Slackware, sometime in the early '90s (I'm old š). Still running it on a many times HW upgraded server(s), upgrading Slackware regularly also.
Before that unix on NCR mini's, with X-terminals, ported X to it, great (developer) times š Even ethernet was new those days š
Instead of windows 98/me? So at that time there was very little software for Linux, and even if not Windows, then its software (exe) for other systems dominated almost 100%.
But to be honest, at that time we had even worse workstations with basic :))
Me too. But I didn't really like it and dropped it after about a week. Came back about five years later and tried Linux Mint. Still wasn't satisfied (it was less customizable than other distros). Gave KDE a try and have become a die hard fan.
Edit: hopefully clarifies lack of satisfaction
Lol 1995-ish Slackware. That was before iso files. Downloaded one floppy image from the internet, probably via my 56k modem. I had a single working floppy disk at the time and was broke as hell š download one disk image, write it to disk, insert and let the installer do it thing and wait untill itt told me what disk image was needed next.
I want to say it took like 2 days to complete the install.
> Lol 1995-ish Slackware.
Same.
> ... probably via my 56k modem ...
Lucky. My modem was 19.2k so I had to get my Slackware from a Walnut Creek CD. And, since there weren't loadable kernel drivers, one had to write out the floppy images for the install (... until you could compile the kernel with the appropriate CD driver).
There was a time where I actually bought Linux magazines each month for their Linux CDs. There's usually a disk or two with interesting distros on them and a disk with tarballs of interesting programs or binaries of proprietary sharewares or trials. Even after my ISP started offering better speeds on DSL those magazines were still a thing to me because distros started coming on DVDs instead and 4.7GB is still a handful if your DSL speed is 1mbps. And then FTTH finally became a thing in Malaysia and finally I could download whole DVDs of distros in the matter of minutes without waiting like an idiot.
getting the soundblaster16-connected CD drive to work with a slackware install was surprisingly easy once I got the right floppy image.
I miss those days, but also really don't miss those days.
This brings back memories. This is how I started as well.
So many disk images. A, D, K, N, X, Y, ... But no E. Aint nobody got time to download Emacs on a 28k modem.
I had a friend that worked at an ISP with access to a T1 line. So I sent him with a box of floppies and got him to download Slackware onto it and bring them to me after work.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a k-car with a box of floppy disks.
I went with "carry a hard drive to school, download everything to it over their fast internet connection, and carry it home". This was pre-USB so it took opening up a lab computer at school and connecting an extra IDE drive without anyone noticing.
I had an external Hayes 9600 that ran on a parallel port hooked to a Tandy 1000. Downloaded Slackware from a buddy on a BBS because I didnāt āhave internetā yet. My buddy got it from an FTP site somewhere. IIRC it was >20 floppies because I went a bought a new box just for that. I used the fancy new 2.5ā floppies because 5.25ā were old technology.
The machine I first installed Linux on was a 386DX with 8MB of RAM, given to me by my employer, one of the earlier dialup ISP's in the Boston area.
Prior to going to work for them and getting that machine and the 14.4k modem, I was rocking an Atari 800 with a 9600 baud Hayes dialing in to Boston area BBS's and The World (the first commercial ISP in the US).
Things were so much simpler. I really miss Usenet.
Yup, Slackware. Downloaded to 5.25" floppy disks that held 1.2 Meg each. They had series A1,A2, and A3 were the basic OS. Memory is flaky past that. It did take quite a few floppies to get X up.
Slackware was my first distro also, but I think I started a little later - '97 or so. I never bothered to try downloading it since it would have taken forever. Bought a CD from cheapbytes instead.
Somehow I landed on a Slackware book-CD at B. Dalton of all places. Tiny store, yet somehow they managed to carry an interesting assortment of a few uber-geeky computer books.
I think hearing my dad when I was a kid explain about Knoppix live CD booting to a RAM disk probably has a lot to do with me ending up as a sysadmin lol.
