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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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.
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 eventuallyUbuntu, 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
Debian 🥔
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 ;-)
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 😅
Slackware 3.1 late 1996. Great fuckin’ year that was.
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.
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!
The Alien repo was a godsend
Kali Linux. Because I was a kid who wanted to be a hackerman.
❤️ Ah yes, the hacker-man vibes!
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 🤣
Red Hat, before the enterprise stuff, back in 1999. Installed from a CD found in a book from the library
I’ve got a Red Hat from '99! Found in grandpa’s garage.
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
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 😄
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.
Damn! Same here, red hat 99, but switched to Debian quite fast
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.
Ubuntu > Mint > Manjaro > Arch > PopOS > Debian
(History, not ranking [Debian wins])
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.
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.
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)
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.
My first Linux install was Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy. Got those wobbly windows going and felt like a fucking king.
I guess technically, Raspbian.
Ubuntu, like a lot of people my age (2000s)
