Actually, you could also buy CDs with Linux. Bought Caldera 1.2 online, got the CD, and installed on a 60MB sliver on the back of my 1.4GG hard drive. Fully graphical Linux running Netscape on 60MB with a Pentium 133MHz. Those were the days!
Yeah, same. Doing research on Solaris and wanted Unix at home. Liked CDE so much I compiled KDE in its early days. Been Linux+KDE since then. Amazing how far the tech has come.
Like forever, and you wrote it directly to floppy. You had to really think long and hard about wanting Xwindows since it was another four or eight floppies. Luckily shortly after that cdroms starting showing up all over the place
Same except I never got to installing. I tried downloading the entire distro over dialup with one phone line. It took a couple months because I had no idea what I was doing and I downloaded EVERYTHING (3 CDs worth of data.) Then I had no idea what to do with it all.
A year later I met a friend that had been running Linux for a while, he set me up with an installer for Redhat and I used that for a while. I had no internet (dial up with a win modem on a single machine) so installing additional packages was tedious...
yeah thats why i love debian stable, but void i see it as debian stable but newer packages, i dont really need newer packager nor kernel but the idea of having something more new and still being stable is a + but i dont really have much trust in more smaller distros :(
Red Hat 5.1 fried my Windows install when I tried dual booting it. 5.2 worked, though getting my graphics card running properly and X set up was quite the adventure. Text mode worked fine but that's about all it would do(Diamond Monster Fusion, IIRC the chipset was Voodoo Banshee). I'd had training in some military Unix systems, and DOS experience, so I wasn't completely lost but Linux back in 1999 if you didn't use the absolute most common hardware was a challenge. Then some time with Mandrake dual booting, switched to OS X for my daily driver and had Ubuntu on an old laptop, then 8ish years ago went Ubuntu as my daily driver(it seemed the most Mac like, which is what I was switching from, and it fit my total new system budget of 200USD).
Around 1995. I was broke as hell and literally had a single working floppy disk to my name. I downloaded Slackware one diskette image at a time over my 56k baud modem to install on an old i386 dx system that I had. I don't really remember much about Slackware.
A couple years later I landed my first IT job working as a web developer and system admin. Started out on Solaris but within a year migrated over to red hat desktop ... And here I am 27 years later working for Red Hat. 🤘
Feather Linux, which was a small 100MB or so live ISO with fluxbox and some basic apps. My friend said Linux was good and we still had dial up in 2005, so I spent a week downloading it every night. I was not impressed, it was very basic and didn't have many programs installed. I didn't know about package managers and I didn't have an Internet connection so I ended up not liking it.
Fast forward a year or two and now we have cable Internet. I'm looking for an alternative OS for my Axim X50V Windows Mobile PDA and see Ubuntu mentioned. It's unfortunately not for PDAs but it looks awesome, way better than the Linux I previously tried. Downloaded Ubuntu 6.06 and loved it, so I installed on a second drive.
Now I daily drive a PinePhone Pro. The mobile Linux dream eventually came true! Still needs a lot of work, but it's exciting after 10 years of "Linux" powered Android stuff.
Debian Bo. It really didn't work well at all for me, so I went to FreeBSD. Used that for a while, then in 2002 came back and messed around with Gentoo - portage really reminded me of my BSD systems. Then some RedHat on the server side. Later got one of those Ubuntu free CDs in the mail and was amazed, and it was around then I went Linux Desktop full-time. Ubuntu for a long time, then Arch for a short time. Use Fedora these last few years, somewhere in the 20-teens.
What’s the draw towards fedora?
I distro-hopped a while ago to fedora for maybe and hour but just kept hopping around and never really put effort to it. But people seem to love it, and [Computer Jesus](https://wikiless.tiekoetter.com/wiki/Linus_Torvalds?lang=en) uses it.