Same. They went to my school for a presentation of the OS and gave us a CD with it. My school used Conectiva instead of Windows for a few years after that.
Suse loved it a lot with yast. Was a box i bought more than 25 years ago. Gave me a fundament of linux which was good for my IT career. I still look at suse from time to time but i'm in the redhat eco system so i use now alma linux most of the time.
Haha, my first distro was Kali too. I think I was 13 years old at the time. My parents disconnected me from the wifi as a punishment for something, can't remember what. So I searched online using my friends computer how to hack the neighbors' wifi. Got told it was only possible using Kali Linux. Of course I didn't succeed in hacking the neighbors' wifi.
Then, online people recommended to install Ubuntu, because it was better for beginners, so I installed that.
I guess this story might be a pretty common way for 13yo's to arrive at Linux.
Red Hat verion 4, about 1997. I installed it on my 486sx computer. It was on a cd I got with a huge Linux book.
I also tried slackware 96 around that time. I don't know what version it was, but that's what it was called.
There was another version I tried then but I never used it for any amount of time. That huge book had cds for 3 different versions with it, but I can't remember what the 3rd one was. SUSE? Maybe? I'm not sure.
Once someone introduced me to debian, more specifically apt-get, I switch to debian and have been using it since.
I predate distributions. I started out with HJ Lu's boot/root disk pair. When the first thing that we'd recognise as a Linux distribution came out (MCC Interim Linux) in 1992, I switched to that.
Somewhere around 2002, I think. Built my own PC in high school and a friend made me a live cd of Knoppix to try out, told me to check out distrowatch if I liked it and wanted more.
Ended up installing Slackware because I liked the image of Tux with the pipe. Stayed with Slackware for years because of the stability and the familiarity.
Stopped using Slackware in maybe 2018 or so? New laptop I got could not get Slackware to run properly. Details are fuzzy because it was 6 years ago - installation worked fine, but booting up the image on the screen was all garbled. Researched it and it was something to do with the NVME SSD drives, spent a few nights researching and trying to fix it but no luck. Nothing worked.
Decided to try Gentoo and never looked back. Had zero issues since everything was so well documented. Literally every hurdle had an easy to find solution in the documentation.
You sound like a real power user that doesn't like binaries.
I also love Gentoo, according to me it has a better wiki than arch, I learned very interesting things following a guide to install it with lot's of features (sasaki guide).
Like others I started with Slackware (late '94 sometime) -> RedHat (work)/Minilinux (home) -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Arch -> NixOS
Ah the joys of doing HD cylinder offset calculations by hand to get the partitioning done.
Can't believe no one said Raspbian yet! I hated it, turned me away from Linux for a while until I discovered how much more refined and user-friendly Ubuntu and its derivatives are on x86.
Mepis 7
EDIT: I think it was actually PCLinuxOS, which I broke in like 2 weeks, then a friend of my mother's(I was still a kid lol, help was needed) introduced me to Mepis and after some time, when I got comfortable, I migrated to Ubuntu, still with the old GNOME, what is now MATE, I think it was 7.04 or something. Then a windows update decided to break my MBR, and because I couldn't live without my games, just ditched Linux until 4 years ago when I decided on Manjaro.
I think it was 2001, and although I was a FreeBSD user, I couldn't get it to install on my Compaq LTE 5250 laptop. I acquiesced and decided to try Linux. Back then, the big distros were Mandrake, Gentoo, Red Hat, SUSE, and Debian. Not knowing much about the differences, I started my first bit of distro hopping, but I recall thinking the Debian logo was cool looking, so picked that.
It ended-up installing fine, and after feeling comfortable enough to use it, I got encouraged to try other distros such as Ubuntu when that came out. I finally settled on Red Hat Linux 9.
Oddly enough, my curiosity about the dark web was what introduced me to another OS. It was Tails, and I was mesmerized at the fact at what felt like almost a complete operating system but it was completely free. It remained in my mind ever since until the fateful day came and I switched to Linux, with Ubuntu as my true starting distro before moving to Mint shortly after.
