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?

  • DFX4509B@lemmy.orgEnglish
    1·
    5 hours ago

    That I played with on an old Pentium II rig? The now-defunct Crunchbang (Bunsen Labs is that distro’s successor).

    That I actually used as a daily driver? Ubuntu 12.10.

    I’ve been daily-driving Linux for well over a decade at this point and have pretty much settled on Arch now after multiple distro-hops in that timespan.

  • qweertz (they/she)@programming.dev
    1·
    9 hours ago

    My first was Ubuntu 14.04. and then 16.04. at school 💀. as early as 2015 iirc

    Though Blackbox or Kali might be a contender too (one of the distros my father had installed for fun)

    I had rly cool CS teachers, which also administered our infrastructure

    then we used Linux Mint in the “Linux” club run by one of said teachers

    For personal use, my first one was Manjaro in 2018 (I switched to it with a Windows dual boot, I got rid of Windows entirely in 2020 I think?). Somewhere I switched to Endeavour OS, tried out OpenSuse Tumbleweed on my laptop and eventually settled on Fedora bc of the Grub fiasco Arch had. Am using it to this day.
    Though it’s in the form of Nobara on my desktop; I also plan on switching to Bluefin eventually

  • phantomwise@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    I actually wanted Arch but everyone was saying that you HAD to do a manual install first and I had been miserably failing at doing it in a WM for a few weeks. I had finally decided to try it directly on hardware so that I had no choice but to complete it if I wanted to use my laptop, and just as was about to burn the ISO on a USB stick the power went out and my hard drive died 😑 On a saturday evening, obviously…

    All I had was a Haiku USB I had made to check it out, and a Linux Mint USB a friend lent me that I hadn’t tried because I assumed I would hate it. So I used Haiku for about 30 minutes (let’s say it had a few bugs), and Mint for the rest of the weekend and did, in fact, absolutely hate it (Windows PTSD 😭 ).

    So until the computer store opened on Monday, I spend 48 hours browsing the web to find a better distro and when I got my new SSD I installed AntiX, because it was very light and likely to run well on my potato-grade laptop, it came without a DE and 7 different window managers to try (which seemed cool at the time, but I didn’t actually try any of them except the default one IceWM and after a few weeks I installed i3 😅 ) and also because YouTube had convinced me that systemd was the Antechrist (thanks YouTube 😑 ).

    After two months I decided to try Manjaro on my other laptop… it didn’t go well : incompatible dependencies preventing updates, Nvidia + Wayland making games not display correctly, and if I had to fix all that manually what’s the point I just might as well use regular Arch. So I gave up after 48 hours and decided to install Arch, and just as I booted from the Arch ISO the laptop died (fan malfunction) and I had to send it back 😑.

    After three months, the third laptop, bought with the refund from the second one, did actually allow me to install Arch without throwing a fit 🥳 using archinstall to preserve my mental health this time.

    Arch has been really great but I need to switch to a bigger SSD and I am probably going to try Nix because it seems really cool 🤩

  • sramder@lemmy.worldEnglish
    571·
    2 days ago

    Welcome to Lemmy stranger.

    Slackware back in the early 90s on a Compaq 386/SX20 💾

      • sramder@lemmy.worldEnglish
        111·
        2 days ago

        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 ;-)

    • jhdeval@lemmy.world
      10·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • sramder@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        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 😅

    • curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      6·
      2 days ago

      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).

      • sramder@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        It was such a cool time for CPUs. Going up a generation was like getting a supercomputer. And Intel had those cartridge CPUs…

        • curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          3·
          1 day ago

          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

    • guy_threepwood@lemmy.world
      3·
      1 day ago

      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

  • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    22 hours ago

    Ubuntu, installed on a 256 gb flash drive as an experiment back in 2020. My first daily driver distro was Mint last year, then KDE Neon, and finally Kubuntu today

    Distro doesn’t matter to me anymore, I just like the Plasma DE and will use anything that uses it. Eventually I’m gonna have to try Arch with it and make my own Steam machine

  • The Menemen@lemmy.ml
    6·
    13 hours ago

    Ubuntu. But I think that will be almost everyones answer who started with Linux in the late-mid 2000s.

