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?

  • Underwaterbob@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    4 minutes ago

    Ubuntu 6 on a Samsung laptop I had lying around 2006ish. The webcam and trackpad wouldn’t work, but a mouse and not caring about the webcam made that tolerable. It was the only OS I ran for a year or so. I went back to Windows for gaming shortly afterwards, but have been using Linux off-and-on in some form ever since.

    • dipdowel@feddit.nl
      2·
      2 hours ago

      Cool, so I’m not the only one here 😁. Mine was also RHL 5.x, can’t remember the exact minor version, whatever they sold on CDs in 1999. I then switched to FreeBSD for a year or so.

  • BoxOfFeet@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 hours ago

    For a long time, I thought it was Fedora Core 4. I did use that, but I recently found my old burned CDs of Mandrake 8.1. That really took me back. I might install it on a VM for some nostalgia.

  • Wynnstan@lemmy.world
    2·
    4 hours ago

    RedHat, I had to recompile the kernel to be SoundBlaster compatible so that I could play Doom with sound on my 486.

    • fluxx1@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      4 hours ago

      Mine too. I had to compile the drivers for a win modem (popularly called linmodem). Then switched to mandrake, mandriva, then Ubuntu 6 or 7, whichever came via mail for free.

  • qweertz (they/she)@programming.dev
    1·
    4 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

  • MummifiedClient5000@feddit.dkEnglish
    2·
    6 hours ago

    Turbo Linux in the late 90s. It didn’t go well.

    Later I gave Redhat a shot - 5.0 or 5.1, I forget. Stayed with RH and now Fedora.

  • ndupont@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    7 hours ago

    I think it was SuSE 5.1, we’re talking 1997. We got a CD at a show but I can’t remember which or where.

  • TheTurner@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    6 hours ago

    Took me a while to dig up the posts on distrowatch, but I’m pretty sure that the first Linux distro that I used heavily was Mepis Linux 8 back in 2007-2009. I loved that OS.

  • rosco385@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    6 hours ago

    My first distro was Debian, probably back around 2008. I used that and Ubuntu for years without having even looked at a desktop environment. For me, Linux was a server OS and I had to teach myself how to use it to spin up Teamspeak/Mumble, webservers, VPNs, etc.

    I first started using Linux as a desktop OS in 2016. Tried SUSE and Fedora, but really liked Manjaro and eventually gravitated to Arch. I tried out NixOS a year or so ago and liked it, but I still go back to Arch with KDE Plasma.

  • belzebubb@lemmus.orgEnglish
    2·
    7 hours ago

    I inherited a Sony Vaio in 2009 which was really slow with windows, but unsurprisingly was ok once I swapped that out for Ubuntu 9.04. Took me a while to get the brightness up as the buttons didn’t respond, but I kept that machine running for 7 years, the HDD controller died in the end so it stopped detecting any HDD.