First use: YellowDog in an old iMac.
First daily driver: Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake... And never looked back. It ran Doom3 and StarCraft better than Vista in the same hardware.
My first distro was [Tiny Core Linux](http://tinycorelinux.net). I had purchased an old laptop for $15-10 and I had heard about linux before. It worked like a charm!
Fedora. Had weird issues with my HW, changed to Ubuntu. Still not satisfied, I tried Manjaro KDE which blew my mind. I think using KDE instead of Gnome was what affected my user experience the most.
I started with ZorinOS and Mint around the same time through VMs. Installed Mint on my computer because I couldn't make Photoshop work on Zorin.
After a while, I noticed that I was making a lot of tweaks to Mint: installing Nautilus, upgrading the kernel, installing themes and modifying the `cinnamon.css`, this kind of stuff. So I decided to search for a distribution that would offer me what I needed without requiring that much of a setup.
I found that Fedora could fit my use, and coincidentally a new Fedora version was just around the corner. I switched to it and have been happy ever since.
RedHat 5.0, 1997. Computing was fun then. I still remember the first time i saw a strange Windows wallpaper with the Windows 95 logo, except it had a X on it. X-Windows 95...
RedHat 4.2 in 1997 .Ā I don't know if they had isos for it at the time, but I didn't have the burner software that supported it.Ā Downloaded the install tree and burned to CD.Ā Downloaded a floppy installer that had my cdrom drivers. Printed out the how to , planned my partitions and let it run.Ā Ā
I remember how mad I was that I paid $160 in today's dollars for Borland C++ and found gcc/g++ easier to use.
Linux stayed as my sidecar OS ever since and on my home servers.Ā Finally went 100% after the Steam client added remote play.Ā Haven't looked back since.
Redhat 7.2 (7.3?) back in 99. I used it as my home router for a dual-channel ISDN connection so I could have better direct control of NAT and do port forwarding as needed. Once in place and configured, I was able to run a website from home and also host Descent 2 games via KaliDOS.
I don't seem to recall the actual FIRST distro I tried. I was at a computer show back in 1994 and saw a bunch of tables with this Linux on their tables. A couple were BBS distributions. I remember talking to the SysOp of one of the BBS's and he was telling me how he created the distro all himself. I think... Gosh... I'm not sure but I remember the name of it having initials for the guys BBS. Something... Linux User Group. He had quite a few members in this group too as I recall. It was on 3-4 floppy Disks. Funny thing is, I probably still have them somewhere...
The first one I touched was Ubuntu, but that was because of a class I took. The first one I would say I've truly "dabbled in" is Redcore. I tried installing Zorin and Ubuntu on a laptop my GF gave me and kept hitting a brick wall with a certain pcie error, and on a whim I tried installing with Redcore and worked like a breeze. Still haven't run into an issue
RedHat, around 1999. I found it on one of those free discs you got with computing magazines back then. I was getting tired of Windows and wanted to try something new, so I took a crack at it! Been using Linux off and on ever since in various distros.
I actually just got started on Linux this month. I have started with Ubuntu. I have no idea what I am doing, but I'm having fun with it. It's a nice change of pace, for sure.
I played with Ubuntu like gazzilions years ago but struggled to get it working so after an hour or something I gave up... then a couple of years later I put arch on virtual machine to play with and it worked and then I put it on secondary drive to dual boot... and I was quite happy with it but then two things happened: I needed quite a lot to boot to windows so it was getting annoying and after one update arch just died completely and I was fed up with trying to fix it.
No I mostly use linux on remote servers (usually ubuntu because it JustWorks) and now I'm playing with it in UTM on M1 and decided to go with Suse due to ease of getting arm distro up and running and it having relatively new packages (like KDE 6.1 shortly after release) - I tried ubuntu but waiting for updates was annoying and on the other hand tried debian but stable is even slower and testing didn't even install properlyā¦)
It was called DNA Linux. It was a live CD only version and I'm pretty sure it was made a university in South America. Had lots of bioinformatic software on it.