    Edit: Oh wait. Might have been Knoppix to resuce some data from a broken windows installation.

      • sramder@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        Watching something compiling is kinda like the reward for getting it to compile in the first place…

    • Thorned_Rose@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      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 💀

    • fl42v@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 day ago

      This, but backtrack 5 (the one just before kali). On a laptop that’d take several eternities to brutforce an md5 🤣

  • BlueÆther@no.lastname.nz
    13·
    2 days ago

    I started with Mandrake 6 when the there were lots of 9’s or 0’s in the year

    Then bounced from Slackware/opensuse/Red Hat/Debian/Gentoo/BSD

    Now running Kde Neon and MacOS (Debian and BSD as server OSs)

  • emb@lemmy.world
    9·
    1 day ago

    Ubuntu had a thing for a while where they would send you a CD if you asked for it. Friend of mine from school gave me one.

  • cygnus@lemmy.ca
    12·
    2 days ago

    Ubuntu in the mid 2000s, but it’s PopOS that made me a fulltimer ~2 years ago. I don’t use it anymore but I’ll always be thankful for it.

  • piranhaconda@mander.xyz
    1·
    22 hours ago

    Whatever Ubuntu was available in 2015. I only dabbled in Linux over the past 10 years. More seriously switching over in the last year or so.

    I have Unraid as a server OS (Debian slackware based, running a lot of docker containers and a couple VMs). Debian on my laptop. And Bazzite (fedora based) on my Lenovo Legion Go.

    Still need to swap my gaming PC from windows. May try Bazzite on that as well. I’ve also tried Mint, Manjaro, and Zorin

      • piranhaconda@mander.xyz
        1·
        1 day ago

        Yea I’m running a much leaner Debian on my laptop now. Base OS was very bare, slowly adding only what I need because it’s a 2016 laptop and noticeably slower on some more bloated OSs

  • nfreak@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    Ubuntu at the start of my college years, dabbled with Arch in the senior year. Huge learning experience, but ultimately I went back to Windows because gaming support was nonexistent at the time. Kept the dual boot up and kept it running Arch during the day for coursework, Windows when I was all done.

    For the past decade since then I was entirely back on Windows. Aside from an Ubuntu VM for my last job, I didn’t really get back into it until the Steam Deck launched a few years ago, and at the start of this year I decided to set up a dual boot again once I got a new full new desktop build. Tried Bazzite, really didn’t like how restricted I felt, immediately wiped it and tried out CachyOS instead, and that’s my daily driver today.

    And just this past week I finally decided got into selfhosting, something I’ve been eyeballing for ages but never really got around to. Proxmox on the host, Debian VM, pretty standard and works amazingly.

  • LeFantome@programming.dev
    5·
    2 days ago

    Started with Soft Landing Systems (SLS). Pre-Slackware. Many hours downloading floppy disk images at school.

    Moved to Red Hat (pre-Fedora and pre-RHEL) until I think 7.3 or so and then Mandrake. I did trial runs with many distros over time but none of them really stuck. Fedora for a release or two. Spent a few years on Manjaro for desktop and CentOS for server. Have been on Arch for many years now (or EndeavourOS). Never used Ubuntu really.

    Moved to Proxmox for server. Although I never used Debian historically, quite a few of the containers I have on Proxmox now are Debian based as is Proxmox itself.

    Lately, I have been using Chimera Linux for desktop though I have an Arch Distrobox on it so I guess I am a bit of a hybrid at this point.

  • oKtosiTe@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 day ago

    SuSE, about 1999, although I didn’t really start ‘getting’ Linux until I tried Slackware a couple of years later. After that I’ve just been bouncing between trusty old Debian and different distros based on it.

    Edit: I’ve also tried Gentoo, Arch and Mandrake briefly many years ago.

  • mrgnz@feddit.org
    1·
    2 days ago

    I guess it was suse or red hat somewhen end of 90s or beginning of 2000. Anyhow I didn’t like KDE back in the days and haven’t touched it since. Although the screenshots I’ve seen of the latest kde looked kind of good. But I’m mostly running arch or manjaro today and prefer gnome or some tiling manager like herbstluftwm.