Got my own PC, went with Slackware again for some God-forsaken reason
Debian again and that's where I've stayed for most part - I tried using Ubuntu as a desktop laptop distro for a while but at some point I realised I should have installed Debian to begin with so I went with that there too
My people! Their screenshot gallery was the sole reason I got into Linux back when I was in the sixth grade. The skills I learned by using it as my daily driver got me a job at a web hosting company and started a very fulfilling career.
Getting X to work required mucking about with a textfile where you specified parameters directing the operation of the electron gun inside a CRT monitor that were so down to the metal, that you could create your own resolution or even blow up your monitor.
The first I tried was Ubuntu 7.04 but I didn't stick with it and went back to XP. Until I ended up with a hardware setup that wouldn't work on Windows XP (widescreen monitor + Intel graphics driver with no widescreen mode options) but worked perfectly on Ubuntu 9.10. I never truly went back to Windows since.
Tried a few other distros in 2011 then switched to Arch for a couple years, Xubuntu for a couple years, Ubuntu GNOME for 7-8 years, and finally switched to Fedora last year.
When I saw the numbers "7.04" I immediately heard the login drum-like sound "bu-du-bup" and remembered Feisty Fawn. It's one of my fondest computer memories. It felt like a friend.
It was quite the interesting thing to run back then — it was all very “Wild West” of software, and a LOT of stuff didn’t work well.
It wasn’t my daily driver; it really wasn’t ready for most workloads back then. But it was nearly free, and we shared around the CD-ROM amongst hacker friends interested in giving it a try.
I attempted to install RedHat 5 in the late 90s, but I had no idea what I was doing since I was like 12 or 13 and we had just gotten our first computer. I never got around to actually using Linux until a few years later with Ubuntu 5.04
You can learn a ton installing your own OS, even if you don’t get things working in the end. Especially back in the 90’s when things weren’t quite as plug-and-play and hardware auto-detection was immature. So even if your RedHat experiment failed, good on you for attempting it anyway!
Ubuntu Server 14.04. Years later I tried Arch+Win10 dual boot, but during a forced update, Windows ate the boot partition and then unalived itself. That's when I nuked the SSD and hard-switched to Manjaro (first daily driver, never had Windows since), later Endeavour, and most recently, Arch. If/when Arch breaks, I'll most likely hop to Nix.
SteamOS, just seeing how friendly and similar-to-windows KDE looked (and proton running all the games I cared about) gave me all the confidence I needed to install fedora and later nobara on my desktop
In vague, hand waving terms, SunOS was based on BSD, while Solaris was a shift to more of a System V flavor of Unix. And they changed the version numbering. Lots more details, but that's the gist.
Ubuntu really was a big step forward for ease of setup back when it first came out, but other distros have since caught up. I think the ultimate success of an open source project is when they make themselves obsolete because they had such a big impact on the eco system at large. I think Ubuntu achieved their main goal, but once they did that they ended up adding a bunch of bloat to distinguish themselves as the intro user option.
I was one if those newbies who went with Arch as their first distro, but I found my home with Fedora. It's not the most up-to-date or polished distro, but it's by far the best all-rounder.
I started with PopOS but it went so smooth that after like a week I decided I needed something a bit more exciting and installed Arch. Except I accidentally partitioned the wrong drive in fdisk (my Windows drive).
+1
I fondly remember having the bootloader on a floppy to dual boot my own machine due to some limitation about where Linux lived on my hard disk, but honestly it was probably more of a knowledge limitation at the time!
First shell was on a Debian 1.x machine in my friend’s living room since they had broadband.
Linux Mint, until I made a mistake during a version upgrade and aptitude had a memory leak while trying to escape dependency hell and roll every package back. Then I replaced it with arch and am happy to be on a rolling release distro.
Guys this is off topic but I'm using Ubuntu server for a jellyfin/coding server and getting headaches trying to do things cli only.. for example connecting openvpn.
My question is how much shame is there using a distro with a gui for a server
A GUI isn't preferable on a server mostly for one reason: Security. A lower number of packages and a smaller codebase means a lower number of things to exploit. And since WM/DE codebases are rather large and they have a lot of dependencies with them, it's really not recommended.
You could try a web UI like Webmin. If it's a public-facing system like a VPS, the once you get the VPN working, configure Webmin to only listen on the VPN IP so that it's not exposed publicly.
By the way, I'd recommend Wireguard or Tailscale over OpenVPN. Tailscale uses Wireguard but makes it a lot easier to configure. One of the major advantages is that Wireguard/Tailscale are peer-to-peer models that don't use a central server like OpenVPN does. Wireguard doesn't have servers, only peers.
Basically, if you have two devices on the VPN that want to communicate with each other (eg say you're at a coffee shop and want to connect to your laptop from your phone), they can communicate directly rather than having to go through a server that's potentially located somewhere else.
To be honest the problem is I'm trying to connect to the VPN provider I have with openvpn client. Im with windscribe, I get as far as importing the profile, attempting to start the service, entering the username and password for the VPN but the thing just won't start.
Oh I see... I thought you wanted to set up your own VPN, as that's the usual use case for a VPN (e.g. connecting to a home server while not at home).
Looks like Windscribe have a Wireguard config generator so you could try that. https://windscribe.com/getconfig/wireguard. I don't have an account so I can't try it, but it may just generate a regular Wireguard config you can use with Wireguard directly, without having to use their app.
The problem is now all my port forwards stopped working for accessing services via my external IP so I guess there is some kind of firewall going on via wireguard.
Pop got me into Linux in July 2021 (i switched the same time as the steamdeck was announced) and I ran Pop for a good two and a half years. Great distro.
Now I'm on EndeavourOS, but it was Pop that helped me make the transition.
Hey, another CentOS guy! I ran my home phone on that with Asterisk for years, on a dual pentium machine that was already ancient.
When I rebuilt it years later as a VM I went to Ubuntu LTS, but CentOS was my first! It’s been so long I don’t even remember what, as a newbie, drove me to choose that one.
i think around 2013 i started occasionally tinkering with ubuntu,
i then quickly started distrohopping
(mint, debian, kubuntu, antergos and probably more)
in 2017 i started seriously using antergos (i3wm) on my work pc
i was still only occasionally tinkering at home,
untill 2022, when i learned about proton,
and fully migrated my private computer from win 10 to fedora(kde)
SuSE linux 4.2 about 1994-6 ish?
Fond memories of having to roll my own modelines to get crt monitors working.
Used the various versions until the sell out to Novell and the controversy with Microsoft.
Then a really big gap with some macs and now I’ve just started using Mint on a mini itx machine I’ve put together just for that use.
Puppy Linux on an old Celeron @ 333MHz, with 160MB of RAM and 4GB of disk space.
I was amazed at the speed compared to Windows XP and even 98SE. It weighed about 100MB but had quite a few applications like mtpaint, Inkscape, Abiword, some spreadsheet program (I don't remember which was it, don't think it was GNUmeric), mplayer, some lightweight browser (I think it was Midori), even XChat.
The only (and BIG) problem is that you basically ran everything as root.
Some time later I bought a more powerful PC (Intel something dual core @ 3GHz, 4GB RAM and 500GB disk), and used the pre installed Windows 7 for some time before installing Ubuntu (I think 12.04) and I've been using it since.
Archlinux if you don't count the time when I was five. I install Ubuntu then a series of packages to make it "look and feel" like Mac os. After that I was disappointed with how janky it was as a Mac clone and switching back to windows.
I was crazy about macs when I was a kid. When I finally got one, I enjoyed the polish but ultimately found it limiting. After 15 years; about six years on macos, seven on Windows. I played with archlinux in an emulator for a few months before I nuked my system and never went back, thanks wine/DXVK!