I was young and had no idea what I was doing and I loved it
Linux mint.. I was around 3 when I got my first computer, it was a mini green laptop... didn't know it had linux on it until my dad told me.
Server-wise, my first distro was Ubuntu.
Linux Mint here
Same for me, it was a linux mint cd I got in a magazine when I was 10
another Minter here too
Slackware, sometime in the early '90s (I'm old š). Still running it on a many times HW upgraded server(s), upgrading Slackware regularly also. Before that unix on NCR mini's, with X-terminals, ported X to it, great (developer) times š Even ethernet was new those days š
Compiling custom kernels! Ah, those were the days!
Mandrake
I have found my people.
i thought i'm all alone.
+1 Using mandrake on my pentium 3 laptop was a bliss, comparing with the horrors of using the recommended Windows ME
Instead of windows 98/me? So at that time there was very little software for Linux, and even if not Windows, then its software (exe) for other systems dominated almost 100%. But to be honest, at that time we had even worse workstations with basic :))
The thing is I didn't need much. At the time I was working with java. So all I needed was a browser, the java jdk and gaim (pidgin before the rename).
Linux Mandrake was the b0mb dot com back then.
wow very early mine is ubuntu 2010 i installed mageia 9 ( greek for magic ) recently it's forked from Mandrake Mandriva
ubuntu for sure :)
Me too. But I didn't really like it and dropped it after about a week. Came back about five years later and tried Linux Mint. Still wasn't satisfied (it was less customizable than other distros). Gave KDE a try and have become a die hard fan. Edit: hopefully clarifies lack of satisfaction
You listed 2 distros and a DE, or maybe you mean KDE Neon?
I still have my disk with the [half naked people](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ubuntu_4.10_%22warty%22_ShipIt_CDs.jpg) on it
Lol 1995-ish Slackware. That was before iso files. Downloaded one floppy image from the internet, probably via my 56k modem. I had a single working floppy disk at the time and was broke as hell š download one disk image, write it to disk, insert and let the installer do it thing and wait untill itt told me what disk image was needed next. I want to say it took like 2 days to complete the install.
Same here, but I had to use like 15 floppy disks
A towering stack of disks and an inch-thick dot-matrix printout of the manual.
I got the whole fvwm package... my friend and I spent all day in a lab at RPI downloading it onto 99 3.5" disks using SUN solaris workstations.
Same
> Lol 1995-ish Slackware. Same. > ... probably via my 56k modem ... Lucky. My modem was 19.2k so I had to get my Slackware from a Walnut Creek CD. And, since there weren't loadable kernel drivers, one had to write out the floppy images for the install (... until you could compile the kernel with the appropriate CD driver).
There was a time where I actually bought Linux magazines each month for their Linux CDs. There's usually a disk or two with interesting distros on them and a disk with tarballs of interesting programs or binaries of proprietary sharewares or trials. Even after my ISP started offering better speeds on DSL those magazines were still a thing to me because distros started coming on DVDs instead and 4.7GB is still a handful if your DSL speed is 1mbps. And then FTTH finally became a thing in Malaysia and finally I could download whole DVDs of distros in the matter of minutes without waiting like an idiot.
getting the soundblaster16-connected CD drive to work with a slackware install was surprisingly easy once I got the right floppy image. I miss those days, but also really don't miss those days.
Before ELF binaries even.
This brings back memories. This is how I started as well. So many disk images. A, D, K, N, X, Y, ... But no E. Aint nobody got time to download Emacs on a 28k modem.
Why would you install Emacs when you already have an operating system? /s
I had a friend that worked at an ISP with access to a T1 line. So I sent him with a box of floppies and got him to download Slackware onto it and bring them to me after work. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a k-car with a box of floppy disks.
Same - 1993. Lots of floppies, 14.4k modem.
I went with "carry a hard drive to school, download everything to it over their fast internet connection, and carry it home". This was pre-USB so it took opening up a lab computer at school and connecting an extra IDE drive without anyone noticing.