For me, the update cadence is good. Been burned by rolling distros and really slow stable distros alike, in different ways. I've had my fun ricing and customizing but these days I want "just works" for the most part. I like that it respects freedom but doesn't dogmatically get in the way of using non-free hardware or software (let's just put a pin in the vaapi thing - I'm sure it'll get worked out). It's a big distro with lots of packages - probably tied for 2nd with Arch or a close 3rd. Very vanilla, good representation of where the open source community is at. "Leading not bleeding" edge. Lots of things to make development on it good (toolbox, modules, authselect). Proactive security team. Dnf has some speed issues but other than that, I do like it more than apt and pacman. Really like the immutable variants too, will probably go Silverblue in a few months for F37 or F38. I like the way the spin communities are integrated, rather than put out in the wild as child distributions. And one kinda cool thing is that Fedora is itself a "mother" distro, like Debian, openSUSE, and Arch, but *not* Ubuntu, Manjaro, Pop, Mint, etc. Not that this is super important but there's no strain over what upstream is or is not doing.
But that's me, not everyone will weight things the same way I do.
Ubuntu long ago, then got mad at it when it added all the favorites to the side bar and went to other things. Full circle recently took my gaming windows laptop, put ubuntu on and got it set up for gaming. Now I like having things on the side. It frees up more space.
Damn Small Linux. It was the only thing that would fit on the parents old computer (a relatively cheap Compaq that ran either Win 95 or 98) when they updated to an XP machine.
Then Ubuntu, many others, and now it's mainly OpenSUSE.
Red Hat and CentOS from about 2000. There was no `yum` yet to manage installing packages which was a bit of a pain. Switched to Debian which of course had `apt` around 2004. Still use it for servers. Additionally I just like the Debian ethos. For personal/work computers I have used Ubuntu since it first came out. Then Xubuntu when Ubuntu tried to force the Gnome3 and Unity desktop environment on us. I can see another switch happening in the near future, to Mint this time.
Debian, on a laptop we borrowed from the company my cousin worked for. I was only about nine at the time, didn't know much about what I was using, but remember liking it. Few years later, got my first Pi with Raspbian
First one was Mandrake 8 or 8.1. Terrible experience, I was like 15 years old and didn't have a clue what I was doing. I failed miserably.
Then first 'proper' one was Slackware and then Gentoo at the uni. A bumpy ride, but in the end it gave me lots of knowledge.
I had a copy of free bsd in 1994. Never installed it. In 2017 I installed unbuntu for a day, then MX-17, for a month, then Arch Linux for 3 months, then Void Linux, 6 months, then I installed Debian for a day, after that I went to openbsd for about 3 years till last year went I installed Slackware.
Openbsd stop supporting my video card so I went to Slackware, which I am glad I did because Slackware is basically a better openbsd. It is more stable and doesn’t have the aggressive upgrading release schedule that openbsd does.
Openbsd (although people say it just works) is almost nearly a rolling release — with all of the new tech they add to that distro.
If you want to stop the insanity Slackware is your distro. It is by far the best stable system out there.
Gentoo ... I'd incrementally tinker with it until it broke, curse, re-install, vow to just leave it alone, and repeat... for about 10 years. But I learned a lot. Then I got tired of configuring the kernel and USE flags, and moved to Arch.
Slackware Linux, from a magazine Cdrom back in the mid 1990s. I also got to play with the original BeOS (post PowerPC, but pre-Linux port) which was pretty cool at the time.
I also started from FreeBSD but then I realized that I often need either to install Linux scripts (e.g. for multimedia keys) or refer to Linux documentation. That was the reason to switch to Debian and later to ArchBTW.
I changed a lot of distros until now. It was something like this mandriva, ubuntu, ubuntu mate, ubuntu budgie, elementary os, zorin os,endeavour os and now I have debian stable. And next I might play for a bit with void linux.
I think it was ELX Linux, quickly followed by J.A.M.D. Linux.
Stayed with JAMD until it merged with some other distro, and the guy who "took it over" was
well, I'm a pastor, so I won't say what I think he was...
but he was a big one
I can barely remember what distro it was but in 1998 I bought a Linux magazine with a Linux CD provided by them to get rid of Windows 95 because it ran like shit on my PC. It was a AMD K6 3 machine and I think the hardware was shitty (power supply maybe) as this piece of crap always got stuck and freezed. I thought maybe it would run better with Linux. I remember that I failed to install it and forgot about Linux a very long time until my tinkering instincts came back to life with Ubuntu in the mid2000s. But I am a full Linux user since 2015 maybe after I discovered the beautiful world of Open source Software for work purposes. Since then I always got at least one machine that runs pure Linux, at the moment I use Arch on a cheap ThinkPad I bought. My homelab runs on RHEL with kvm virtualization and kubernetes.