Ubuntu. Back when win 10 was announced and all the bullshit started.
But unity was definitely not my thing, and I tried a handful of other distros on my dad's old computer. I figured if I could get a decent functionality on that, I'd be able to comfortably use whatever I settled on for a decent box.
Mint with cinnamon is where I settled. Cinnamon or plasma are perfect for my wants, and mint being debian related makes software damn easy to get going fast. What's not to like about that? I tried it with dual boot on my gaming box at the time, and then when I set up a newer box, I went straight mint. Now, the old one is my air gapped media machine running win7 because fuck life without musicbee.
Everything else is on mint except my kid's gaming laptop (which is an oxymoron imo, but whatever) because they're unwilling to try anything else, and my dad's current but ancient box running 11 and being nearly useless because of that. But he's damn near 80, so he can do whatever he wants short of shitting on the dinner table.
I have been searching soo long to get musicbee working on Linux and I think some ppl may have had a bit of luck with wine shinnanigans but other then that I can't see it happening :(
have you looked into using any alternative Linux native mp3 players? I used musicbee for a bit when I was on windows but I didnt find anything too unique about it.
Yeah, I had hoped with proton and whatnot, it would be a solved thing. Hell, it may be, but I'm fine using what I've got until it dies, so I only check about once a year.
How is NixOS going? I am also an Arch convert, but the issue with Gentoo is that it feels like a clusterfuck after days spent on configuration that is not easy to replicate. I mean it works but I might not want to go through it next time.
I think Puppy or Damn Small Linux, maybe knoppix, i was on dial up at the time. Then I found that I could request a free Ubuntu install disk and the speed and cleanliness and compiz effects blew my mind. 04 or 06, can't remember which. From there I think it was xubuntu, mint, arch, arch nvme died and I needed an os immediately so manjaro, got sick of manjaro and garuda sounded neat so i tried it and that's where I am now on my main. Made a mess toying with wayland and am ready to reinstall, probably back to arch or try out nixos
edit: reading through all these comments is bringing back so many memories of other distros I played with back then.
I started with Ubuntu, but since I was a kid at the time, wifi not working scared me away as I only ever knew of "everything works out of the box". After 2 years, I took a shot at linux again and I gotta say that it was mint that helped me build enough confidence in fixing any issues myself and to try other harder distros like arch. Now after all the exploring/distro hopping, I have settled down on opensuse as a daily driver, but mint will always be one of my favorites, and will always recommend it to any newbie.
SuSe Linux in the early 2000s. Came on a couple of CD-ROMs. We used it to run JBoss servers at work, alongside various Unix flavours. But my first experience with Unix was in the late eighties at university. Been using Mint as my daily driver for about two years now and I'm never going back.
For me, it was Mandrake, I think it was back around 2000. I played so much Tux Racer on that machine. However, after they switched the branding to Mandriva, the OS started to run pretty poorly for me around that time. I stayed away from Linux entirely until around 10 years ago when I friend introduced me to Mint. It's been my main ever since, though I've played with others since then, like OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, and most recently, Debian and EndeavourOS.
First Debian, then Ubuntu because people said it was better, then back to Debian because it wasn't (snaps really suck and break things), then to Pop OS (bc new laptop preinstalled with it). I also got a SteamDeck semi-recently if that counts (still use the Pop OS laptop).
My first distro was Xubuntu. It was 2014-15. I was still in high school. My pc was getting old, and I read online that Linux can make your pc run faster. Since it wasn't my gaming machine, I decided to give it a try. I also read online that Xubuntu is among the lightest of distros, so decided to install that. It really was a night and day difference in performance.
I've switched distros a few times (Xubuntu -> Ubuntu Gnome -> Manjaro KDE -> EndeavourOS KDE, also run AlmaLinux on a few headless server machines) since then, but never went back to Windows ever again.
I went from Ubuntu to Xubuntu one Ubuntu started adding all their bloaty window UI. I stuck with it for a long time but recently it started acting up on me so I switched to Linux mint xfce since it's the closest experience and feels a bit more stable. I figure if it ain't broke...
Tried MythTV for a HTPC and had some issue with a log file filling up the the whole drive. Didn't have the skill yet to fix the issue. Does messing around with the terminal in OS X count? It certainly made me more comfortable for the next time tried. I think the next major attempt was another HTPC, but this time, I just used Ubuntu + XBMC and setup it up to also be a headless torrent box. Using OS X as my main desktop still made things easier then it would have been going from Windows to Linux as the file naming and system directories were compatible.
I've been using Mint as my laptop OS for a while now and just recently switched from Mac to Mint on my desktop machine. I made an effort to never get trapped in property file types or an "eco system", so all the apps I was using were available in Linux already and the Majove Hackintosh was becoming less and less viable.
Slackware 4. Nothing like having to compile your kernel depending on the hardware you hand-selected for compatibility. Then entering your monitor specs in the config files by hand to get WindowMaker to run correctly.
I was thinking of this. Searching for the monitor manuals to fix the wonder than it should desktop. I wanted more resolution but it just made the desktop wider and higher than the monitor with the same resolution so it scrolled ahahaha! It was red hat ~5 (I think) in my case!
First server was Debian in 2002 or so. First desktop was the first version of Ubuntu (4.10). Back then, they'd send you a free CD upon request, anywhere in the world. Dial-up was still pretty common in Australia at the time, so not having to download it was very useful. That was one of the things that really drove adoption of Ubuntu.
I believe it was Ubuntu, likely something like 8.04, but only in a VM. Then a few years later I tried Fedora, DamnSmallLinux, and maybe one or two others. I didn't install Linux on actual hardware until 2017 when I installed Ubuntu 16.04 and never looked back, though I tried it from a bootable USB a few times years before that. Currently on Ubuntu 22.04 on my desktop, my servers all run Ubuntu or Proxmox (Debian).
Using on a computer, Debian back in 2011. On my own machine I first went with an Ubuntu dual boot, then later switched to Linux Mint and haven't switched to anything else since. I just love how Mint was able to give new life to the same old trooper laptop I had since 2013.
Pretty sure Linux Mint back in 2009-2010 that my brother forced all of our family PC's to use. Now over 14 years later I have made it back to Linux Mint and oh how I've missed it.
Mandrake, I wanna say ~1998 or so. But tbh, I only recently finally took the plunge and wiped all traces of M$ off my system. I've tried Linux distris over the years and always just couldn't make them work for me for one reason or another. Red hat, Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Pop_OS, Manjaro, Arco, Endeavor. Nothing really worked out for me and something inevitably broke that genuinely wasn't my fault. Now, I have settled on pure Arch with KDE and for some reason, it's been stable and been used daily for months now and I can't think of one thing that could ever make me go back, or anywhere else for that matter.
I am an old timer. I started with BSD before there was even a Linux. NetBSD on an Amiga 3000 before the AT&T law suite against NetBSD, then heared about Linux which was twice as clean as NetBSD and without legal issues - Later NetBSD removed all legal issues nonetheless.
First Linux was a Watch-Tower Distribution, basically a big RAM-Disk with a rudimentary Linux system which you copied to HD. No package manager, nothing. tar, make was the way to do installations. Shortly after Slackware and SuSE which basically was the same back then. Then a lot of SuSE then Debian, then Ubuntu. Don't care much about the distribution nowadays as long as it is DEB-based.
But now something to scare all of you: Today my most used POSIX environment is... Cygwin. Well, I got a Windows-Notebook for development and a VM is really clunky in comparison to a fully integrated POSIX-layer like Cygwin. For developing Stuff it actually matters very little if you use BSD, Linux, Cygwin or even Solaris.