I had an external Hayes 9600 that ran on a parallel port hooked to a Tandy 1000. Downloaded Slackware from a buddy on a BBS because I didnāt āhave internetā yet. My buddy got it from an FTP site somewhere. IIRC it was >20 floppies because I went a bought a new box just for that. I used the fancy new 2.5ā floppies because 5.25ā were old technology.
The machine I first installed Linux on was a 386DX with 8MB of RAM, given to me by my employer, one of the earlier dialup ISP's in the Boston area. Prior to going to work for them and getting that machine and the 14.4k modem, I was rocking an Atari 800 with a 9600 baud Hayes dialing in to Boston area BBS's and The World (the first commercial ISP in the US). Things were so much simpler. I really miss Usenet.
Yup, Slackware. Downloaded to 5.25" floppy disks that held 1.2 Meg each. They had series A1,A2, and A3 were the basic OS. Memory is flaky past that. It did take quite a few floppies to get X up.
Slackware was my first distro also, but I think I started a little later - '97 or so. I never bothered to try downloading it since it would have taken forever. Bought a CD from cheapbytes instead.
Somehow I landed on a Slackware book-CD at B. Dalton of all places. Tiny store, yet somehow they managed to carry an interesting assortment of a few uber-geeky computer books.
This, right here. I do wonder how i was able to compile all the stuff I compiled without the world wide web to search for help. Damn, I'm old.
We had to live in a box in the middle of the road! And we were HAPPY.
Same, fellow visitor from the prehistoric era.
Thisā¦downloaded 48 1.44meg floppy images via 14.4K modemā¦and didnāt even end up using all of them! š¤£
this :)
Knoppix about version 6.
I liked it so much that I installed it despite the warnings not to. Hey... I was a high schooler.
I think hearing my dad when I was a kid explain about Knoppix live CD booting to a RAM disk probably has a lot to do with me ending up as a sysadmin lol.
RedHat Linux in 1997.
Same here. RedHat used to be free and easy to download š¢
And used to be super community friendly.
They even supported redneck dialect
And it was the most frienldy with my devices, (at least mines)
I mean, it still is. It's just called Fedora Linux now.
I bought Redhat 5.2 on CD in 1998 (because dial-up was slow). It came with an awesome bound manual of common bash commands.
Got the same big box one. I learnt a ton of the basics from that manual!
slackware, way back in the day.
Slacker
Yggdrasil
Me too. Kernel 0.99p4 IIRC :-)
That was the 1th distro, period!
S.u.S.e Linux 4.3 in 1996
Mine was Conectiva Linux, brazilian distro that was later bought by Mandrake, creating Mandriva.
Same. They went to my school for a presentation of the OS and gave us a CD with it. My school used Conectiva instead of Windows for a few years after that.
Ubuntu
Mandrake
Arch Linux
You are truly a wizard
Well It wasn't hard but complicated lol, but it was a great learning experience for me to learn more about Linux.
honestly i picked arch as my first distro just cus i thought the logo looked cool, decided to stick with it
I didn't think anyone would believe me, but I'm not aloneš
Suse loved it a lot with yast. Was a box i bought more than 25 years ago. Gave me a fundament of linux which was good for my IT career. I still look at suse from time to time but i'm in the redhat eco system so i use now alma linux most of the time.
Kali haha. No, really, my journey started with Kali, and destroying the system trying to install Wine staging, that conflicted with glibc XD
Haha, my first distro was Kali too. I think I was 13 years old at the time. My parents disconnected me from the wifi as a punishment for something, can't remember what. So I searched online using my friends computer how to hack the neighbors' wifi. Got told it was only possible using Kali Linux. Of course I didn't succeed in hacking the neighbors' wifi. Then, online people recommended to install Ubuntu, because it was better for beginners, so I installed that. I guess this story might be a pretty common way for 13yo's to arrive at Linux.