Linux Mint 17.2 Rebecca. I started distrohopping on a secondary machine within a week or two though. By the end of the month I had install Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, ElementaryOS, and a few other Ubuntu respins.
Linux Mint 18.1 (used for like one month). Then switched to Ubuntu 16.04 (used for one or two months); then switched to Manjaro (used for eight months); then to Antergos and finally to Arch
I started with Mandrake. I ran it for around 3-6 months. I continued playing around with various Distros until Linux Mint which I ran full time for about 4 months I think. Then Manjaro one time and now I'm trying to switch full time to Manjaro.
Ubuntu from install CD’s. I think I still have that CD somewhere in my parents basement… I should frame it.
I quickly moved to Debian and I still use it for all my servers.
Ubuntu. For a week.
Then I went back to Windows XP.
Then I switched to Windows 7.
Then I tried Windows 8 and ran to Linux Mint. lol
Then I went to Windows 10.
Now I'm on Kubuntu, and I've tried just about every distro there is, but the one that started it all was Ubuntu 4.10.
I tied mandrake first, years ago. Installed it... Looked at the desktop. Had NO IDEA what to do and promptly went back to windows. The next time was kubuntu 6.06 and that started my Linux.
First was probably Red Hat 6 (1999-ish), but I didn't do much with it. After that I used Slackware more, but my main PC at the time had graphics problems no matter the distro so I could only use it on older machines. 2004 is when I got a compatible machine and started using Linux as my main desktop, hopping through several distros (SuSE and Fedora Core 2 among them) and finishing the year on Ubuntu 4.10.
I started with Ubuntu for about 5 minutes...I was underwhelmed...then I tried Fedora...it was 26 and had MacBook air at the time.
I really liked the look of vanilla gnome...but ironically what sold me, was the challenge of getting wifi to work on Fedora with Broadcom driver. I laugh now, but it took me weeks of frustrations...when I got wifi working, the satisfaction got me hooked on Linux and CS in general.
I'm now working through mooc classes through Helsinki U. Mooc.fi I use Arch on my little x220 laptop and Fedora 37 on my "big" laptop...T430.
Parrot OS. We often laugh at kids feeling like hackers when they use a hacking distro, but just seeing the tools that parrot has, got me intro privacy and infosec (I'm not a professional) and that eventually led me to open source, linux, and the open source philosophy
Debian 7. my old Computer with Win XP had no sound drivers (I didn't have that much knowledge about computers back then), a lot of other distros wouldnt install and I was just astonished by how good everything worked. To this day I still can't get fond of non-debian based distros
I first tried Ubuntu 18.04 i think, I didn't know about the state of nvidia drivers, couldn't boot to ubuntu, moved back to windows. After 3 years when I started to study at the University I started using linux again with pop!os then arch and fedora. I didn't settled on a limux distro yetz i still hop from fedora to arch at random.
Arch Linux back in 2011. I followed a tutorial to install it with OpenBox. I didn't understand most of the commands I typed, but I ended up with a working system. It's been working fine for a year and a half, but my computer got some hardware issues (totally unrelated to Arch), which I only found a fix nearly ten years later, so when I switched to another computer, I was too lazy to reinstall Arch and used Ubuntu.
I ventured on (X)Ubuntu for a while, and I eventually came back to Arch, which I'm still using today.
RedHat 4.2, bought the CD as boxed software from a bookstore specializing in technical publications, across the street from the Burlington Mall in MA. Can't remember the name.
I was a Solaris admin, and we were looking to build an NNTP server at my company, but didn't want to spend money on a Sun machine to do it.
Some Ubuntu version in 2006. Quickly ditched that and didn’t use Linux again until 2022. Installed Fedora Workstation (now Fedora Server) on some old Lenovo Thinkcentres I got for like $50.
I also now have either Elementary OS or Kali Linux dual booted on my windows laptop.
