What was the first ever distro you installed and used? For me, it was Mint as I seemed like the closest thing to Windows minus all the forced updates and chappy changes.
Currently on Fedora GNOME now but what about you? What made you choose your first distro diving into the world of Linux?
I wanna hear your thoughts!
Slackware. About 1994 or so.
Same! With the stack of disks!
Slackware2 or maybe 3 in 95.
RHL4.x from 1998 . Looked at debian, but a local snob convinced me halfway through explaining “the debian way” to steer clear. Didn’t even learn of the validation glitch in the .deb format by then.
Now it’s Rocky. But if PCLinuxOS had a better installer (like a good kickstart) I’d be there in an instant. Its massive versatility in having so many versions of apps available without the appstream bullshit - it’s just Alternatives and proper naming - really makes it stand out.
Now let me packer some templates and I’m SO done with ELs and the shit RH has done to their crown jewels.
Sounds like me. I ordered it from a magazine and installed it from 3.5 floppy disks also. After that it was Debian and i used that for years.
SLS
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System
I used to have to head into University to use the Sun Lab ( Sun Microsystems workstations ) to download all the floppy images. Took forever.
I would copy the X configuration from the Sun machines so that my 486 at home looked the same. For some reason, that made me feel like my PC was a “real” UNIX workstation.
Ubuntu Late 2000’s. I wanted it because of the CUBE. But left because the only game which worked was TF2.
Slackware.
What was the first ever distro you installed and used?
Slackware with some version of FVWM. Installed from a couple dozens floppies. (yes, I am that old :-( )
What made you choose your first distro diving into the world of Linux?
It is the only one available for download at the time as floppies.
Mandrake linux on 2001
It was probably Red Hat, late '90s.
Yggdrasil in 1993. Why? Because it was the easiest to install at the time, and came with one of my books in college.
Either Slackware or Red Hat Linux 5, can’t remember. I do remember that when I first installed RH5 I used “Hick” for my language.
Void. I was so excited when I booted into TTY. A blank canvas like never before.
Relatively new full-time Linux user here. My first experience of using Linux was Knoppix. I had it on cd-rom to troubleshoot Windows, got into media servers and xbmc, so had a few OpenElec machines. Now have Mint as a daily driver.
Caldera (probably around 1999).
Slackware. Installed from 3.5" floppy disk.
I kept hearing mutahar (someordinarygamers) talk about virtual machines and eventually i managed to get a laptop so i tried making one and Ubuntu was my pick (cus he recommended it for noobs), i hardly knew anything ab linux then but i figured a vm would be the perfect chance to try it :) . Later on when i first decided i wanted to try rawdogging linux it was cus my friend had an old laptop he never used so i asked if i could have it and he didnt mind. The thing was so slow the start menu (the thing u open when u press the windows button) literally took minutes to open. So i eventually checked its specs and downloaded a few distros trying them out and settled on mx linux cus it seemed to tick the most amount of boxes for me :3 (also i got around downloading linux on my main device later on, been using fedora on it.)
I think the first one I installed was Debian back in '97 when I was 12. I think my dad helped a bunch, but I can’t really remember stuff from back then very well.
My initial thought was that it was gentoo which I used as my principal OS for close to ten years. I don’t know how many times I reinstalled, but enough that I basically had it by memory. Taught me to keep my home dir on a separate partition.
These days I mostly live in windows because AutoCAD is a part of my professional life, but I dual boot popos on weekends. Unless kernel updates break my displaylink docking station…