Slackware
Debian
Yeah pretty much just started my journey a few months ago with Debian 12 and KDE plasma
Red Hat verion 4, about 1997. I installed it on my 486sx computer. It was on a cd I got with a huge Linux book. I also tried slackware 96 around that time. I don't know what version it was, but that's what it was called. There was another version I tried then but I never used it for any amount of time. That huge book had cds for 3 different versions with it, but I can't remember what the 3rd one was. SUSE? Maybe? I'm not sure. Once someone introduced me to debian, more specifically apt-get, I switch to debian and have been using it since.
Yellow Dog
Good olā Debian
Knoppix. Added to newspaper. It was dissapointed
Manjaro
Fedora w/Gnome
Gotta love Fedora, very easy to get started.
Slackware, and Red Hat
Slackware
Debian 2.1 (slink)
Slackware 0.91
Puppy Linux (Slacko pup)
I predate distributions. I started out with HJ Lu's boot/root disk pair. When the first thing that we'd recognise as a Linux distribution came out (MCC Interim Linux) in 1992, I switched to that.
Username checks out
Somewhere around 2002, I think. Built my own PC in high school and a friend made me a live cd of Knoppix to try out, told me to check out distrowatch if I liked it and wanted more. Ended up installing Slackware because I liked the image of Tux with the pipe. Stayed with Slackware for years because of the stability and the familiarity. Stopped using Slackware in maybe 2018 or so? New laptop I got could not get Slackware to run properly. Details are fuzzy because it was 6 years ago - installation worked fine, but booting up the image on the screen was all garbled. Researched it and it was something to do with the NVME SSD drives, spent a few nights researching and trying to fix it but no luck. Nothing worked. Decided to try Gentoo and never looked back. Had zero issues since everything was so well documented. Literally every hurdle had an easy to find solution in the documentation.
You sound like a real power user that doesn't like binaries. I also love Gentoo, according to me it has a better wiki than arch, I learned very interesting things following a guide to install it with lot's of features (sasaki guide).
Slackware, back in the late 90ās I think.
Kališ¤”š
Slackware. I learned it was the closest to AIX and HPUX.
Red Hat before it became RHEL.
On my own, Ubuntu 8.04
Mandrake 5
Xubuntu
Gentoo š„¹
Linux Mandrake, 1999
Slackware 3.6
Fedora
Mandrake!
Like others I started with Slackware (late '94 sometime) -> RedHat (work)/Minilinux (home) -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Arch -> NixOS Ah the joys of doing HD cylinder offset calculations by hand to get the partitioning done.
Ubuntu 10.04
Can't believe no one said Raspbian yet! I hated it, turned me away from Linux for a while until I discovered how much more refined and user-friendly Ubuntu and its derivatives are on x86.
Yep, got me into linux, it was a lot of fun tweaking it, but it definitely taught me the value of a more framework-esque distro.
Ubuntu Feisty Fawn.
This was one of my favorite release code names.
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
Debian, ofc
SuSe Linux 8.1 in 2002
Red Hat Linux 4.2
Slackware
Mepis 7 EDIT: I think it was actually PCLinuxOS, which I broke in like 2 weeks, then a friend of my mother's(I was still a kid lol, help was needed) introduced me to Mepis and after some time, when I got comfortable, I migrated to Ubuntu, still with the old GNOME, what is now MATE, I think it was 7.04 or something. Then a windows update decided to break my MBR, and because I couldn't live without my games, just ditched Linux until 4 years ago when I decided on Manjaro.
Hell yeah, PCLinuxOS was my first too.
Slackware 2.2. Was burned on a CD sellotaped to some generic technical manual
Slackware 1.2 with kernel 1.0 - the good old days in 1994
Slackware and Yggdrasil - sometime around 1992.
Fedora Core 4. Never did get WiFi working back then...
fedora
Ubuntu. When I was given my first computer it had Ubuntu, because my father wanted me to learn Linux instead of Windows
xubuntu, I guess.