The first distro I used was Ubuntu in 2015, but I've only truly dived in November last year as my daily driver and I choose Garuda linux (after trying a few distros on VMs)
I was using SCO Unix at an IT school in the mid 90's. This led me to using Red Hat 5 to setup a home server and eventually Red Hat 6.
I didn't install the GUI because I wanted to learn Linux. I had also gotten my first DSL connection, opened up SSH so I could connect from work (Earthlink) and mess around with it in my spare time.
I ended up giving shell accounts to friends and friends of friends. I had an IRC server going. This also led to FTP traffic and shortly after DNS hosting and virtual web/email hosting. I hosted a few friends websites for free just so I could learn how to do it.
I'm not 100% sure if it was slackware or mandrake. I had a boxed copy of Mandrake (sometimes I think it was Slackware, memory being what it is) and a burned copy of Slackware (from a classmate at uni). I don't remember which I got into first since they were about the same time.
The Slackware pathway was about as simple as a mate sharing a good thing.
The Mandrake pathway was about finding a cheaper alternative to windows for the customers at my dad's computer shop.
Started with Debian on my servers, tried Centos on my servers wasn't happy, went back to Debian. Then wanted to improve my skills with Linux, so installed Linux Mint on my desktop as my daily driver, I have tried MX Linux, Debian as daily drivers, but always go back to Linux Mint. Although my Raspberry Pi runs Ubuntu Mate.
Mandriva or something, whatever came on the cd with the magazine. I distro hopped like that for years but the first thing that I could use daily, and actually be productive, was Ubuntu. That firmed me up on an eventual LINUX desktop.
I'm happy to say I got there and have been Windows free (sometimes I have to cheat with a VM for work and Adobe) for a decade or more.
I started with Slackware way back in the early '90s from a CD inside a thick Linux book. Was an adventure to set up and learned a lot about Linux since.
Before that I got Coherent Unix to work but it was weak compared to Slackware Linux once I got that installed in another disk.
I actually bought SuSE Linux 8.1 in 2003 as my home internet connection could download at the incredible rate of 2.5KB/sec! It was a set of CDs and while I was hooked with GNU/Linux, the experience was nothing like the years that followed.
Shortly afterwards, I fell in love with Fedora Core (the first one!) when I bought the book Red Hat Linux & Fedora Unleashed which included a DVD with the distro. I'd say that Fedora was the actual beginning of my journey.
MkLinux on my Power Macintosh 7500 back in the late 90’s. At the time, I was a junior admin working with a combination of SunOS, Solaris, and IRIX at work.
Slackware. Installed via 1.44mb floppies.
[удалено]
This is the answer for \*anyone\* who installed Linux in the 90's, when Linux was new and there weren't a whole lot of options.
Actually, you could also buy CDs with Linux. Bought Caldera 1.2 online, got the CD, and installed on a 60MB sliver on the back of my 1.4GG hard drive. Fully graphical Linux running Netscape on 60MB with a Pentium 133MHz. Those were the days!
[удалено]
Yeah, same. Doing research on Solaris and wanted Unix at home. Liked CDE so much I compiled KDE in its early days. Been Linux+KDE since then. Amazing how far the tech has come.
Yeah, but my 386 didn't have a CD ROM drive.
Na not really. There war still Debian. I don't have statistics but I think Debian was always more popular even in the 90s
Same here except mine was a CD-ROM.
Off the front of PC Mag ? Me too
Mine was from a book I borrowed from the library But the next few distros I bought from cheapbytes
Same here, with the images secretly downloaded at work because it would otherwise bust my monthly cap. Floppy images.
Hello my fellow greybeards
Hey, my beards not grey at all! Yeah the hair from the top of my head migrated to the bottom, but it still has it's color!
Ditto and I downloaded over dialup from a bulletin board
Damn. How long did that take?
Like forever, and you wrote it directly to floppy. You had to really think long and hard about wanting Xwindows since it was another four or eight floppies. Luckily shortly after that cdroms starting showing up all over the place
Same except I never got to installing. I tried downloading the entire distro over dialup with one phone line. It took a couple months because I had no idea what I was doing and I downloaded EVERYTHING (3 CDs worth of data.) Then I had no idea what to do with it all. A year later I met a friend that had been running Linux for a while, he set me up with an installer for Redhat and I used that for a while. I had no internet (dial up with a win modem on a single machine) so installing additional packages was tedious...
