
It was the distro that my friend uses all the time, and I’ve had to use his laptop on occasion so I’m somewhat familiar with the distro, enough so that I’ve installed it on persistent USBs before and already chosen it as my next OS after Windows (I would switch now, but I rode Windows 7 till the end date, so I figured I’d ride out 10 until the final day this October)
Also! Gender fluid hello!! It made me so insanely happy to see that flag in the Linux terminal, I feel so seen!! It feels like trans girls hog all the Linux spotlight this side of the fediverse, I’m happy for them! But I still don’t feel like I have a proper community where I belong, especially since I stay off of all other mainstream social media >.<
So seeing another enby, another gender fluid especially, for the literal first time since I made my lemmy account just makes me so ecstatic!! We’re so rare x3
Anyways, thank u for existing and simply posting this, seeing another makes me feel seen and I can’t really express enough how unreasonably happy something so small just made me c:
Thank you! And I should sleep so good night also lol
Red Hat, back when that was a distro. It was a long time ago now and my toying with it didn’t last long; and began an obsession with hardware RAID…
genderfluid fetch spotted!!! also im not sure which was first but i use arch and openbsd ;3
Linux Mint. I made a dumb decision to install it right away thinking it’s just like Windows. Boy was i wrong. Took me years until I felt ready to switch to Linux.
I use Arch BTW
Mandrake! It was a fucking disaster! Fortunately, I came back later using Kubuntu and had a much better experience.
Welcome to Lemmy stranger.
Slackware back in the early 90s on a Compaq 386/SX20 💾
The Alien repo was a godsend
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).
I overlocked my Pentium 133 to 150.
I was such a badass.
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
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 😅
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
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 ;-)
Floppy sets represent!
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.
I somehow could not find the Mint install so I went with Ubuntu Mate. It was fine.
Red Hat Linux, about 2002 from a CD I got from somewhere.
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!
Raspbian if that counfs
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.
My first distro was the Asahi Linux Beta which was using Arch Linux ARM. EDIT: Now I use Void Linux
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.