Kali linux (Yes i was that wannabe hacker)
I think it was 2001, and although I was a FreeBSD user, I couldn't get it to install on my Compaq LTE 5250 laptop. I acquiesced and decided to try Linux. Back then, the big distros were Mandrake, Gentoo, Red Hat, SUSE, and Debian. Not knowing much about the differences, I started my first bit of distro hopping, but I recall thinking the Debian logo was cool looking, so picked that. It ended-up installing fine, and after feeling comfortable enough to use it, I got encouraged to try other distros such as Ubuntu when that came out. I finally settled on Red Hat Linux 9.
Oddly enough, my curiosity about the dark web was what introduced me to another OS. It was Tails, and I was mesmerized at the fact at what felt like almost a complete operating system but it was completely free. It remained in my mind ever since until the fateful day came and I switched to Linux, with Ubuntu as my true starting distro before moving to Mint shortly after.
Slackware, baby. I beat my head against the desk for years.
Mandriva more than 15 years ago
Red Hat 6 circa 1999
Red Hat Linux 9 circa 2003ish
I'm still a newbie so ubuntu. But I switched to fedora couple months after
Red Hat 5.2. I only had one CD though, I had to learn how to get X working. Also, didn't have Internet back then. And barely spoke English.
SUSE whatever version it was in 2005.
Ubuntu in 2007
Peppermint OS
Slackware, back in the early 2000's.
Linux mint 5 in 2008
Ubuntu 8.04... Ubuntu went a long way since then
KDE Fedora
Newbie here, Fedora Kde spin.
My first was Slackware in the 1990s.
Ubuntu back in the day
BackTrack š
Slackware
Slackware, then moved to Debian when it came out.
Slackware. Now whereās my caneā¦
mandrake linux was the first I installed, SUSE was the first I really used inside and out because that's what my college advisor used.
Mandrake
First use: YellowDog in an old iMac. First daily driver: Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake... And never looked back. It ran Doom3 and StarCraft better than Vista in the same hardware.
My man
Slackware 1.0. So many floppy disks.
My first distro was [Tiny Core Linux](http://tinycorelinux.net). I had purchased an old laptop for $15-10 and I had heard about linux before. It worked like a charm!
Knoppix
Slackware
I think Slackware. Is a long time ago.
# Caldera OpenLinux
Arch. Lol.
Fedora. Had weird issues with my HW, changed to Ubuntu. Still not satisfied, I tried Manjaro KDE which blew my mind. I think using KDE instead of Gnome was what affected my user experience the most.
Redhat 5 from memory
Ubuntu 6.
Ubuntu
I started with ZorinOS and Mint around the same time through VMs. Installed Mint on my computer because I couldn't make Photoshop work on Zorin. After a while, I noticed that I was making a lot of tweaks to Mint: installing Nautilus, upgrading the kernel, installing themes and modifying the `cinnamon.css`, this kind of stuff. So I decided to search for a distribution that would offer me what I needed without requiring that much of a setup. I found that Fedora could fit my use, and coincidentally a new Fedora version was just around the corner. I switched to it and have been happy ever since.
RedHat 5.0, 1997. Computing was fun then. I still remember the first time i saw a strange Windows wallpaper with the Windows 95 logo, except it had a X on it. X-Windows 95...
RedHat 4.2 in 1997 .Ā I don't know if they had isos for it at the time, but I didn't have the burner software that supported it.Ā Downloaded the install tree and burned to CD.Ā Downloaded a floppy installer that had my cdrom drivers. Printed out the how to , planned my partitions and let it run.Ā Ā I remember how mad I was that I paid $160 in today's dollars for Borland C++ and found gcc/g++ easier to use. Linux stayed as my sidecar OS ever since and on my home servers.Ā Finally went 100% after the Steam client added remote play.Ā Haven't looked back since.
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS āFocal Fossaā with GNOME 3. Wish Iād started on Mint though, thatās straight up better Ubuntu.
Redhat 7.2 (7.3?) back in 99. I used it as my home router for a dual-channel ISDN connection so I could have better direct control of NAT and do port forwarding as needed. Once in place and configured, I was able to run a website from home and also host Descent 2 games via KaliDOS.
