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?
Slackware 1.2, because it came on a CD in the back of a fat paperback manual I got at Barnes and Noble. It was only later that I learned what a distro is.
Currently on Fedora with a Frankenstein desktop of my own concoction.
I think it was SLS. I know it took a pile of floppies. At some point I made a tape to make it easier to install. Why I needed to install that often eludes my aging memory but those experiences still pay to this day.
<span style="color:#323232;">Q: How do I upgrade SLS
</span><span style="color:#323232;">A: If from .96, you don't. You must re-install from scratch. Otherwise,
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> read the ChangeLog file and download just the needed files manually.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Q: Can I install a new version of SLS over an old one?
</span><span style="color:#323232;">A: Best not to. Save what you want somewhere and use mk[*]fs. SLS may
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> be best for base installs. Updates you can often get anywere on the net.
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> That is, unless you follow the upgrades to SLS religously.
</span>
To this day I still don’t upgrade OSes in general and I even evangelize “rip and replace” professionally so loudly that it’s now enforced via policy at my workplace. This must be where my ethos for this practice originated.
I had not suitably prepared. I was a Windows Vista power user who heard how I could crack some Wi-Fi and gave it a whirl.
My chips went into one basket and me, oh my, was the transition ever so uncomfortable. What was dual booting? Who knows. Long story short, I made a mess for myself. I went through a significantly steeper learning curve than most, though it introduced me to script kiddie tools, programming, and eventually exploits.
Now a decade or so later, I’ve settled away from Arch to Debian. Though I miss the bleeding edge, my update frequency has lost much of it’s zealous edge.
Arch was the only thing I could get working on my E200AH when I started. It’s a weird SoC x86_64, with some non-free drivers. Now I can run anything, but the default with arch was figuring out what to do… Debian installer didn’t have a mouse and the keyboard didn’t work right and I just got stuck. Arch installer dropped me into a TTY and made me figure it out
Ubuntu back when it was decent lol. I picked it because everyone said that was a beginner-friendly distro, and I had already used it anyway as my parents had an Ubuntu ASUS laptop when I was little (though atp I didn’t really remember much from using that laptop).
Mine was an obscure, short-lived distro called LibraNet. It was well done though, by just a father and son team. Unfortunately that was also why it was short lived, because the father passed away.
As for why I picked it, I didn’t really know much about how to choose a distro at the time, so I picked it based on the name, and its description of being easy to use and set up, which it was.
My first distro was Suse Linux 8.1. I had to buy the box as downloading was not an option with my dial-up connection back then. However, the first distro that I fell in love with was Fedora Core. The original one. I bought the book which had the DVD with the full installation. I was hooked. That was more than 20 years ago.
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