I bounced around a few different distros about twenty years ago. OpenSuse, Mint, and Ubuntu. I settled on Ubuntu (6.0X I think) because the others had a lot of trouble with hardware in my Korean laptop at the time. Ubuntu was the only one that had the track pad working right away, and also the only one I managed to get Korean keyboard input working in. I never did get the webcam working in any of them. I used Ubuntu in some form or another up until a few months ago when I switched to Mint. Largely because of Lemmy.
From my very casual view, it's just Debian but, the packages are up to date and the package manager doesn't spam the terminal.
Also just been easier to use so far.
Learned about Nobara not long after and that was finally enough to ditch windows.
on each linux upgrade it broke(on boot after screen would show yellow, red, orange, ... squares) so I had to clean reinstall, gave up after maybe fourth upgrade
Ubuntu, opensuse, or freebsd. I can't remember what I installed first, since it was around 2006-2007. There was a piece about Linux in some PC magazine and I had to check it out.
Ubuntu on an orangepi 5 when it released, now Linux Mint dual-booted to windows (haven't booted into windows for ages now) on my main rig.
I'll figure out making VR work at some point I hope, it's all I really use windows for now.
@Waffelson First effort was Corel Linux back in 1999. The experience was so bad that I didn't try linux again until 2008, and it finally stuck 6 years ago. Now i'm all in.
open suse (or was it mandrake? idk) around 2006. I remember trying it, and thinking "wow. This is trash" and then sticking with windows for 10 more years until giving ubuntu a try (and sticking to it). I tried other non-debian linuxes since then, but they all gave me that "wow, trash"-kind of feeling
the family computer running ubuntu from 2010 on. I used it mainly for Web browsing and creating presentations for School. I was able to run League of Legends (that was in 2014 i think) through wine but i think it crashed in about 50% of Games during the loading screen :D. Linux gaming has truly come far since then (and now LoL doesn't run on Linux at all because of Riots Rootkit)
i honestly didn't do too much linux growing up; i was more involved with radio shack and trsdos and then win 3.1 (since we only had the one family computer; tandy sensation, whoo). then onto windows 2000. it was probably around the early to mid 2000s when i experimented with fedora with one of my coworkers; that was probably the first time i actually did a lot beyond basic commands ssh'ing into a web server on a web host.
Xubuntu in a vm on win10, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, OpenSuse Tumbleweed with Kde, and now Nix.
I used Fedora the longest and OpenSuse the shortest as Kde reminded me so much of horrible windows. I've also tried a lot of other distros in a vm or live usb, Linux Mint, Mubuntu, Void linux, the one without any Gnu component(Artix?) and some other ones. I also have ISOs of some other esoteric Oses on my computer, DebianHurd, Redox, can't even remember rn but I'm yet to try them out.
I'm mentally restraining myself from distrohopping to Guix and or FreeBSD as I doubt I'd have the same workflow I have now on NixOS. To have distrohopped this much in the space of 18 months is why I'm a failed Javascript programmer.
Technically the first distro i used was Lubuntu 10.04, but it was only a live cd because i was 13 by then and i was terrified that i installed linux and my father got angry at me if i left any evidence. The first one i used as a full SO to use as i like, Raspbian, so debian (wheezy, i believe).
I found a distro that would install on the windows file system and boot. Apparently it was slackware based didn't have a concept in my head of package managers couldn't figure out how to install gaim (now pidgin) gave up. Didn't go back for another 4 years doing C in college. Didn't look back from there.
Ubuntu in 2010 (with compiz' burning screen of course!). Got a new laptop a the time with decent to good specs and was shocked how bad it performed with the stock Win7 and bloated with bloatware (it was a Sony).
Suse linux. I didnt know what partitioning was, so I partitioned my hard drive 6 times and messed up my bootloader. I didn't know what that was too, so I had to figure out how to do all this....with a Suse linux disk from the library.
Later on, I discovered Wesnoth and that was an awesome game. I also played around with Ubuntu 6+, Slackware, DSL, and a host of others. Its been a fun ride. Nowdays, I like PopOS and Manjaro (steamdeck). Most anything debian.
Ubuntu 5.04 back in like 2004-2005. Although I did pick up RedHat 5 back in the late 90s but never managed to get it installed... Because I was like 11 or 12 lol
Ubuntu 8.10. My XP install had gotten corrupted and I didn’t own a disc copy of Windows. One of the tech support ladies at my school gave me a copy. Once I discovered the desktop cube and GTK themes I was hooked.
I'm not sure what the first distro I installed was but I used to have a Linux VM running 24/7 on my Windows machine back in '06. I ran folding@home on my athlon 64 and for some reason the client at the time ran faster in a Linux VM on windows than it did in native windows. Pretty sure I was running Ubuntu but I can't be certain.
Redhat 5.2 on cd. I learned a lot about compiling kernels as it didn’t support scsi emulation which was required for an ide cd burner. I think I ended up on Mandrake for a while before bouncing around including LFS. Then gentoo for many many years. And I’ve come full circle and been back on fedora for about 10 years now.
I received a free CD of 10.04 with a computer magazine that I purchased every time I travelled.
The CD was neglected for the better part of that year, until I tried it out of curiosity. I remember setting up a dual boot configuration around two weeks in. I removed Windows around eve of 2011 and never looked back.
Since then I distro hopped every six months but kept coming back to Linux Mint as it nailed the balance between stability and UX, especially for the home machine that would be used by people from diverse age groups.
In those years, GNOME’s UX regressed so terribly with its 3.0 release, that Canonical’s Unity and Mint’s Cinnamon & MATE popped up as a response. One of those didn’t make it by the end of that decade. In those same years, Canonical started alienating its users with questionable decisions. Fedora and Manjaro became stable enough to be recommended for actual daily use. The 2010s was a wild ride.
Though by the start of 2020s, I entered Apple’s walled gardens as I no longer had time to troubleshoot my devices and tools, and expected those to work reliably.
I still use Linux on the home machine as well as the homelab. But I patiently wait for the day Linux is stable for daily use on phones. :-)
Think it was pop OS because "gaming" but never really had Linux as main os on my pc because gaming and modding and few other things that are just more complicated compared to what I'm used to. Being told to just use arch also does not help when I don't want to use terminal. And also don't know if you can run vr on Linux without problems. Current have installed mint on second drive(HDD) will start looking more into Linux when windows 10 stops getting support. But I'm a noob so what do I know.
My first linux distro was i dunno how many years ago.
Ubuntu
I gave a old dell inspirion with an althlon to one of our church members at the time, no idea what happened to that laptop.
Currently I'm using linux mint due to recommendations for being easy, just recently switched from windows 11 actually.
Linux Mint 20 (MATE).
Almost Arch or Gentoo due to trolls.
I'd also like to mention that was when I got my first computer and I first had to figure out what's an OS.
I got it used, and it already had Windows free DVD burner pre-installed. I didn't have any flash drive, why would I anyway? I just managed to dig out one single DVD-RW.
First one I tried was suse. Had it installed at an installfest (ah those heady days). But when I got it home it wouldn't work with my monitor.
Second I bought Mandrake, but couldn't get that to work either because I had lost my monitor manual and couldn't give it the vsync value for it.
First one I got to work was called LibraNet. That worked great for a couple of years until they stopped supporting it because it was run by a father and son team and the father passed away.
So then I chose suse again, hoping a bigger org wouldn't suffer the same problem. But then later there was some controversy I can't remember anymore (was it with microsoft?), so I switched to Kubuntu which I have been using forever, but am going to switch to opensuse very soon for various reasons.