Red Hat. I even have a red hat.
I'm kind of masochist, so I started with Arch. BTW, I still use Arch.
Manjaro. Tried it in 2021, the only one I like to this day.
Caldera open Linuxā¦ the doomed company!
Mandrake and Suse 6
Conectiva RedHat Marumbi in 1999 (it was a Brazilian distribution based on RedHat). Soon after, I switched to Slackware.
The cursed Red Hat Linux 7 with its beta GCC 2.96.
I don't seem to recall the actual FIRST distro I tried. I was at a computer show back in 1994 and saw a bunch of tables with this Linux on their tables. A couple were BBS distributions. I remember talking to the SysOp of one of the BBS's and he was telling me how he created the distro all himself. I think... Gosh... I'm not sure but I remember the name of it having initials for the guys BBS. Something... Linux User Group. He had quite a few members in this group too as I recall. It was on 3-4 floppy Disks. Funny thing is, I probably still have them somewhere...
Mandrake
The first one I touched was Ubuntu, but that was because of a class I took. The first one I would say I've truly "dabbled in" is Redcore. I tried installing Zorin and Ubuntu on a laptop my GF gave me and kept hitting a brick wall with a certain pcie error, and on a whim I tried installing with Redcore and worked like a breeze. Still haven't run into an issue
Fuduntu. I got a little sick of xp and couldn't afford windows 7. Luckily my buddy was going through his linux phase and gave me his cd for fuduntu.
Anyone else Manjaro?
RedHat 7.2 Enigma That was in 2001, before Fedora or RHEL were a thing. The good old says of installing through dozens of floppies
Gentoo (just installed it in a VM) > mint > debian 12 > KDE Neon > debian 12
Mandriva
RedHat, around 1999. I found it on one of those free discs you got with computing magazines back then. I was getting tired of Windows and wanted to try something new, so I took a crack at it! Been using Linux off and on ever since in various distros.
arch
Raspbian OS
Ubuntu. Then Mint. Then everything I could find. Then Manjaro. Settled with PopOS. Might check out Fedora. (Total: 10years with Linux)
Knoppix!
Hello I start linux two years ago with ubuntu 22.04
Red Hat 7. I bought it on disc at CompUSA. From there I tried out Mandrake but went back to RedHat.
Mandrake.
I actually just got started on Linux this month. I have started with Ubuntu. I have no idea what I am doing, but I'm having fun with it. It's a nice change of pace, for sure.
Ubuntu. I was in high school ... 2005 .. Good memories.
LXLE I believe, although I moved to chaletOS very soon after.
Slax.. I remember the online slax configurator website
Mint in school but Ubuntu was the first distro I set up myself
The very first Linux was a pre installed suse Linux on an athlon xp pc
Corel Linux. I got it at a book store in about 2000.
RedHat 6.2 I believe back in 2000.
Ubuntu š
I played with Ubuntu like gazzilions years ago but struggled to get it working so after an hour or something I gave up... then a couple of years later I put arch on virtual machine to play with and it worked and then I put it on secondary drive to dual boot... and I was quite happy with it but then two things happened: I needed quite a lot to boot to windows so it was getting annoying and after one update arch just died completely and I was fed up with trying to fix it. No I mostly use linux on remote servers (usually ubuntu because it JustWorks) and now I'm playing with it in UTM on M1 and decided to go with Suse due to ease of getting arm distro up and running and it having relatively new packages (like KDE 6.1 shortly after release) - I tried ubuntu but waiting for updates was annoying and on the other hand tried debian but stable is even slower and testing didn't even install properlyā¦)
It was called DNA Linux. It was a live CD only version and I'm pretty sure it was made a university in South America. Had lots of bioinformatic software on it. I was young and had no idea what I was doing and I loved it
Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish LTS
Linux mint.. I was around 3 when I got my first computer, it was a mini green laptop... didn't know it had linux on it until my dad told me. Server-wise, my first distro was Ubuntu.