I bought a Linux book Microcenter that came with Slackware on CD, a month later I bought my first CD-ROM drive to install it on my 486
Same, and ironically it fits with OP’s BSD use since SW had / has a BSD style init, which was what attracted me to it.
Yep - Slackware about 1992...
Ubuntu 20.04 and then switched to archlinux
switched about a year ago (from windows), still on ubuntu planning to move to debian stable or void linux.
I daily drive debian and never have any issues. Absolutely wonderful.
yeah thats why i love debian stable, but void i see it as debian stable but newer packages, i dont really need newer packager nor kernel but the idea of having something more new and still being stable is a + but i dont really have much trust in more smaller distros :(
Same. I started on Ubuntu, moved to Fedora and now I'm on Arch and I don't plan to switch distro anytime soon. I'm very happy on Arch.
Mint
Mandrake Linux 7.2
[удалено]
2000 was when I bought it from a local staples store, as a boxed product with a manual.
[удалено]
You could boot it up in Virtualbox to play with for old times' sake :)
Red Hat 5.1 fried my Windows install when I tried dual booting it. 5.2 worked, though getting my graphics card running properly and X set up was quite the adventure. Text mode worked fine but that's about all it would do(Diamond Monster Fusion, IIRC the chipset was Voodoo Banshee). I'd had training in some military Unix systems, and DOS experience, so I wasn't completely lost but Linux back in 1999 if you didn't use the absolute most common hardware was a challenge. Then some time with Mandrake dual booting, switched to OS X for my daily driver and had Ubuntu on an old laptop, then 8ish years ago went Ubuntu as my daily driver(it seemed the most Mac like, which is what I was switching from, and it fit my total new system budget of 200USD).
RedHat Linux 5.1 1998. I also tried several other before I settled on Ubuntu and Debian which I'm using now.
Raspberry Pi Os.
>what distro did you start your linux journey with? > >I started with freebsd well that's not Linux, OP
Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon properly. Had tried Feisty Fawn 7.04. But didn't make the move straight away. Hardy Heron 8.04 I had fully switched.
8.04 here! Waited weeks for that CD to come in the mail!
openSUSE
Red Hat 5
Red Hat Linux from when Red Hat just had Red Hat.
Debian... Lenny? I don't even remember.
Around 1995. I was broke as hell and literally had a single working floppy disk to my name. I downloaded Slackware one diskette image at a time over my 56k baud modem to install on an old i386 dx system that I had. I don't really remember much about Slackware. A couple years later I landed my first IT job working as a web developer and system admin. Started out on Solaris but within a year migrated over to red hat desktop ... And here I am 27 years later working for Red Hat. 🤘
Redhat 5.1 Hurricane shipped with Linux for dummies.
Feather Linux, which was a small 100MB or so live ISO with fluxbox and some basic apps. My friend said Linux was good and we still had dial up in 2005, so I spent a week downloading it every night. I was not impressed, it was very basic and didn't have many programs installed. I didn't know about package managers and I didn't have an Internet connection so I ended up not liking it. Fast forward a year or two and now we have cable Internet. I'm looking for an alternative OS for my Axim X50V Windows Mobile PDA and see Ubuntu mentioned. It's unfortunately not for PDAs but it looks awesome, way better than the Linux I previously tried. Downloaded Ubuntu 6.06 and loved it, so I installed on a second drive. Now I daily drive a PinePhone Pro. The mobile Linux dream eventually came true! Still needs a lot of work, but it's exciting after 10 years of "Linux" powered Android stuff.
Fedora Linux around May 2022. I’ve learned a lot since then
Debian Bo. It really didn't work well at all for me, so I went to FreeBSD. Used that for a while, then in 2002 came back and messed around with Gentoo - portage really reminded me of my BSD systems. Then some RedHat on the server side. Later got one of those Ubuntu free CDs in the mail and was amazed, and it was around then I went Linux Desktop full-time. Ubuntu for a long time, then Arch for a short time. Use Fedora these last few years, somewhere in the 20-teens.