I attempted to boot Mandrake/Mandrivia on an old laptop once and failed, then I mucked around in Slackware's live CD for an afternoon. The first thing I actually installed and used daily was Ubuntu 10.04.
No, she imagines how an actor whom she asked to say vulgar words on a dictaphone strokes her head, in reality she strokes her head with her hand, which the actor was holding
Yeah, same, but I think I didn't really start using it as a daily driver until Redhat. I used Amiga for a while, then NeXTSTEP had a student discount that put it in my price range, and it was simply years ahead of everything else, and that kept me busy until Redhat made Linux less than a chore.
There's dozens of us! Actually I couldn't scrounge together enough floppies, but eventually somehow came across a CD-ROM, probably from someone at school... And I was a bit later, more like '96 maybe...
I got the CD a little later, it's still in the basement somewhere. All of it ran on a 386 in an XT fold open casse, with a monochrome graphics card and an amber CRT display.
If you needed more grognard nostalgia.
The first computer I had personally ran ubuntu, but counting other computers before that it could have been either ubuntu or centos that was first, I don't remember which
Believe it or not, I don't think this is technically from an anime. One of the characters is (the short one in front), but the picture itself appears to be from DeviantArt. The other character, as far as I can tell, is an OC. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong.) Even the DeviantArt post just calls him "Anime Boy".
The short character in front appears to be a character named Tomoko Kuroki, the main character in the show "No Matter How I Look At It, It's You Guys Fault I'm Not Popular!" (It's apparently usually referred to by a shortening of it's Japanese title: "WataMote".)
I'm a little surprised I learned all this just from a reverse image search.
Redhat 2.1, a cd stuck to a huge book
7.0.90 here, that one had kernel 2.4. Been a minute.
Wow, nice! I started on 6.1.
Ubuntu, before Unity came along
Slackware 3.0 in 1996
Then this new promising distro called Debian
Got my own PC, went with Slackware again for some God-forsaken reason
Debian again and that's where I've stayed for most part - I tried using Ubuntu as a desktop laptop distro for a while but at some point I realised I should have installed Debian to begin with so I went with that there too
Slackware on 3.5" floppy's FTW!
Slackware for me at about the same time. Installed from 3.5" floppys.
Knoppix STD
Klaus would be proud
Ubuntu, it was an on-off-relationship until I finally made it
Mandrake mid 1990s
My people! Their screenshot gallery was the sole reason I got into Linux back when I was in the sixth grade. The skills I learned by using it as my daily driver got me a job at a web hosting company and started a very fulfilling career.
I've still got my Mandrake 9.2 CDs somewhere that a friend burned for me. Didn't dig the rebranding to Mandriva.
Slackware.
Me too, on floppy disks, kernel 2.0.something... I remember I struggled to get X11 running, so I tried with redhat next
Getting X to work required mucking about with a textfile where you specified parameters directing the operation of the electron gun inside a CRT monitor that were so down to the metal, that you could create your own resolution or even blow up your monitor.
Ah, those were the days ;)
Same. The year was 1997…
Mandrake Linux. I'm old, I know 😊
There is another :D
Fedora from 2015, to circumvent my school laptop's OS with it installed on a USB stick.
The first I tried was Ubuntu 7.04 but I didn't stick with it and went back to XP. Until I ended up with a hardware setup that wouldn't work on Windows XP (widescreen monitor + Intel graphics driver with no widescreen mode options) but worked perfectly on Ubuntu 9.10. I never truly went back to Windows since.
Tried a few other distros in 2011 then switched to Arch for a couple years, Xubuntu for a couple years, Ubuntu GNOME for 7-8 years, and finally switched to Fedora last year.
When I saw the numbers "7.04" I immediately heard the login drum-like sound "bu-du-bup" and remembered Feisty Fawn. It's one of my fondest computer memories. It felt like a friend.
Yggdrasil LGX, back in ‘93.
Damn, you got in on like the ground floor haha
It was quite the interesting thing to run back then — it was all very “Wild West” of software, and a LOT of stuff didn’t work well.
It wasn’t my daily driver; it really wasn’t ready for most workloads back then. But it was nearly free, and we shared around the CD-ROM amongst hacker friends interested in giving it a try.
I attempted to install RedHat 5 in the late 90s, but I had no idea what I was doing since I was like 12 or 13 and we had just gotten our first computer. I never got around to actually using Linux until a few years later with Ubuntu 5.04
You can learn a ton installing your own OS, even if you don’t get things working in the end. Especially back in the 90’s when things weren’t quite as plug-and-play and hardware auto-detection was immature. So even if your RedHat experiment failed, good on you for attempting it anyway!
Red hat on a disc from a for dummies book at the library.
Same here. Red Hat 5 from the Linux for Dummies book.
Ubuntu
Slackware 3.5 because my friend thought it'd be funny and didn't tell me fuck all about distros.
Helped me learn a lot though.
Could you hand me the X floppy?
Ubuntu Server 14.04. Years later I tried Arch+Win10 dual boot, but during a forced update, Windows ate the boot partition and then unalived itself. That's when I nuked the SSD and hard-switched to Manjaro (first daily driver, never had Windows since), later Endeavour, and most recently, Arch. If/when Arch breaks, I'll most likely hop to Nix.
SteamOS, just seeing how friendly and similar-to-windows KDE looked (and proton running all the games I cared about) gave me all the confidence I needed to install fedora and later nobara on my desktop
Ubuntu 8.10
I don't like Ubuntu anymore but I loved it then
AT&T SVR4
Oh, Linux. Slackware 1.2, but I had already used SunOS, Solaris, Ultrix, BSD, A/UX, and Unixware
Damn, you old 😂
Get of my lawn!
What is the difference between SunOS and Solaris?
Solaris uname identifies as SunOS. iirc
In vague, hand waving terms, SunOS was based on BSD, while Solaris was a shift to more of a System V flavor of Unix. And they changed the version numbering. Lots more details, but that's the gist.
Open suse and mandrake
Debian
Pop! OS
POS Ubuntu giving me repo cancer every other week making me think Linux for desktop was not ready.
Then I tried Debian (and XFCE) and realized Ubuntu was just on some drugs and eventually landed on Fedora after demoing some distros.
Ubuntu really was a big step forward for ease of setup back when it first came out, but other distros have since caught up. I think the ultimate success of an open source project is when they make themselves obsolete because they had such a big impact on the eco system at large. I think Ubuntu achieved their main goal, but once they did that they ended up adding a bunch of bloat to distinguish themselves as the intro user option.
Ubuntu back in the day before enshitification.
Got in just after Dapper, those days fooling around with compiz were the best. Went distrohopping when Unity happened.
I was one if those newbies who went with Arch as their first distro, but I found my home with Fedora. It's not the most up-to-date or polished distro, but it's by far the best all-rounder.
I started with PopOS but it went so smooth that after like a week I decided I needed something a bit more exciting and installed Arch. Except I accidentally partitioned the wrong drive in fdisk (my Windows drive).
happy little accident
Debian in the nineties :) Watched the towers fall on slashdot...
Now on bazzite, it's also glorious.
Show me your #debian scars.
+1
I fondly remember having the bootloader on a floppy to dual boot my own machine due to some limitation about where Linux lived on my hard disk, but honestly it was probably more of a knowledge limitation at the time!
First shell was on a Debian 1.x machine in my friend’s living room since they had broadband.
Caldera Open Linux 2.(?) back around 98/99, for long enough to download Slackware and Win98SE.
Linux Mint, until I made a mistake during a version upgrade and aptitude had a memory leak while trying to escape dependency hell and roll every package back. Then I replaced it with arch and am happy to be on a rolling release distro.
