I’m new to #Lemmy and making myself feel at home by posting a bit!
My first Linux distribution was elementary OS in early March 2020. Since then, I’ve tried Manjaro, Arch Linux, Fedora, went back to Manjaro, and since early January 2023, I’ve landed on Debian as my home in the #Linux world.
What was your first Linux distro?
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Slackware, in the 90s, installed from floppy disks. I also used SuSE, Debian and now stick with Fedora.
I guess Ubuntu when I tried to make a minecraft server a couple of years ago. I first started actually using Linux as my desktop with bazzite.
Ubuntu. But I think that will be almost everyones answer who starter with Linux in the late-mid 2000s.
Edit: Oh wait. Might have been Knoppix to resuce some data from a broken windows installation.
Redhat 4.1 back in 97. I even purchased the CD from PC World, seems wild now to buy a CD/DVD of a distro.
First PC I installed it on was a work laptop, had to compile a bunch of kernel modules and then the kernel to get everything working but get everything working I did, Thinkpads being good for Linux even then.
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 :‐/
I had Slackware running on a couple of 386 machines with 200MB hard disks. It was impossible to do almost anything as it was all compile from source but I didn’t have the disk space to install all the compiler tools and what I was trying to run on them. I was originally going to use them as part of a distributed system for my degree, but in the end I didn’t use them and did something different instead.
I used CentOS at work a lot for several years and liked it, but only fully switched form Windows at home 10 years ago and I went to Ubuntu at the time. Installed KDE on it, messed around with i3 and had a great time. I then went hopping and landed on Endeavour OS which I’ve been really enjoying for many years now and have no intention of moving from. All my servers still run Ubuntu LTS Server as it has been unbelievably solid.
Ubuntu in 2009 or so. Booting school computers onto the live DVD felt like hacking. I think around 2016 I installed some spin of Ubuntu on my laptop and used it somewhat regularly. Prior to that it was just random times I felt like using the dual boot function. I mostly used Windows. It took until 2025 for me to switch my desktop to Cachy OS.
Ubuntu, the release right before unity was the one I started actually using.
After that I switched to arch for a very long time, and now i’m on nixos.
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 😁
It was Slackware… Back in the late 90s. Do not ask me about how kid me managed that, all I recall is endless terminals, kernel panics and eventually getting a desktop through some arcane means I can’t remember.
I didn’t return to linux for many years after that experience.
I still have the 1996 edition of Slackware Linux Unleashed and the CD in my bookshelf as a reminder.
Ubuntu lol
Arch in like 2019 maybe.
I still like Arch, I tried all sorts of distros in VMs, most feel clunky to me.
Tiling manager, GUI file explorer, minimal status bar and I’m set.
For my laptop this is swaywm, swaybar, nautilus.
I also use drun-like programs
I believe it was slackware. it was gifted to teenage me ca 1994, was on the CD of some magazine.
I wanted to try it, so went dual boot. it (or I?) partitioned my 800MB hard disk into a 300MB and an 800MB partition. stupid young me thought this was great and I just gained 300MB. when I noticed date corruption, stupid young me started to copy over important data to the assumed good partition. things didn’t end well.
I took a two year break from Linux afterwards 🤣
Ubuntu, as they used to send free CD packs to distribute. Was fun booting into live CD on computers.
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…
