Linux

SuSe Linux, I got a CD in the (late?) 2000s and installed it on my old PC. But reality got me pretty fast, I iust wasn't invested yet. Years later I started from scratch on Debian.

Lubuntu :O and Kali linux

I had a friend back in the day that was a big Linux geek. He got me hooked when he showed me this crazy system that let me just type in a command and within a few minutes or an hour (internet wasn't super fast in my house in 2002), I could have something installed without having to search the internet for some potentially cooked installer.

That's the long way around to say I started with Gentoo, installed over the course of 3 long Saturdays with my friend over my shoulder and the install guide printed out on a stack of papers because neither of us had a laptop to look at.

I moved to Debian after a few months, but man portage was life changing.

I think the first I used was Fedora Core 5, but the first I installed myself was Fedora Core 6.

Ubuntu 6.06. It came on a CD with a PC magazine. I've used it to convince my parents to allow me to spend as much time as I want in front of the computer because "there are no games on Linux".

WoW worked on it.

Knoppix live cd

Ubuntu 5.10 back when a random Finnish teenager could ask Canonical for free install CDs and they'd just mail them to you no money asked.

The first was Redhat Linux 7, but not for long. I moved to Slackware soon after.

Ubuntu, and the experience was crap lol.

Then I got to try Debian on a server and it was much nicer.

Then I saw Torvalds uses Fedora, and given that he also disliked Debian and Ubuntu for their lack of end user ease, I switched and have been happy ever since.

Seriously though, GNOME 40 really should not be the default DE. It made me think Linux UI was years behind Windows when it was actually the opposite with proven DEs like XFCE, KDE, and GNOME 3/2 etc.

Slackware in the early mid-nineties. But of course there was other Unix variants before that. And what was it called, OS/2 or something like that?

Puppy Linux. On very old hardware.

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 -> Manjaro.

CentOS

I think Ubuntu 10.04 or whatever mint version around then

Red Hat Linux, about 2002 from a CD I got from somewhere.

Red Hat 5.1, which I quickly abandoned after learning the hard way about winmodems

litterally arch btw

RedHat, I had to recompile the kernel to be SoundBlaster compatible so that I could play Doom with sound on my 486.

My parents had some of the ancient ubuntu (or ubuntu based?) distros that they let me play with, I myself tried Manjaro in 2017 for a month (very scuffed back then), and then full Arch Linux since March or Apr 2021

Haven't bothered switching since, but if I did, I'm lightly curious on the NixOS hype. Why yes, I just installed Arch Linux for the archbtw, but also it feels like it just works for me at this point (yknow, till the next fuckup akin to the grub2 fiasco)

I think it was SuSE 5.1, we're talking 1997. We got a CD at a show but I can't remember which or where.

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.

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.

Kurumin, a brazilian offshoot of Knoppix, sometime in early 2007 I think. The distro has been discontinued back in 2008. I was completely amazed that the whole OS would boot and work straight out of the CD, without needing to install anything.

Ubuntu 6 on a Samsung laptop I had lying around 2006ish. The webcam and trackpad wouldn't work, but a mouse and not caring about the webcam made that tolerable. It was the only OS I ran for a year or so. I went back to Windows for gaming shortly afterwards, but have been using Linux off-and-on in some form ever since.

Ubuntu back in the Gnome 2 days.

Mine was slackware in I think 1997?

Turbo Linux in the late 90s. It didn't go well.

Later I gave Redhat a shot - 5.0 or 5.1, I forget. Stayed with RH and now Fedora.

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.

First:

• Server: Debian
• Desktop: Debian
• Desktop daily driver: Ubuntu

Knoppix circa 2004-2005, It was in a cd that came from chip.de. I had no clue what linux was back then. I know even less now.

I inherited a Sony Vaio in 2009 which was really slow with windows, but unsurprisingly was ok once I swapped that out for Ubuntu 9.04. Took me a while to get the brightness up as the buttons didn't respond, but I kept that machine running for 7 years, the HDD controller died in the end so it stopped detecting any HDD.

Mandriva. Yes, old and no longer exist. Forst distro i started to to use permantly on desktop is Fedora. The server has always been Ubuntu since the Mandriva time when I first learned about Linux. I think 2005. CS server etc. Desktop was 2024 when MS screwed up Windows too much

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 eventually

Mandrake

My first Linux install was Slackware sometime in the late 90's. I didn't really use it though, as I never managed to get it working with my dial-up Internet. Stupid winmodems.

The first distribution I actually used was Mandrake. Others I've used since then include Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS. I've landed on using Manjaro on both my main desktop and laptop, though I have secondary machines running Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, and EndeavourOS.

When I took my Linux class in 2007, he gave us a mountain of distros we could choose from. Ubuntu got picked first and Fedora second. This was mostly due to already having easy installs and a gui to boot with. It was also due to him having shown us these distros beforehand.

I was third pick. I knew what I wanted right away. My teacher, an extremely smart man with photographic memory, seemed fairly bored with the proceedings. That was until I chose Damn Small Linux as the third overall choice. The grin on his face as he knew he found a student that would be fun to teach and wanted to learn.

I was fairly sure he expected me to pick openSUSE. It was the third distro he'd shown us installations for and had us play around with. And boy, am I glad I chose Damn Small. I learned so much more than the other teens that were in there just to get an easy credit. He was an easygoing teacher. He didn't fail people really, he let them hang around and play WC3: FT DOTA on LAN if they wanted and still passed them. But boy would he teach you if he knew you really wanted to learn it.

After that, we had to group in pairs in PC Repair class (same teacher) to take old student's orders to help fix their computers. I was allowed to work alone and he just let me do what I wanted. I stuck to the code, repaired computers, and never snooped through anyone's files. He knew I already could find my way around the Windows Registry (something Microsoft is thinking hard on how to stop you from doing now). He'd also do IT for the school during classes. Whenever he was away, I was allowed to be secondary IT if he was busy. It was easy stuff, mostly printer drivers and wifi troubleshooting.

It was really thanks to Damn Small Linux. My first project was to get Windows Solitaire running on it. He set it for us to research as homework. When he came over to me that same day, I had already looked up the info and was playing it on the GNOME 2 DE (MATE is still one of my favorite desktops). I just said, "WINE?" and he put a finger to his lips and grinned.

Thank you for letting an old man waffle on. Those were good times.

slackware, from floppy circa 1996