Guys this is off topic but I'm using Ubuntu server for a jellyfin/coding server and getting headaches trying to do things cli only.. for example connecting openvpn.
My question is how much shame is there using a distro with a gui for a server
A GUI isn't preferable on a server mostly for one reason: Security. A lower number of packages and a smaller codebase means a lower number of things to exploit. And since WM/DE codebases are rather large and they have a lot of dependencies with them, it's really not recommended.
I will persevere then, at least it's improving my Linux skills!
I feel this comment
You're dead to us
No shame, if you would use GUI on a different OS then you would use a GUI on Linux
If you would use CLI on a different OS then you would use CLI on Linux
You could try a web UI like Webmin. If it's a public-facing system like a VPS, the once you get the VPN working, configure Webmin to only listen on the VPN IP so that it's not exposed publicly.
By the way, I'd recommend Wireguard or Tailscale over OpenVPN. Tailscale uses Wireguard but makes it a lot easier to configure. One of the major advantages is that Wireguard/Tailscale are peer-to-peer models that don't use a central server like OpenVPN does. Wireguard doesn't have servers, only peers.
Basically, if you have two devices on the VPN that want to communicate with each other (eg say you're at a coffee shop and want to connect to your laptop from your phone), they can communicate directly rather than having to go through a server that's potentially located somewhere else.
To be honest the problem is I'm trying to connect to the VPN provider I have with openvpn client. Im with windscribe, I get as far as importing the profile, attempting to start the service, entering the username and password for the VPN but the thing just won't start.
Oh I see... I thought you wanted to set up your own VPN, as that's the usual use case for a VPN (e.g. connecting to a home server while not at home).
Looks like Windscribe have a Wireguard config generator so you could try that. https://windscribe.com/getconfig/wireguard. I don't have an account so I can't try it, but it may just generate a regular Wireguard config you can use with Wireguard directly, without having to use their app.
I got wireguard to connect! Thank you
The problem is now all my port forwards stopped working for accessing services via my external IP so I guess there is some kind of firewall going on via wireguard.
Pop!_OS... About 5 months ago. first time user just hard switched on my main.
But now 3 PCs are running it in the house.
Pop got me into Linux in July 2021 (i switched the same time as the steamdeck was announced) and I ran Pop for a good two and a half years. Great distro.
Now I'm on EndeavourOS, but it was Pop that helped me make the transition.
Ubuntu, then arch.
Debian
Some old ass Fedora Core distro.
mandrake, in 2004
CentOS But now it seems that it has withdrawn from the stage of history.
Hey, another CentOS guy! I ran my home phone on that with Asterisk for years, on a dual pentium machine that was already ancient.
When I rebuilt it years later as a VM I went to Ubuntu LTS, but CentOS was my first! It’s been so long I don’t even remember what, as a newbie, drove me to choose that one.
its been a long time
i think around 2013 i started occasionally tinkering with ubuntu,
i then quickly started distrohopping
(mint, debian, kubuntu, antergos and probably more)
in 2017 i started seriously using antergos (i3wm) on my work pc
i was still only occasionally tinkering at home,
untill 2022, when i learned about proton,
and fully migrated my private computer from win 10 to fedora(kde)
SuSE linux 4.2 about 1994-6 ish? Fond memories of having to roll my own modelines to get crt monitors working. Used the various versions until the sell out to Novell and the controversy with Microsoft. Then a really big gap with some macs and now I’ve just started using Mint on a mini itx machine I’ve put together just for that use.
Puppy Linux on an old Celeron @ 333MHz, with 160MB of RAM and 4GB of disk space.
I was amazed at the speed compared to Windows XP and even 98SE. It weighed about 100MB but had quite a few applications like mtpaint, Inkscape, Abiword, some spreadsheet program (I don't remember which was it, don't think it was GNUmeric), mplayer, some lightweight browser (I think it was Midori), even XChat.
The only (and BIG) problem is that you basically ran everything as root.
Some time later I bought a more powerful PC (Intel something dual core @ 3GHz, 4GB RAM and 500GB disk), and used the pre installed Windows 7 for some time before installing Ubuntu (I think 12.04) and I've been using it since.
Archlinux if you don't count the time when I was five. I install Ubuntu then a series of packages to make it "look and feel" like Mac os. After that I was disappointed with how janky it was as a Mac clone and switching back to windows.
I was crazy about macs when I was a kid. When I finally got one, I enjoyed the polish but ultimately found it limiting. After 15 years; about six years on macos, seven on Windows. I played with archlinux in an emulator for a few months before I nuked my system and never went back, thanks wine/DXVK!
Ubuntu. Back when win 10 was announced and all the bullshit started.
But unity was definitely not my thing, and I tried a handful of other distros on my dad's old computer. I figured if I could get a decent functionality on that, I'd be able to comfortably use whatever I settled on for a decent box.
Mint with cinnamon is where I settled. Cinnamon or plasma are perfect for my wants, and mint being debian related makes software damn easy to get going fast. What's not to like about that? I tried it with dual boot on my gaming box at the time, and then when I set up a newer box, I went straight mint. Now, the old one is my air gapped media machine running win7 because fuck life without musicbee.
Everything else is on mint except my kid's gaming laptop (which is an oxymoron imo, but whatever) because they're unwilling to try anything else, and my dad's current but ancient box running 11 and being nearly useless because of that. But he's damn near 80, so he can do whatever he wants short of shitting on the dinner table.
I have been searching soo long to get musicbee working on Linux and I think some ppl may have had a bit of luck with wine shinnanigans but other then that I can't see it happening :(
have you looked into using any alternative Linux native mp3 players? I used musicbee for a bit when I was on windows but I didnt find anything too unique about it.
Yeah, I had hoped with proton and whatnot, it would be a solved thing. Hell, it may be, but I'm fine using what I've got until it dies, so I only check about once a year.
First time I mucked with Linux I don’t think there were any formal distros yet. Had to rawrite the kernel to my full height 5.25” 100mb hard drive
Fedora
Then Arch
And finally NixOS
How is NixOS going? I am also an Arch convert, but the issue with Gentoo is that it feels like a clusterfuck after days spent on configuration that is not easy to replicate. I mean it works but I might not want to go through it next time.
I really like centralised configuration, stability and development environments of Nix
After overcoming initial learning curve and configuring NixOS and Home Manager, I rarely change anything. It just works™
And if I ever wanted clean installation or if I moved to another machine, I would just copy config from
/etc/nixos/and it should work the same.Raspbian (Buster) for my first; Kubuntu for my longest, and still happily enjoying it!
Call me a normie if you must, I need shit to work and I like it lookin' pretty.
Knoppix, followed by Mandrake, Ubuntu, etc.
Linux Mint was the only one that I installed and used unironically followed by Kubuntu.
I'm a simpleton, I just want my OS to work.
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS
Arch
Day 1 was some awesome crazy dude on IRC teaching me how to compile the kernel from source, what options to choose, and then installing Slackware.
knoppix, then slax, then slackware, then.... Ubuntu 4.10
I think Puppy or Damn Small Linux, maybe knoppix, i was on dial up at the time. Then I found that I could request a free Ubuntu install disk and the speed and cleanliness and compiz effects blew my mind. 04 or 06, can't remember which. From there I think it was xubuntu, mint, arch, arch nvme died and I needed an os immediately so manjaro, got sick of manjaro and garuda sounded neat so i tried it and that's where I am now on my main. Made a mess toying with wayland and am ready to reinstall, probably back to arch or try out nixos
edit: reading through all these comments is bringing back so many memories of other distros I played with back then.
Those cds were a godsend for broke kids on dial up back then.
