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 had just started my university days and I had two young kids who wanted to watch cartoons but we couldn’t afford cable. I ended up scrounging parts from the garbage bins in and behind the computer lab to scrape together a workable desktop.
If I recall correctly it was 333 MHz. Originally installed Windows 98 SE on it. But media would stutter no matter what I did, even if all other processes were killed.
A monk friend of mine (my university was geographically attached to a Benedictine monastery) asked me if I had tried Linux as it should be easier on the system resources and still allow me to play most media.
I worked on Caldera Open Linux. It was a tough merge, Caldera taking over our shop, but the work was good and valuable and we derived a lot of pride from solving tricky issues. Working with the company Caldera bought (on DrDos Lawsuit money) remains, decades later, my best working experience ever.
It’s nice to see it was occasionally magical on the outside.
Whoa! thanks for sharing your experience. Your work was definitely appreciated. 25 years later, mainly due to that silly need to play pirated cartoons for the kiddos, and a CD rom I pulled out of the trash - I am a sysadmin who wears an architect title, and I have built some amazing systems. Maybe if Caldera hadn’t been what it was I wouldn’t have been interested enough to make it work, and to realize a love for unixlike systems. So yeah. Thanks :)
Got fed up of Windows Vista, so I decided to try Linux. I was just a kid messing around, so tried some distros but Ubuntu stuck because I found it noob friendly. I think I went for Ubuntu 6.06. I started to get interested in PC gaming, then I dual booted Ubuntu and Windows 7 since gaming was not really a thing on Linux then. I found that to be a hassle so when Windows 10 came out I stuck with it.
Then I jumped back to Linux when going back to do an IT degree in uni a couple of years back. Tried Ubuntu, but hated it. I tried Manjaro, but it broke my system. Then I discovered EndeavourOS and have stayed with that. Started to jump DE’s instead. Went from GNOME to Xfce and now I am going for Cinnamon. I have tried some distro jumping in VM. I really tried to get into NixOS, but it was just too much for me. I liked Mint though.
I wanted to try Ubuntu on a live disk back in highschool (~2012) but ended up wiping the drive on my laptop. Had to ask a friend who knew Linux for help so I could actually use it. That was eventually followed by debian and Manjaro. Later I tried arch on my desktop, got tired of that and switched back to windows for a few years. I’ve been running nixos for a while now and have been really enjoying it.
The first distro I used would be CentOS, followed closely by Gentoo. CentOS was installed on the computers in the computer lab in college, and Gentoo was on the computers in the library. I think I went to the computer lab first. I'm probably biased against those two now, since every time I was using them I was banging my head against the keyboard trying to get some programming assignment to work, or desperately finishing a paper before midnight. :P
The first I installed and used myself was Ubuntu, which I still use. I just bought a System76 laptop, though, and I'm debating if I'll just go with Pop OS or switch to Debian.
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