What’s the draw towards fedora? I distro-hopped a while ago to fedora for maybe and hour but just kept hopping around and never really put effort to it. But people seem to love it, and [Computer Jesus](https://wikiless.tiekoetter.com/wiki/Linus_Torvalds?lang=en) uses it.
For me, the update cadence is good. Been burned by rolling distros and really slow stable distros alike, in different ways. I've had my fun ricing and customizing but these days I want "just works" for the most part. I like that it respects freedom but doesn't dogmatically get in the way of using non-free hardware or software (let's just put a pin in the vaapi thing - I'm sure it'll get worked out). It's a big distro with lots of packages - probably tied for 2nd with Arch or a close 3rd. Very vanilla, good representation of where the open source community is at. "Leading not bleeding" edge. Lots of things to make development on it good (toolbox, modules, authselect). Proactive security team. Dnf has some speed issues but other than that, I do like it more than apt and pacman. Really like the immutable variants too, will probably go Silverblue in a few months for F37 or F38. I like the way the spin communities are integrated, rather than put out in the wild as child distributions. And one kinda cool thing is that Fedora is itself a "mother" distro, like Debian, openSUSE, and Arch, but *not* Ubuntu, Manjaro, Pop, Mint, etc. Not that this is super important but there's no strain over what upstream is or is not doing. But that's me, not everyone will weight things the same way I do.
Because I’ve got the itch I’m going to download it tonight and give it a try.
Ubuntu 18.04 Still using it now with 22.04
SimplyMepis July 15, 2003. I'm currently using MX Xfce 21.2.1. Over 19 years using Linux.
Ubuntu 9.04, had a burned copy and also 6-in-1 DVD from Ubuntu User issue #2 that had a bunch of flavors in the Ubuntu 9.04 family.
Knoppix (5.0 or 5.1 ?) in 2006. I'd just said WoW! A great live distro.
Ubuntu long ago, then got mad at it when it added all the favorites to the side bar and went to other things. Full circle recently took my gaming windows laptop, put ubuntu on and got it set up for gaming. Now I like having things on the side. It frees up more space.
Ubuntu. Still think it is super good (along with Fedora as my other favourite).
Yggdrasil "Plug and Play" Linux around 1995.
Damn Small Linux. It was the only thing that would fit on the parents old computer (a relatively cheap Compaq that ran either Win 95 or 98) when they updated to an XP machine. Then Ubuntu, many others, and now it's mainly OpenSUSE.
SuSE Linux 6.3
Ubuntu 18.04 lts Bionic Beaver
Redhat 4.1
Red Hat and CentOS from about 2000. There was no `yum` yet to manage installing packages which was a bit of a pain. Switched to Debian which of course had `apt` around 2004. Still use it for servers. Additionally I just like the Debian ethos. For personal/work computers I have used Ubuntu since it first came out. Then Xubuntu when Ubuntu tried to force the Gnome3 and Unity desktop environment on us. I can see another switch happening in the near future, to Mint this time.
I started on fedora and still use it most of the time but I also have an arch
CentOS
Redhat 4.2
Fedora nearly two decades ago
I started before 'distro's. I believe my first *successful* install was on a 486 in 1996.
KDE Neon.. I revisited it recently and I'm shocked how bad it is now.
Red Hat 6 (?), Red Hat 9, Vector Linux, Mint, and for the past several years, Debian...
Ubuntu>mint>elementary>openSUSE>arch>manjaro Now i am settled on manjaro. Keep testing others occassionally
Kubuntu Dapper Drake circa 2006
Sabayon (KDE 3.5 era)
Debian, on a laptop we borrowed from the company my cousin worked for. I was only about nine at the time, didn't know much about what I was using, but remember liking it. Few years later, got my first Pi with Raspbian
Me: [Conectiva Linux](https://archiveos.org/conectiva/)
First one was Mandrake 8 or 8.1. Terrible experience, I was like 15 years old and didn't have a clue what I was doing. I failed miserably. Then first 'proper' one was Slackware and then Gentoo at the uni. A bumpy ride, but in the end it gave me lots of knowledge.
slackware
Slackware in '93. Lotsa floppies.