Ubuntu Breezy (5.10)
Kubuntu 8.04 was my first, with the KDE 4 demo, it was pretty as fuck compared to Windows XP that came with that PC
SLS (Soft Landing System) then Slackware. 30+ years and still enjoying the Linux ride...
I started with Ubuntu, but since I was a kid at the time, wifi not working scared me away as I only ever knew of "everything works out of the box". After 2 years, I took a shot at linux again and I gotta say that it was mint that helped me build enough confidence in fixing any issues myself and to try other harder distros like arch. Now after all the exploring/distro hopping, I have settled down on opensuse as a daily driver, but mint will always be one of my favorites, and will always recommend it to any newbie.
Elementary OS Freya. I love a good GUI
Open Suse in the mid 2000s.
Knoppix
Ubuntu
Epic trolled by my friend, my first was Gentoo
Redhat 5.2 in 1998. I think I bought a box set from CompUSA.
SuSe Linux in the early 2000s. Came on a couple of CD-ROMs. We used it to run JBoss servers at work, alongside various Unix flavours. But my first experience with Unix was in the late eighties at university. Been using Mint as my daily driver for about two years now and I'm never going back.
For me, it was Mandrake, I think it was back around 2000. I played so much Tux Racer on that machine. However, after they switched the branding to Mandriva, the OS started to run pretty poorly for me around that time. I stayed away from Linux entirely until around 10 years ago when I friend introduced me to Mint. It's been my main ever since, though I've played with others since then, like OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, and most recently, Debian and EndeavourOS.
Mandrake. After that it gets hazy, but Mandrake was first.
I think I went Mint - MX Linux - Opensuse tumbleweed which is where I have stayed for the last year and loving it
Kubuntu
Some form of Novell-era Suse Linux when I was in college… 20 years ago. I didn’t get it back then. Mint is my daily driver today.
Manjaro GNOME Edition,
But am now on NixOS 😸❄️🐈✨
My first was Suse Enterpise Linux. Bought from Best Buy in the late 90s.
Suse
Mint was my first main. Before that there were some projects on raspbian.
Ubuntu, in 2006.
Pardus in 2007
Slackware back in '97.
Debian with kde, because it looked a bit like Windows.
Then slackware because it was supposedly a "simple" Linux distro. Apparently simple doesn't mean simple to use for a newbie...
Kubuntu 5.10 that breezy badger release was the best
Xubuntu just because it was the first one I found when looking for something that worked with a really old computer I had
First Debian, then Ubuntu because people said it was better, then back to Debian because it wasn't (snaps really suck and break things), then to Pop OS (bc new laptop preinstalled with it). I also got a SteamDeck semi-recently if that counts (still use the Pop OS laptop).
The year was 2002, and the distro was Caldera Open Linux 2.2
edit to add: Currently running KDE Neon. KDE 6 is pretty great so far.
My first distro was Xubuntu. It was 2014-15. I was still in high school. My pc was getting old, and I read online that Linux can make your pc run faster. Since it wasn't my gaming machine, I decided to give it a try. I also read online that Xubuntu is among the lightest of distros, so decided to install that. It really was a night and day difference in performance.
I've switched distros a few times (Xubuntu -> Ubuntu Gnome -> Manjaro KDE -> EndeavourOS KDE, also run AlmaLinux on a few headless server machines) since then, but never went back to Windows ever again.
I went from Ubuntu to Xubuntu one Ubuntu started adding all their bloaty window UI. I stuck with it for a long time but recently it started acting up on me so I switched to Linux mint xfce since it's the closest experience and feels a bit more stable. I figure if it ain't broke...
Conectiva Linux. Don’t remember the version, bought a CD together with a manual a news stand.
Tried MythTV for a HTPC and had some issue with a log file filling up the the whole drive. Didn't have the skill yet to fix the issue. Does messing around with the terminal in OS X count? It certainly made me more comfortable for the next time tried. I think the next major attempt was another HTPC, but this time, I just used Ubuntu + XBMC and setup it up to also be a headless torrent box. Using OS X as my main desktop still made things easier then it would have been going from Windows to Linux as the file naming and system directories were compatible.
I've been using Mint as my laptop OS for a while now and just recently switched from Mac to Mint on my desktop machine. I made an effort to never get trapped in property file types or an "eco system", so all the apps I was using were available in Linux already and the Majove Hackintosh was becoming less and less viable.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
RedHat back when it was just RedHat. No RHEL. No Fedora. Late 90s.
Ubuntu -> Xubuntu -> Linux Mint XFCE
Ubuntu -> Linux Mint -> Pop!_OS -> MX linux -> EndeavourOS
Knoppix I think
I tried Puppy with a persistent live USB first, then I used Ubuntu through WUBI for a while until it borked my MBR.
Slackware. Horrible experience.
Then Ubuntu.
Now Debian.
SimplyMepis (RIP)
FreeBSD 3.3
My first distro was Ubuntu 8.04, but my first experience with Linux was Damn Small Linux.
Funny enough, Damn Small Linux just had an update after all these years.
Ubuntu -> Mandriva -> Zorin -> Ubuntu -> Debian
I had the amazing luck of being introduced to linux at such a young age that i don't remember the distro. I just remember the penguin.
But the first time I try linux for myself it was mint, of course.
it was mine too, in 2020... bring me memories <3
Slackware, either the first or the second release IIRC.
Linux Mit, im still loving cinnamon
Slackware 4. Nothing like having to compile your kernel depending on the hardware you hand-selected for compatibility. Then entering your monitor specs in the config files by hand to get WindowMaker to run correctly.
I was thinking of this. Searching for the monitor manuals to fix the wonder than it should desktop. I wanted more resolution but it just made the desktop wider and higher than the monitor with the same resolution so it scrolled ahahaha! It was red hat ~5 (I think) in my case!
First server was Debian in 2002 or so. First desktop was the first version of Ubuntu (4.10). Back then, they'd send you a free CD upon request, anywhere in the world. Dial-up was still pretty common in Australia at the time, so not having to download it was very useful. That was one of the things that really drove adoption of Ubuntu.
I believe it was Ubuntu, likely something like 8.04, but only in a VM. Then a few years later I tried Fedora, DamnSmallLinux, and maybe one or two others. I didn't install Linux on actual hardware until 2017 when I installed Ubuntu 16.04 and never looked back, though I tried it from a bootable USB a few times years before that. Currently on Ubuntu 22.04 on my desktop, my servers all run Ubuntu or Proxmox (Debian).
Using on a computer, Debian back in 2011. On my own machine I first went with an Ubuntu dual boot, then later switched to Linux Mint and haven't switched to anything else since. I just love how Mint was able to give new life to the same old trooper laptop I had since 2013.
CorelLinux
Pretty sure Linux Mint back in 2009-2010 that my brother forced all of our family PC's to use. Now over 14 years later I have made it back to Linux Mint and oh how I've missed it.
Mandrake 8.2
I have fond memories of it, as it weaned me off Windows.
Edit: Actually, Knoppix was my first foray into Linux, but Mandrake was the first Linux distro that I actually installed.
Seems appropriate that he’s about to snap her neck.
After not realizing there were updates available for over three years, you notice a little exclamation point in the corner and apply all of em.
Ubuntu, specifically the netbook edition.
That little guy struggled with Windows 7 Starter, but it got some pep in it's step when Linux was installed!
Pop OS. I honestly feel like it was a great transitional OS for me as a lifelong Windows user. Kind of like riding a bike with training wheels.
