What was the first ever distro you installed and used? For me, it was Mint as I seemed like the closest thing to Windows minus all the forced updates and chappy changes.
Currently on Fedora GNOME now but what about you? What made you choose your first distro diving into the world of Linux?
I think the first one I installed was Debian back in '97 when I was 12. I think my dad helped a bunch, but I can’t really remember stuff from back then very well.
My initial thought was that it was gentoo which I used as my principal OS for close to ten years. I don’t know how many times I reinstalled, but enough that I basically had it by memory. Taught me to keep my home dir on a separate partition.
These days I mostly live in windows because AutoCAD is a part of my professional life, but I dual boot popos on weekends. Unless kernel updates break my displaylink docking station…
my first time installing linux was ubuntu, because it was what i’d seen a friend using. i meant to install it to dual boot with windows, but instead ended up wiping everything from the family PC, which was very distressing, and my dad quickly reinstalled windows. this was back around '06 i think.
in '08, i first installed linux on my own system and actually got to use it. i’m not sure what i installed first, cause i did a fair bit of distrohopping, but i settled on ubuntu mate for a while.
Slackware in the late 90s. 3.x version. “If you want to know how Linux works, ask a Slackware user” used to be the mantra back in the day.
I’ve been using Kubuntu on my desktop machines for at least a decade now. So, I’ve completely lost track of some of the things going on, like docker, flatpak, and so on. Which is actually a good thing: Linux has gotten so good, I no longer need to know how to administer my Linux system. I can just use it.
I currently run Debian on my server and intend to switch my desktop to Debian as well. Haven’t gotten around to it…been busy. I also have to figure out how best to set up the nvme drive I have for it - GPT partition tables? Do I need a FAT32 partition? Etc.
I used to have to head into University to use the Sun Lab ( Sun Microsystems workstations ) to download all the floppy images. Took forever.
I would copy the X configuration from the Sun machines so that my 486 at home looked the same. For some reason, that made me feel like my PC was a “real” UNIX workstation.
Red Hat back in the 1990s. I had to buy it from a local stationary shop because being in a small, isolated country and the internet being in it's infancy, it was all I could find. Came with a manual bigger than a phone book and cost about the equivalent to these days $200.
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