I tired Linux a few times in the past, but didn’t really start using seriously until 2019. I love poking around old OSs and distros, and I want to spin a few up in some VMs my next free evening.
Any suggestions? Open to any distro (or let’s be honest, DE). Any versions that holds a special place in your heart or that’s exceptionally novel? Really interested to see what’s out there!
Early Knoppix live CDs have a special place in my heart
Yeah, Knoppix was kind of a ‘Tucows vibe’ distro. Pretty approachable.
Zen Linux was another short-lived 2005 liveDistro, which had a nice feel and Art.
Also, installing all https://trisquel.info/ versions side-by-side and doing a 17 year fast-forward would be cool.
Slackware like 7-12.
Basically until they pulled fortunemod.
Mandrake 6.0 was my first distro in '98-'99. Mandrake hasn’t existed for a long time now; I have no idea if you can still find an old iso of it. It used KDE 1.1.1 as it’s DE, and to this day, KDE has remained my preferred DE.
Crunchbang (#!) linux breathed live into some very wimpy hardware I’ve had in the past.
Loved the minimalism.
Gentus Linux comes to mind, obscure distro based on Red Hat (not RHEL mind You) released by now forgotten ABIT, a motherboard manufacturer. I was daily driving it as teenager back in 2001 for couple of weeks until I learned by trial and error how to get windows 98 installed back. Another one would be Mandrake Linux which I was dual booting couple years later.
I read gentoo instead of gentus, found it awkward that someone would call gentoo obscure, did a websearch, came back to the post with gentus as a reply, re-read the post.
Great distro! I ran Lunar Linux so Source Mages sister from the fork of Sorcerer Linux. Lunar I know is still going and updating. Need to drop into their IRC channel for support and what not. Wonder if Source Mage is still kicking. Amazing how great the bash scripts were to run it all. I feel like if they added binary support they would get a lot more traction
Yes SMGL is still active. You can try joining one of their channels. There are still people looking for source based distros, not sure while Gentoo is the only thing that pops up for them. I used it for some time, and it’s fantastic. Sadly having to build stuff takes too much time, particularly on old, and not performance oriented HW. They had support for binaries, and actually include a binaries grimoire, so you could install binaries that used to take too much time, like Firefox for example. Still it takes too much to keep a source based distro. And if you go all the way, then when changing parts of the building toolchain, like gcc, the recommendation was to build everything so that everything would be built with the more up to date toolchain, that was cool, since SMGL has tools for it, but those fancy stuff take as well a lot of time. There I learned 1st about ccache, hahaha.
Sooo fun, :)
I think the LARP elements of this distro put me off trying it back in the day. Calling the package manager a “Grimoire” and having to “cast” packages to install them was just too much for me.
Wao, Mandriva and DamnSmallLinux 🤣🤣🤣
I’m nostalgic for Ubuntu when it still had Unity as default, and Linux mint around 2014. That’s when I began coding, and that’s the time I liked the look of them more than the current modern offerings. Plus there was more ease of customization it felt like
Tom’s Root Boot.
One floppy disk, one Linux machine!
Corel Linux
Uninstalled this recently as well. It is surprisingly slick for the time and way more modern feeling than you would expect.
Linux was just not corporate enough for it at the time.
In a different timeline….
I’ve been meaning to fiddle with OpenIndiana and Illumos for a while, which both trace their roots back to Sun Microsystem’s Solaris. It’d be really cool to poke around in a system that didn’t grow off of BSD or Linux.
The distro used by the one laptop per child project. Fascinating GUI
Ubuntu ca 2010
Play some Nibbles from that era
If you want to experience travelling back in time with an operating system then OpenBSD feels like a time capsule, albeit one which is still being maintained. I realise it is not linux but using it is very similar to what linux was like before 2010.
Kubuntu 8.04.
It was the last release with KDE 3 and very polished for its time. Many applications from back then have vanished by now. Kopete was Magic, supporting all IM protocols (Including Yahoo video calls!), Amarok was so reliable and sleek.
Of course most things have improved since then, but I remember it fondly.