Mandrake, I wanna say ~1998 or so. But tbh, I only recently finally took the plunge and wiped all traces of M$ off my system. I've tried Linux distris over the years and always just couldn't make them work for me for one reason or another. Red hat, Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Pop_OS, Manjaro, Arco, Endeavor. Nothing really worked out for me and something inevitably broke that genuinely wasn't my fault. Now, I have settled on pure Arch with KDE and for some reason, it's been stable and been used daily for months now and I can't think of one thing that could ever make me go back, or anywhere else for that matter.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
Biolinux so ubuntu based... Now still on ubunut but considering moving to debian.
Ubuntu. Couldn't use Unity, so then installed Mint with Cinnamon.
I am an old timer. I started with BSD before there was even a Linux. NetBSD on an Amiga 3000 before the AT&T law suite against NetBSD, then heared about Linux which was twice as clean as NetBSD and without legal issues - Later NetBSD removed all legal issues nonetheless.
First Linux was a Watch-Tower Distribution, basically a big RAM-Disk with a rudimentary Linux system which you copied to HD. No package manager, nothing. tar, make was the way to do installations. Shortly after Slackware and SuSE which basically was the same back then. Then a lot of SuSE then Debian, then Ubuntu. Don't care much about the distribution nowadays as long as it is DEB-based.
But now something to scare all of you: Today my most used POSIX environment is... Cygwin. Well, I got a Windows-Notebook for development and a VM is really clunky in comparison to a fully integrated POSIX-layer like Cygwin. For developing Stuff it actually matters very little if you use BSD, Linux, Cygwin or even Solaris.
I bounced around a few different distros about twenty years ago. OpenSuse, Mint, and Ubuntu. I settled on Ubuntu (6.0X I think) because the others had a lot of trouble with hardware in my Korean laptop at the time. Ubuntu was the only one that had the track pad working right away, and also the only one I managed to get Korean keyboard input working in. I never did get the webcam working in any of them. I used Ubuntu in some form or another up until a few months ago when I switched to Mint. Largely because of Lemmy.
Actual first was I think knopix or whatever it was called. My friend had a bootable floppy and we booted it on a school computer.
First real daily use was Ubuntu somewhere around 2006.
Debian, Manjaro, Fedora, Endeavour, OpenSuSE Tumbleweed.
SuSE Linux 6.0 I believe. Its been a while and I was very young then...
Elementary OS 6 Years ago
Debian Lenny in 1999.
Ubuntu 6.04. It was really simple to get it up and running even back then.
Opensuse without knowing that it was Linux 20 years ago. Knowing was 3 years later with Mandrake.
Ubuntu, then Mint, now Arch, but I'm too inexperienced for it and want to try Kubuntu for native KDE with Plasma desktop.
Careful because kubuntu still silently installs snaps and I switched off it after having to do the whole ppa thing just to install Firefox correctly
Debian -> Zorin -> Fedora -> Nobara
Kind of just been going down the convenience route.
why the fedora route
From my very casual view, it's just Debian but, the packages are up to date and the package manager doesn't spam the terminal. Also just been easier to use so far. Learned about Nobara not long after and that was finally enough to ditch windows.
Fedora Core 2 :)
Fedora,
I will never repeat that mistake again, it was more like Dementor.
Explain
it's simple,
on each linux upgrade it broke(on boot after screen would show yellow, red, orange, ... squares) so I had to clean reinstall, gave up after maybe fourth upgrade
It sucked all the interest
I eventually switched to fedora after using linux for a while and I love it
Ubuntu
Ubuntu, opensuse, or freebsd. I can't remember what I installed first, since it was around 2006-2007. There was a piece about Linux in some PC magazine and I had to check it out.
Fedora Core 6 is when I made the full switch.
DLD with some 2.0 kernel.
Ubuntu on an orangepi 5 when it released, now Linux Mint dual-booted to windows (haven't booted into windows for ages now) on my main rig. I'll figure out making VR work at some point I hope, it's all I really use windows for now.
Slackware, probably in 1997. My cousin lent me his copy, had like 100 floppies for the install.
@Waffelson First effort was Corel Linux back in 1999. The experience was so bad that I didn't try linux again until 2008, and it finally stuck 6 years ago. Now i'm all in.
Fedora Core, I don't remember exactly which version it was.
Xandros on an eeePC 901
open suse (or was it mandrake? idk) around 2006. I remember trying it, and thinking "wow. This is trash" and then sticking with windows for 10 more years until giving ubuntu a try (and sticking to it). I tried other non-debian linuxes since then, but they all gave me that "wow, trash"-kind of feeling
Ubuntu because I didn't know anything about it and wanted to see if I could use it to fix my win10 account on my old laptop.
the family computer running ubuntu from 2010 on. I used it mainly for Web browsing and creating presentations for School. I was able to run League of Legends (that was in 2014 i think) through wine but i think it crashed in about 50% of Games during the loading screen :D. Linux gaming has truly come far since then (and now LoL doesn't run on Linux at all because of Riots Rootkit)
Slackware, circa 1995. Kernel 1.2.8
My first Linux experience was trying to install Yellow Dog Linux on my Power Mac G4 in college
i honestly didn't do too much linux growing up; i was more involved with radio shack and trsdos and then win 3.1 (since we only had the one family computer; tandy sensation, whoo). then onto windows 2000. it was probably around the early to mid 2000s when i experimented with fedora with one of my coworkers; that was probably the first time i actually did a lot beyond basic commands ssh'ing into a web server on a web host.
Xubuntu in a vm on win10, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, OpenSuse Tumbleweed with Kde, and now Nix.
I used Fedora the longest and OpenSuse the shortest as Kde reminded me so much of horrible windows. I've also tried a lot of other distros in a vm or live usb, Linux Mint, Mubuntu, Void linux, the one without any Gnu component(Artix?) and some other ones. I also have ISOs of some other esoteric Oses on my computer, DebianHurd, Redox, can't even remember rn but I'm yet to try them out.
I'm mentally restraining myself from distrohopping to Guix and or FreeBSD as I doubt I'd have the same workflow I have now on NixOS. To have distrohopped this much in the space of 18 months is why I'm a failed Javascript programmer.
Red Hat 6 in college.
Mandrake Linux 7 at home.
In 2000
Why do I not see any pop os comments... My first was (and is) pop os
Debian was first Linux, Sun was first UNIX.
Technically the first distro i used was Lubuntu 10.04, but it was only a live cd because i was 13 by then and i was terrified that i installed linux and my father got angry at me if i left any evidence. The first one i used as a full SO to use as i like, Raspbian, so debian (wheezy, i believe).
Ubuntu 12 or 14 on a hdd
Fedora 7
fedora 💀
*ubuntu (Xubuntu -> Ubuntu 10.04 -> Kubuntu 12.04) -> Debian 8 (KDE). Debian since then.
Nobara, yea I switched less than a year ago
Suse Linux before it was opensuse
I found a distro that would install on the windows file system and boot. Apparently it was slackware based didn't have a concept in my head of package managers couldn't figure out how to install gaim (now pidgin) gave up. Didn't go back for another 4 years doing C in college. Didn't look back from there.
I saw some Red Hat first around 2000, then tried Mandrake on my machine around 2005.
Ubuntu in 2010 (with compiz' burning screen of course!). Got a new laptop a the time with decent to good specs and was shocked how bad it performed with the stock Win7 and bloated with bloatware (it was a Sony).
Ubuntu
Mint -> Kubuntu -> EndeavourOS -> Arch (btw)
Ubuntu studio 🤣🤣🤣
Suse linux. I didnt know what partitioning was, so I partitioned my hard drive 6 times and messed up my bootloader. I didn't know what that was too, so I had to figure out how to do all this....with a Suse linux disk from the library.
