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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Mandrake Linux. I couldn’t tell you what year but I remember booting into it and thinking it was the coolest thing.
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 -> Parabola -> Manjaro.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Welcome to Lemmy stranger.
Slackware back in the early 90s on a Compaq 386/SX20 💾
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
The Alien repo was a godsend
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
Floppy sets represent!
Slackware 3.1 late 1996. Great fuckin’ year that was.
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 ;-)
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.
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
Red Hat 7
My first linux was Ubuntu 10.04. And I swapped to Arch only when Ubuntu added snap.
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.
litterally arch btw
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.
My first distro was the Asahi Linux Beta which was using Arch Linux ARM. EDIT: Now I use Void Linux
Red Hat Linux, about 2002 from a CD I got from somewhere.
