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?

58 points
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Welcome to Lemmy stranger.

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

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18 points

Go Slackware!

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10 points

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 ;-)

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10 points

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.

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2 points

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 😅

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9 points

Slackware 3.1 late 1996. Great fuckin’ year that was.

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6 points

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).

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4 points

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

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3 points
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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

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2 points

I overlocked my Pentium 133 to 150.

I was such a badass.

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3 points

Floppy sets represent!

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3 points

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

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2 points

The Alien repo was a godsend

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32 points

Kali Linux. Because I was a kid who wanted to be a hackerman.

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19 points
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❤️ Ah yes, the hacker-man vibes!

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7 points
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After that I used Ubuntu with XFCE for 2 years, Now settled in Fedora with Gnome for like 4 years straight.

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6 points

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

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2 points
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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 💀

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1 point

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

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31 points

Red Hat, before the enterprise stuff, back in 1999. Installed from a CD found in a book from the library

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14 points

I’ve got a Red Hat from '99! Found in grandpa’s garage.

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12 points

Nice! The one I found looked like this. I remember picking it up because I thought the logo looked cool. I think it was 5.2 though

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3 points

This was very similar to the box I had but in my case it was mostly white. And the manual was waaaay bigger. Like almost the size of a phone book. I bought mine in 1999 too. Installed from CD. I bought mine for $110 from a stationary shop (since I lived in a student flat and my flatmates would have probably murdered me if I’d downloaded it over dial up that also had a monthly download limit). Good times lol.

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3 points

YES! That was the same distro that was my entry, it came along with the book Linux for dummies. However mine came on a single CD. Must have been the “lite” edition 😄

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Oh, back in 1999s, very epic! ❤️

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7 points

Same for me, it was Red Hat Linux 6.1 (Cartman). I got it from a CD on the front of a PC magazine.

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2 points
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Damn! Same here, red hat 99, but switched to Debian quite fast

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26 points

am a simple noob who started with Mint, and remain on Mint on my main gaming machine.

i have fun distro-hopping on my other old, cheap laptops though

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Mint is a favorite here too! It just works! ❤️

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1 point

Real!

After installing and restoring Arch for the third time in 1.5 year I decided to go back to Mint. In the past 5.5 or so years, nothing needed to be reinstalled or restored; Mint’s more stable than Windows by now!

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2 points
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There’s something about simplicity that is underated.

Technically my first ditro was SuSE a loooong time ago but I didn’t stick with it. Then back when Ubuntu became he new hit thing I tried that, but again didn’t stick with it.

I have now loaded up Mint and that’s the one I’m running with. Mind you, all distros have come a long way since my prior Linux dealings but Mint is the one to make me permanently switch.

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19 points
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Ubuntu > Mint > Manjaro > Arch > PopOS > Debian

(History, not ranking [Debian wins])

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10 points

Debian wins

Testify, brother.

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1 point

Same, but I skipped manjaro and popOS. And I used slackware at the college computers. Debian still wins for me, it came a long way.

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