From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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One of the first slackware (so many floppies) on my mighty 486 DX 50. Linux wasn't at 1.0 yet at the time.
Linux (many versions) has been my daily driver ever since, with windows as a gaming backup a lot of the time. I still have it on a single machine in a small partition because of VR :‐/
Technically I first experuenced Linux as a very small kid in 2009 in my school computers, but my first time trying Linux for my personal desktip usage was in December 11, 2021, when I first tried Linux Mint. My setup was a very humble, 14 years old, ddr2 board, and I was amazed at how much faster Cinnamon was compared to Windows 10. Since then, I already helped about 5 people to move to Linux too 😁
Bodhi Linux. It had to be something that could run on a 32 bit laptop, because that's what I used as a testing ground before committing to Linux.
Lubuntu — what a horrible experience (back then)! Now I'm happy with openSUSE Tumbleweed, Void Linux, and Nobara (for my wanna-be gaming PC, lol; trying to get just enough frames for CS2). Every once-and-a-while (I feel like hyphenating that), I do a fresh install, just to get rid of the cruft. Nowadays that makes me wonder if I should be switching to immutable...
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
I first tried Mandrake for a couple days in the late 9ps because I heard it was easy. It was definitely easy to brick my system and have no idea why!
So I switched to Slackware and never looked back. I'm still daily driving Slackware all these years later.
Welcome to Lemmy!
For me the first Linux distribution I used was Ubuntu 8.04 - though I never had installed it on physical hardware, just a VM - VirtualBox IIRC (that didn't occur till Ubuntu 8.10). I was in my early teenage years and had discovered Linux and found it interesting, I used the WUBI tool to install it through Windows and updated the bootloader to keep Windows as the default (with a one second timeout) since it was the family computer, I think my family would've shat their pants if they randomly rebooted the PC and was greeted with Linux heh.
Though a few years later on an old secondary family laptop (it was the "someone else is using the other computer" spare/backup) that was running Vista, it had gotten so buggy and bogged down that I installed Kubuntu for my family and they happily used that until eventually that laptop was retired. It never got them to really look into permanently switching to Linux, but I think that's more than fine - I've never been one to "proselytize" Linux: If it is the right tool for you, fantastic - if not, no hard feelings is how I see it. In the aforementioned case, it was the better tool over the bogged down and buggy Vista.
As for nowadays, its CachyOS on my desktop (I'm not married to it, but its been working alright for me for about a year now), SteamOS on my Deck, Fedora on my secondary laptop (an old intel macbook), and then Bazzite on my ROG Ally. Windows is still installed on a secondary drive on my desktop, but I very rarely have to boot into it.
Debian 3.1, but was not successful in getting X to work, but didn’t put a lot of effort into it. Then I got Mandrake running with X, but went back to Windows. On a small computer, I got FreeBSD running as a server but never used it, so that went away again. Knoppix a couple of times to recover data from failed Windows installations.
Yeah, it’s not until recently that I installed Debian 12 on a old work laptop and was very impressed. Now I’m on the fence of having a stable distribution or sumthin with newer packages. I love the philosophy of Debian and the wide usage on servers but Arch is personally also up my alley, however I have not used it at all.
First:
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.
I came in just about as Debian Woody was coming out, in 2002. (Main reason I can even date it beyond "Idk, about 20 years ago?").
Tried Mandrake a while after that, often recommended as pretty much the equivalent of Linux Mint at the time in terms of noob friendliness. I did enjoy that but stuck with Debian for my main system for years, though.
I started using Linux this year. I first tried out Debian, but then switched to mint. Has been very happy with mint every since, so I don't think I will switch again in the near future.
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.
Corel Linux.
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.
Mint
Linux Mint XFCE, it was easy to setup and could run on my really old laptop.
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.
Whatever Ubuntu was available in 2015. I only dabbled in Linux over the past 10 years. More seriously switching over in the last year or so.
I have Unraid as a server OS (~~Debian~~ slackware based, running a lot of docker containers and a couple VMs). Debian on my laptop. And Bazzite (fedora based) on my Lenovo Legion Go.
Still need to swap my gaming PC from windows. May try Bazzite on that as well. I've also tried Mint, Manjaro, and Zorin
Manjaro -> openSuse tumbleweed -> Fedora (Desktop) and tuxedoOS (Laptop)
redhat 4.1 or maybe 5.2 back around 1996-1998 (plus a freebsd release around the same time). I got a pile of probably 15 discs from walnut creek and they were the only two I could get running. I didn't have internet access at the time.
My first steps were with Debian 2.0 and a Suse Version from about the same time. But that was not very successful so I went back to Windows for about a year and then really got into Linux with Gentoo. I had a year of not much to do, had to wait a year to get into University, and I decided to install the complicated Linux Distribution that I could find.
Reasoning was: It will break a lot if it is so complicated, due to this I am forced to learn while repairing it.
I somehow could not find the Mint install so I went with Ubuntu Mate. It was fine.
scientific linux. I failed to get most things running and switched to ubuntu. this was about 10 years ago
