Ask Lemmy

Knoppix. Was recommended it by someone I chatted with at the time and that did not go well. This was not Knoppix's fault though, but rather me not knowing what I got into. Things worked as one would expect, the applications that were included ran without issues, but the issue came when wanted to install software. At the time didn't know anything about linux, so didn't know how to use the terminal to install software, and when trying to install new ones using exe files that didn't work for now obvious reasons. So threw that stuff out and went back to windows, and didn't touch Linux again until Ubuntu Hardy Heron which went a lot better.

Backtrack then crunchbang. Eventually I moved to arch. I've been using debian and mint lately though.

DSL (Damn Small Linux) was what I started plying with, but my first daily driver was PCLOS.

I daily drove Puppy Linux live booted off a USB for a few months probably 15 years a go when my hard drive died and I couldn't afford a new one.

Attempted to use Red Hat 4 (pre-RHEL), but couldn't work out the partitioning. However, I tried SuSE Linux Personal 7.0 soon afterwards and YaST gave me a much smoother time when installing everything; I've been using SUSE/openSUSE ever since as my primary Linux distro.

This is the weirdest attempt to get my website security question answers... But... Slackware on floppies.

Slackware, floppies, my 486.

I did some research on what would be a good OS for someone coming from Windows and at the time Linux Mint was recommended a lot so that's what I chose.

Lindows lmao

Ubuntu back in 2005.

10 years ago Arch and it was a bloodbath. No background and both IT bros said I should not do it. Took about 4 days and countless rescues, so much manual fstab editing, looking up what the thing I destroyed even is. Glorious times. Dual boot because I thought I might need windows, not anymore.

Ubuntu 16.04

Debian 2.2 on a consulting job in 2001. I'd used Unix mainframes in college, but other than that had only ever done work on DOS and Windows before then. Didn't think much of it at the time, though it was familiar and easy to work with. Certainly a far cry from the experience we all have with Linux today.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Immediately liked the interface, but was bummed by lack of software and (expected) subpar performance on my shitty hardware. Went back to Windows 7 after a month or so. It took me quite a lot of hopping between many Linux distros and Windows to finally settle on Manjaro as my desktop OS of choice

Oh god it's been so long (20+ years). I only remember that whatever distro I installed had that great game preinstalled in which Tux slides down a mountain. Ah... Nice memories of easier times.

Kubuntu 6.06. Got the CD with a computer magazine that had a good tutorial on how to install the thing next to a pre-existing Windows partition. To this day I miss the look of KDE 3!

Ubuntu 8.04, and I got it on one of those free discs they used to send out.

Installed and tinkered with Mandrake 6.0 First full time: Ubuntu 04-10. Warty Warthog

My first distro was OpenSUSE (or SuSE Linux back then) sometime around 2002. I picked it up out of curiosity in a book shop. They were selling the handbook, bundled with a DVD with the actual OS. It looked something like this. And thus started decades of distro hopping.

I think it was Debian! My dad had an old cd of it and we live booted into it for fun like almost 20 years ago.

Redhat lol back in the 90’s

I am not really sure but I think it was yggdrasil. I remember loading a ton of floppies one after the other. 5 1/4 inch ones too!

Slackware 7, year 2000. Never seen linux before. Thanks to help from IT geek next door managed to boot net-installer it from single 3.5". After many hours managed do finally get xfree86 working. As far as I remember it was running with KDE.

Linux Mint

Ubuntu sometime in the late 2000's. I remember a friend showing me virtual desktops that rotated between each other.

I dual booted my machine and it was amazing... For 10 seconds until I realized thats all it did. When right back to windows.

Ubuntu with Gnome Classic.

Deepin

SuSe Linux from an installation CD about twenty years ago. A right royal pain in the arse it was.

Not sure but it was slackware or red hat in 1997

God I am old, I remember before kali rebranded 😭.

Phlak and Knoppix were mine. Neither lasted long since I couldn't install it on my home computer. The first one I installed as a dual boot was Ubuntu. While I have strayed from them over the years they have been my daily driver for the better part of 15 years

My first distro was SlackWare 7.

I'm not anywhere near my desktop(s) but it has largely been an Ubuntu box of differing flavors.

Though I experimented with Yoper, Knollix, SuSe, Mint, and a few other distros.

i think the first one i tried was Ubuntu 7.04 when i was just messing around with linux on an old Windows XP Machine. A few years later I ran Mint on my laptop and now I'm kind of getting back into it with Manjaro on my current old laptop lol.

No better way to learn about linux than to just try it out

DLD 5 in 1998, a colleague at work handed me a CDR and said "i think this might be something for you", and he was right ;)

I started back on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. It was so much prettier than Windows, it got 11 yr. old me into hosting web servers

Started using Linux a year ago. My friend recommended Manjaro (not a good distro) because he himself used Arch. I was a little to stupid to use Manjaro at the time so I moved to Ubuntu, then Kali and finally Arch which is what I use now. I have practiced some distrohopping with Arco, Vanilla, Archcraft and my favourite Gentoo.In the future I want to dabble with LFS and Gentoo but I do see myself using Arch from this point forward. Linux is such an amazing operating system and it has taught me very much. Also use Neovim.

Some version of Ubuntu. I got a free laptop that didn't have an operating system so I just put linux on it because I didn't want to buy windows.

I spent weeks installing Linux in 2002, finally got it up and running and was like wow this is barely usable.

Turns out I had a fundamental misunderstanding, and there were pre-made distributions of it for you to use! Took me two years to realize that. Picked up Ubuntu and it just worked (other than wifi)

I probably played with some Ubuntu live CDs beforehand, since you could order them for free, but the first time actually using it was back in 2004-2005. I had gotten one of the first AMD 64 bit laptops, with 32 bit Windows and I wanted to see what 65 bit “could do”. So I installed Ubuntu as a dual boot setup. Worked quite well! I played around a lot with customising the experience, making my desktop 3D with Compiz. Great times! I also remember the lack of game support it had, I could only play OpenTTD on it. How times have changed! I’m now running Linux full time on my game machine (EndeavourOS) and haven’t touched Windows in a long time.