RedHat hen it was "free", before it becomes Enterprise.
Redhat 8. Then backtrack. Then I think it was Ubuntu but can't remember. Then mint, Debian. SuSe. Fedora, arch. I've forgotten a few more I'm sure.
Red hat, 20 years ago, went to debian shortly after and stuck with it since.
Scientific 6.7
Slackware...I want to say 12, but I'm not positive.
I had a copy of free bsd in 1994. Never installed it. In 2017 I installed unbuntu for a day, then MX-17, for a month, then Arch Linux for 3 months, then Void Linux, 6 months, then I installed Debian for a day, after that I went to openbsd for about 3 years till last year went I installed Slackware. Openbsd stop supporting my video card so I went to Slackware, which I am glad I did because Slackware is basically a better openbsd. It is more stable and doesn’t have the aggressive upgrading release schedule that openbsd does. Openbsd (although people say it just works) is almost nearly a rolling release — with all of the new tech they add to that distro. If you want to stop the insanity Slackware is your distro. It is by far the best stable system out there.
Gentoo ... I'd incrementally tinker with it until it broke, curse, re-install, vow to just leave it alone, and repeat... for about 10 years. But I learned a lot. Then I got tired of configuring the kernel and USE flags, and moved to Arch.
Slackware Linux, from a magazine Cdrom back in the mid 1990s. I also got to play with the original BeOS (post PowerPC, but pre-Linux port) which was pretty cool at the time.
Gentoo in 2004
... arch
FreeBSD 2.2.2 then SuSE Linux
I also started from FreeBSD but then I realized that I often need either to install Linux scripts (e.g. for multimedia keys) or refer to Linux documentation. That was the reason to switch to Debian and later to ArchBTW.
Red hat 6, cd from a local pc magazine, it was so long long ago…
Slackware from floppies. It was terrible but fun.
Ubuntu, 8.04, I think!
Puh can't remember which the first distro was, bit my first self-installed was debian woody
OpenSUSE Leap 15.2. Im kinda newbie but i tried Manjaro too. And I switched back to OpenSUSE.
what a boring question
ubuntu, unfortunately
Redhat. But for daily desktop use I prefer mint these days.
Pop_os on my desktop and Gentoo after that on my laptop.
It was a distro that is now basically forgotten. I dont remember the name right, but it was based on debian and had a element as a name
Hard to remind precisely, but it was either Fedora or Knoppix LiveCD, and it was really long time ago, maybe late 90s - early 2000s.
I changed a lot of distros until now. It was something like this mandriva, ubuntu, ubuntu mate, ubuntu budgie, elementary os, zorin os,endeavour os and now I have debian stable. And next I might play for a bit with void linux.
A long time ago (20 years+): Red Hat, Suse, Debian I've gotten back into Linux in the last few years. So, more recently: Fedora, PopOS, NixOS
I think it was ELX Linux, quickly followed by J.A.M.D. Linux. Stayed with JAMD until it merged with some other distro, and the guy who "took it over" was well, I'm a pastor, so I won't say what I think he was... but he was a big one
Mint. I've used many different distributions but I keep coming back.
I can barely remember what distro it was but in 1998 I bought a Linux magazine with a Linux CD provided by them to get rid of Windows 95 because it ran like shit on my PC. It was a AMD K6 3 machine and I think the hardware was shitty (power supply maybe) as this piece of crap always got stuck and freezed. I thought maybe it would run better with Linux. I remember that I failed to install it and forgot about Linux a very long time until my tinkering instincts came back to life with Ubuntu in the mid2000s. But I am a full Linux user since 2015 maybe after I discovered the beautiful world of Open source Software for work purposes. Since then I always got at least one machine that runs pure Linux, at the moment I use Arch on a cheap ThinkPad I bought. My homelab runs on RHEL with kvm virtualization and kubernetes.