Later on, I discovered Wesnoth and that was an awesome game. I also played around with Ubuntu 6+, Slackware, DSL, and a host of others. Its been a fun ride. Nowdays, I like PopOS and Manjaro (steamdeck). Most anything debian.
rocky linux 8 on a vm (rocky is a tablet os to me)
Ubuntu 5.04 back in like 2004-2005. Although I did pick up RedHat 5 back in the late 90s but never managed to get it installed... Because I was like 11 or 12 lol
Zorin :D
My first distro was ubuntu 11.04 if I remember correctly.
ChromeOS (more it's Debian Container)
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
Distrohopping every view Weeks
KDE Neon
NixOS
Opensuse ca. 18 to 16 years ago
Ubuntu 8.10. My XP install had gotten corrupted and I didn’t own a disc copy of Windows. One of the tech support ladies at my school gave me a copy. Once I discovered the desktop cube and GTK themes I was hooked.
MkLinux around 1997, but mostly NetBSD back then.
RHEL desktop 4 when it was still free and I was in middle school
I'm not sure what the first distro I installed was but I used to have a Linux VM running 24/7 on my Windows machine back in '06. I ran folding@home on my athlon 64 and for some reason the client at the time ran faster in a Linux VM on windows than it did in native windows. Pretty sure I was running Ubuntu but I can't be certain.
Redhat 5.2 on cd. I learned a lot about compiling kernels as it didn’t support scsi emulation which was required for an ide cd burner. I think I ended up on Mandrake for a while before bouncing around including LFS. Then gentoo for many many years. And I’ve come full circle and been back on fedora for about 10 years now.
RedHat 5.2 in 1998. The manual that came with the box set was amazing.
Same here.
Something that ran from loadlin, I can't remember. Slackware, probably.
I think my first was Red Hat but I'm not sure. Then I gave Gentoo a go shortly after.
Ubuntu 10.04.
::: spoiler A walk down memory lane
I received a free CD of 10.04 with a computer magazine that I purchased every time I travelled.
The CD was neglected for the better part of that year, until I tried it out of curiosity. I remember setting up a dual boot configuration around two weeks in. I removed Windows around eve of 2011 and never looked back.
Since then I distro hopped every six months but kept coming back to Linux Mint as it nailed the balance between stability and UX, especially for the home machine that would be used by people from diverse age groups.
In those years, GNOME’s UX regressed so terribly with its 3.0 release, that Canonical’s Unity and Mint’s Cinnamon & MATE popped up as a response. One of those didn’t make it by the end of that decade. In those same years, Canonical started alienating its users with questionable decisions. Fedora and Manjaro became stable enough to be recommended for actual daily use. The 2010s was a wild ride.
Though by the start of 2020s, I entered Apple’s walled gardens as I no longer had time to troubleshoot my devices and tools, and expected those to work reliably.
I still use Linux on the home machine as well as the homelab. But I patiently wait for the day Linux is stable for daily use on phones. :-)
:::
Same.
Think it was pop OS because "gaming" but never really had Linux as main os on my pc because gaming and modding and few other things that are just more complicated compared to what I'm used to. Being told to just use arch also does not help when I don't want to use terminal. And also don't know if you can run vr on Linux without problems. Current have installed mint on second drive(HDD) will start looking more into Linux when windows 10 stops getting support. But I'm a noob so what do I know.
My first linux distro was i dunno how many years ago. Ubuntu I gave a old dell inspirion with an althlon to one of our church members at the time, no idea what happened to that laptop.
Currently I'm using linux mint due to recommendations for being easy, just recently switched from windows 11 actually.
Linux Mint 20 (MATE).
Almost Arch or Gentoo due to trolls.
I'd also like to mention that was when I got my first computer and I first had to figure out what's an OS.
I got it used, and it already had
Windowsfree DVD burner pre-installed. I didn't have any flash drive, why would I anyway? I just managed to dig out one single DVD-RW.Ubuntu back in 09 or so.
I used Ubuntu, during the GNOME 2 + Compiz days. God I wish for those days to have a comeback. I've kept a bit of an eye on Wayfire for that reason.
First one I tried was suse. Had it installed at an installfest (ah those heady days). But when I got it home it wouldn't work with my monitor.
Second I bought Mandrake, but couldn't get that to work either because I had lost my monitor manual and couldn't give it the vsync value for it.
First one I got to work was called LibraNet. That worked great for a couple of years until they stopped supporting it because it was run by a father and son team and the father passed away.
So then I chose suse again, hoping a bigger org wouldn't suffer the same problem. But then later there was some controversy I can't remember anymore (was it with microsoft?), so I switched to Kubuntu which I have been using forever, but am going to switch to opensuse very soon for various reasons.
Fun trivia: used KDE on every one of them.
ubuntu, manjaro was my first real foray into linux. I hopped to arch about a week later.
It's been like 5 years now. Please help.
I attempted to boot Mandrake/Mandrivia on an old laptop once and failed, then I mucked around in Slackware's live CD for an afternoon. The first thing I actually installed and used daily was Ubuntu 10.04.
First must've been Caldera Linux in 1996 or 1997. Absolutely wild to compare with contemporaries at the time.
Started with Raspbian when I first got my Pi, and have mostly used KUbuntu or Debian since.
Tried Redhat in the late 90s, but I really started using Linux with Mandrake, a few years later.
Debian 4 lyf
Mine was lubuntu that I booted off USB on school computers
tailsOS. made me love GNOME, even though I use i3 now.
is he forcing her to look at the screen?
No, she imagines how an actor whom she asked to say vulgar words on a dictaphone strokes her head, in reality she strokes her head with her hand, which the actor was holding
I'm not sure if Yggdrasil or Slackware, which we tried out at the old university computers. But quickly Debian became so much more flexible.
Red Hat 5.1 CD from a magazine. Ended up at fedora and couldn't be happier.
OpenSUSE back in the early 2000s. Since my parents got a new PC and the old one from '99 wasnt able to run Windows XP properly
Ubuntu. Still going strong 5 years later❤️.
KDE Neon, since it was just basic Debian it was pretty good
slackware around 1996. the install was about thirteen floppies.
Yeah, same, but I think I didn't really start using it as a daily driver until Redhat. I used Amiga for a while, then NeXTSTEP had a student discount that put it in my price range, and it was simply years ahead of everything else, and that kept me busy until Redhat made Linux less than a chore.
Fedora Core 4...? I have yet to fully take the plunge but we'll get there.
Slackware circa 1996
Slackware 1.1, downloaded from s BBS as a large pile of floppy disk images, in late 1993.
There's dozens of us! Actually I couldn't scrounge together enough floppies, but eventually somehow came across a CD-ROM, probably from someone at school... And I was a bit later, more like '96 maybe...
I got the CD a little later, it's still in the basement somewhere. All of it ran on a 386 in an XT fold open casse, with a monochrome graphics card and an amber CRT display.
If you needed more grognard nostalgia.
Edubuntu, IT@School
The first computer I had personally ran ubuntu, but counting other computers before that it could have been either ubuntu or centos that was first, I don't remember which
Several floppies of Slackware.
manjaro
Some 10+ year old Ubuntu version probably. Before Unity so 10.04 maybe. Can't say
I fucking hate anime
👍
Believe it or not, I don't think this is technically from an anime. One of the characters is (the short one in front), but the picture itself appears to be from DeviantArt. The other character, as far as I can tell, is an OC. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong.) Even the DeviantArt post just calls him "Anime Boy".
The short character in front appears to be a character named Tomoko Kuroki, the main character in the show "No Matter How I Look At It, It's You Guys Fault I'm Not Popular!" (It's apparently usually referred to by a shortening of it's Japanese title: "WataMote".)
I'm a little surprised I learned all this just from a reverse image search.
DevianArt even worse
Noted!