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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Arch, btw
It was the distro that my friend uses all the time, and I’ve had to use his laptop on occasion so I’m somewhat familiar with the distro, enough so that I’ve installed it on persistent USBs before and already chosen it as my next OS after Windows (I would switch now, but I rode Windows 7 till the end date, so I figured I’d ride out 10 until the final day this October)
Also! Gender fluid hello!! It made me so insanely happy to see that flag in the Linux terminal, I feel so seen!! It feels like trans girls hog all the Linux spotlight this side of the fediverse, I’m happy for them! But I still don’t feel like I have a proper community where I belong, especially since I stay off of all other mainstream social media >.<
So seeing another enby, another gender fluid especially, for the literal first time since I made my lemmy account just makes me so ecstatic!! We’re so rare x3
Anyways, thank u for existing and simply posting this, seeing another makes me feel seen and I can’t really express enough how unreasonably happy something so small just made me c:
Thank you! And I should sleep so good night also lol
Red Hat, back when that was a distro. It was a long time ago now and my toying with it didn’t last long; and began an obsession with hardware RAID…
genderfluid fetch spotted!!! also im not sure which was first but i use arch and openbsd ;3
Linux Mint. I made a dumb decision to install it right away thinking it’s just like Windows. Boy was i wrong. Took me years until I felt ready to switch to Linux.
I use Arch BTW
Welcome to Lemmy stranger.
Slackware back in the early 90s on a Compaq 386/SX20 💾
Go Slackware!
Honestly it still feels like home. Because I was kind of a moron and figured it would mean less to figure out, I registered darkstar.org (the default domain Slackware came set up with).
I few years later I actually emailed Patrick Volkerding about something and he mentioned it… I felt this strange mix of pride and shame ;-)
The Alien repo was a godsend
Well shit you got me beat I ran Slackware from 3.5 disks in the 90s on a 486dx2. I sent away for those disks to be mailed to me. I even did something crazy with that machine I had lots of ram so I sent them off to a company to combine them together. I want to say it 8 or 16 megabytes. Bit I can’t remember now.
That’s great, I didn’t even know that was a service you could get. I remember being really disappointed when I realized that a SIMM would not actually fit in one of my 386s ISA slots 😅
Slackware 3.1 late 1996. Great fuckin’ year that was.
Also Slackware!
But I skipped from my 286 to a Pentium 133 (then went a bit backwards to a 486 dx100, then ahead to some cyrix and AMD).
It was such a cool time for CPUs. Going up a generation was like getting a supercomputer. And Intel had those cartridge CPUs…
Such a wild time… I started building PCs for people (even my gym teacher), it was so fun - and yeah, such a huge jump every time!
Now I have the same build for nearly 15 years with upgrades along the way, and my servers are all decom’d t/m/m PCs.
Edit: Jump had a typo
I overlocked my Pentium 133 to 150.
I was such a badass.
I used Vector Linux 3.2, which was Slackware based, mostly because it was a small(ish) download on my friend’s Cable internet connection. Shortly after I moved to real Slackware. This was probably 2003/4
Floppy sets represent!
I somehow could not find the Mint install so I went with Ubuntu Mate. It was fine.
Mandrake! It was a fucking disaster! Fortunately, I came back later using Kubuntu and had a much better experience.
Ubuntu 6.06. It came on a CD with a PC magazine. I’ve used it to convince my parents to allow me to spend as much time as I want in front of the computer because “there are no games on Linux”.
WoW worked on it.
I think I tried to compile Gentoo about 20 years ago for some reason… Took many hours, and I don’t remember even getting it running. Later I tried dual booting Ubuntu, but ended up using Windows all the time since that’s where my games were. Started using Linux only (Xubuntu) some time around 2010.
Kali Linux. Because I was a kid who wanted to be a hackerman.
❤️ Ah yes, the hacker-man vibes!
After that I used Ubuntu with XFCE for 2 years, Now settled in Fedora with Gnome for like 4 years straight.
Watching something compiling is kinda like the reward for getting it to compile in the first place…
My monitor is visible to a public footpath and I honestly am waiting for the day that I get a knock on the door from the cops because Jo Public saw me do a system update
sudo pacman -Syu 💀
This, but backtrack 5 (the one just before kali). On a laptop that’d take several eternities to brutforce an md5 🤣
Red Hat, before the enterprise stuff, back in 1999. Installed from a CD found in a book from the library
I’ve got a Red Hat from '99! Found in grandpa’s garage.
Nice! The one I found looked like this. I remember picking it up because I thought the logo looked cool. I think it was 5.2 though
This was very similar to the box I had but in my case it was mostly white. And the manual was waaaay bigger. Like almost the size of a phone book. I bought mine in 1999 too. Installed from CD. I bought mine for $110 from a stationary shop (since I lived in a student flat and my flatmates would have probably murdered me if I’d downloaded it over dial up that also had a monthly download limit). Good times lol.
YES! That was the same distro that was my entry, it came along with the book Linux for dummies. However mine came on a single CD. Must have been the “lite” edition 😄
Oh, back in 1999s, very epic! ❤️
Same for me, it was Red Hat Linux 6.1 (Cartman). I got it from a CD on the front of a PC magazine.
Damn! Same here, red hat 99, but switched to Debian quite fast
My first was Ubuntu in the early 2000s, I think CDs were being distributed by the IT department in one of the faculties, then SUSE but Linux didn’t stick with me at the time. In 2018 I installed Manjaro which helped me make the switch to arch. I’ve also got Debian on a server and fedora on a laptop
Ubuntu, and the experience was crap lol.
Then I got to try Debian on a server and it was much nicer.
Then I saw Torvalds uses Fedora, and given that he also disliked Debian and Ubuntu for their lack of end user ease, I switched and have been happy ever since.
Seriously though, GNOME 40 really should not be the default DE. It made me think Linux UI was years behind Windows when it was actually the opposite with proven DEs like XFCE, KDE, and GNOME 3/2 etc.
am a simple noob who started with Mint, and remain on Mint on my main gaming machine.
i have fun distro-hopping on my other old, cheap laptops though
There’s something about simplicity that is underated.
Technically my first ditro was SuSE a loooong time ago but I didn’t stick with it. Then back when Ubuntu became he new hit thing I tried that, but again didn’t stick with it.
I have now loaded up Mint and that’s the one I’m running with. Mind you, all distros have come a long way since my prior Linux dealings but Mint is the one to make me permanently switch.
Mint is a favorite here too! It just works! ❤️
Real!
After installing and restoring Arch for the third time in 1.5 year I decided to go back to Mint. In the past 5.5 or so years, nothing needed to be reinstalled or restored; Mint’s more stable than Windows by now!
Mandrake
