Simple question. Which distribution was your introduction?
For me, it was SLS Linux in '92-93, followed relatively naturally by Slackware, which was followed by Redhat.
RedHat here in the late 90s, back when you could still find yourself writing a “modeline.”
Then Debian in the early 00s when apt was still a major discriminator. Finally, Ubuntu around 2008 just so I was running the same thing I was recommending to family members for ease of use. (At the time, Ubuntu sported the same ease of installation and hardware detection I’d found with Knoppix.)
Now on Xubuntu, but seriously eyeing a return to Debian.
RedHat in the mid-late 90s here too. It wasn’t a great time for the linux desktop haha. I think I used afterstep or windowmaker back then. RPM hell was bad and hosed my system enough that Debian was like a savior with apt-get. Never really looked back from debian based systems since.
I forgot about Knoppix.
Oh wow my first distro was also RedHat sometime around 1999. It had a GUI, so I’m thinking Gnome 1 days maybe?
Slackware, 1996. I had a hand-me-down 486 that didn’t have a CD-ROM drive. It was cheaper for me to sit in a Uni computer lab with a case of 3.5" floppies, than it was to buy a drive. Slackware got me through my systems programming course at the time without me having to find time to get to the Unix lab (only open during regular classroom hours) or Telnet in (yes, really.) I was living on campus and the dorms only had time-limited dialup.
I did my first distribution download via the modem pool at the University where I worked. Next time I used my head and just brought a stack of floppies in with me and set one of the SunOS boxes running a script writing disks. It would write one, eject it, then beep to tell me to feed it the next disk.
It wasn’t long after that that I replaced the main server in the research lab (a Microvax II) with a 486 running Redhat.
Ubuntu 5.04.
18 years of continuous linux desktop usage, with various distros.
My brain did the math before I could stop myself.
~30 years. Now I feel old.
Jk, I always feel old.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Better old than foolish, that’s what I say. Kids these days…
I’m almost to 30 myself. Started in 1994. If it weren’t for those dang kids I wouldn’t feel so old :)
Mandrake Linux 6.5. At the time I was drawn to it because they had a version that worked with the sims game.
As a kid in 1998, I installed Slackware to one of the two family computers. My parents were less proud than you might possibly think.
That’s crazy. If one of my kids installed any Linux distribution on a computer, I’d be proud as hell.
OpenBSD on the Amiga in 95-96 or so.
Slackware I’m pretty sure back in 1993. I remember compiling my own kernels that took hours. Those were the days.
Yup I remember downloading Slack on the college network in the early 90’s. Good times.
My first distro was Manjaro. It was really cool, but also I remember having some trouble getting things to work on it without super extensive troubleshooting.
but also I remember having some trouble getting things to work on it without super extensive troubleshooting
still the standard experience
Ubuntu 10.10 on a school issued dell latitude d505 with a core 2 duo, windows xp and 512mb of ram. I ran it in virtualbox. I will give one guess on just how well it worked
Mandrake 8.1 back in 2002.
Red Hat Linux 6.2. I, too, got it out of a book, but I don’t remember which one.
My first I used was Slackware back in 2002 on a 486 with a 250MB disk. Wasn’t easy when you have to compile half the software and there’s basically nor enough room for the build environment. This was on a small test and development PC I used whilst at uni.
When I went all in on my desktop and waved Windows goodbye I used Ubuntu as that’s what I’d had good experience with on my headless VMs.
Now running EndeavourOS and love it.
I just flashed back to running my first Linux box and struggling to get X Windows working with a miniscule amount of RAM and a swap partition.
I’m thinking I had 1 MB RAM on that machine. I can’t wrap my head around that. It just seems impossible. I do remember my wife bought me 16MB RAM as an anniversary present after that, and I was excited by how much easier everything was with so much memory.
I think the 16MB was around $1000.00 at the time.
It was around 2001 and I started by dual booting Windows with Red Hat, don’t remember which version. Eventually I dropped Windows and dropped the dual boot and switched from Red Hat to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu when I was a child, maybe version 6, and my uncle choose their PC with Linux over Windows. I didn’t understand it very well, and everything needed commands: move, copy, extract, change name of files… I remember commands like echo, sudo and tar since then.
My first distro with Linux as daily use was Linux Mint 20.
I didn’t know about Linux until I was in my late teens, and even then didn’t care because I was a “Gamer” (ugh). My first disto was Ubuntu. I have used many distros but like debain the most.
