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 ordered a laptop (five years ago) that had Ubuntu/Gnome preinstalled, but soon replaced it with Debian/Mate, mainly because of what I read about it on Distrowatch. My new laptop (one year old) shipped bare metal and runs Fedora/Cinnamon.
Fedora 6 back in 2007-8 as a part of my CompTIA A+ training. It wasn’t required but my instructor wanted some of us more advanced students to experience a life outside of Windows.
I first installed mint on a pc, but only for homebridge. First distro I really used was openSuse tumbleweed and after that I shortly switched to Arch because I liked the way the AUR work (using yay) better, than the community repos of openSuse.
I still recommend openSuse TW to anyone that wants to try a rolling release distro. You don’t even need the Terminal in that distro.
My first ever Linux experience was with the crouton project on a Chromebook in school (Ubuntu 16.04). A buddy of mine figured it out and we all wanted to play Minecraft during class. Thing is, I ended up enjoying tinkering with the OS as much as I did playing Minecraft… so now I’m stuck trying to learn NixOS.
I started with trying distros in live mode out of general curiosity. My machine had a ton of data and didn’t support dualbooting so I didn’t want to install something. Then my Windows license broke and I decided that pirating is not great so I wanted to install a distro. I liked Manjaro the most(I know I know but hey back then I didn’t know about its issues) but couldn’t install it because of a wrong boot device mode (lol I was an absolute noob then). So I flashed KDE Neon and installed it after finally figuring out the BIOS/UEFI stuff (was too lazy to reflash Manjaro lol). It wasn’t much of a conscious choice. I just installed one of the KDE distros I liked pretty much the same after I couldn’t install Manjaro but that probably saved me a few hours of troubleshooting so that’s good. KDE was a requirement though. I did want a Windows-looking distro so my older family members could use it. After that I tried many distros. Now I’m on Cachy just because of the significantly smoother experience (optimization rules!). It’s unstable though so I don’t recommend it
My very first linux distro is Zorin OS since it is Windows like and heard it is more light weight. After using it for a while, it didn’t feel like more light weight to me so I switched back to Windows.
After some years later, I decided to ditch Windows completely and used Ubuntu 20.04 for about a year. When I broke Ubuntu after using about a year, I switched to Arch and still on Arch to this day.
The first distro I tried was Red Hat 5 back in the late 1990s but I never got a GUI working so I guess the first one I used properly would have been Mandrake iirc. These days it’s Tumbleweed.
Linux Mandrake in 1999. It was a bit rough and featured a very ugly KDE. I didn’t use KDE again until about 18 months ago, and it is now my desktop environment of choice.
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