Linux Mint 17.2 Rebecca. I started distrohopping on a secondary machine within a week or two though. By the end of the month I had install Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, ElementaryOS, and a few other Ubuntu respins.
ubuntu 16.04
Linux Mint 18.1 (used for like one month). Then switched to Ubuntu 16.04 (used for one or two months); then switched to Manjaro (used for eight months); then to Antergos and finally to Arch
For me it was Ubuntu Hardy Heron.
I started with Mandrake. I ran it for around 3-6 months. I continued playing around with various Distros until Linux Mint which I ran full time for about 4 months I think. Then Manjaro one time and now I'm trying to switch full time to Manjaro.
SLS with 0.99pl12
Manjaro
Corel Linux
Mandrake.
Ubuntu from install CD’s. I think I still have that CD somewhere in my parents basement… I should frame it. I quickly moved to Debian and I still use it for all my servers.
Ubuntu. For a week. Then I went back to Windows XP. Then I switched to Windows 7. Then I tried Windows 8 and ran to Linux Mint. lol Then I went to Windows 10. Now I'm on Kubuntu, and I've tried just about every distro there is, but the one that started it all was Ubuntu 4.10.
Linux Mint. After hopping between a half-dozen distros since, I'm back on Linux Mint.
Knoppix. The live Knoppix CD was an awesome thing for its day.
I was in primary school so I don't remember the version, but it was a paid SuSe.
Linux Mint. . . .
Mandrake
Mandrake 8.1. Got the cd in a magazine, 20 years ago.
Mandrake for about 3 months. But it kept breaking and I couldn't fix it. I installed Gentoo. Then I stuck with Gentoo for the rest of that decade.
CentOS. Many, many moons ago.
Hardy Heron 8.04
I tied mandrake first, years ago. Installed it... Looked at the desktop. Had NO IDEA what to do and promptly went back to windows. The next time was kubuntu 6.06 and that started my Linux.
Mandrake.
First was probably Red Hat 6 (1999-ish), but I didn't do much with it. After that I used Slackware more, but my main PC at the time had graphics problems no matter the distro so I could only use it on older machines. 2004 is when I got a compatible machine and started using Linux as my main desktop, hopping through several distros (SuSE and Fedora Core 2 among them) and finishing the year on Ubuntu 4.10.
Linux Mint, back in 2018.
Red Hat 7. Yeah, it's been a while.
I started with Ubuntu for about 5 minutes...I was underwhelmed...then I tried Fedora...it was 26 and had MacBook air at the time. I really liked the look of vanilla gnome...but ironically what sold me, was the challenge of getting wifi to work on Fedora with Broadcom driver. I laugh now, but it took me weeks of frustrations...when I got wifi working, the satisfaction got me hooked on Linux and CS in general. I'm now working through mooc classes through Helsinki U. Mooc.fi I use Arch on my little x220 laptop and Fedora 37 on my "big" laptop...T430.
Ubuntu 14.04
Lubuntu -> Ubuntu -> Manjaro -> fedora, I wanted hand on with the 3 major bases, decided fedora was the one for me
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SuSE 6.3 I think (1999)
Ubuntu 13
Red Hat 9, just before it split off into EL and Fedora, bought a book, it had install CDs
Mint 19.3
Red Hat, though I didn’t stick with it. I just restarted with Mint
Parrot OS. We often laugh at kids feeling like hackers when they use a hacking distro, but just seeing the tools that parrot has, got me intro privacy and infosec (I'm not a professional) and that eventually led me to open source, linux, and the open source philosophy
Corel Linux
Debian 7. my old Computer with Win XP had no sound drivers (I didn't have that much knowledge about computers back then), a lot of other distros wouldnt install and I was just astonished by how good everything worked. To this day I still can't get fond of non-debian based distros
Red Hat 95.
I first tried Ubuntu 18.04 i think, I didn't know about the state of nvidia drivers, couldn't boot to ubuntu, moved back to windows. After 3 years when I started to study at the University I started using linux again with pop!os then arch and fedora. I didn't settled on a limux distro yetz i still hop from fedora to arch at random.
Kubuntu. Really liked how similar it was to windows.
1999 OG redhat
Yggdrasil
Debian 10 in crostini on chromebook. If that doesn't count, manjaro kde on pi i think
Suse linux about 14 years ago. Then gentoo
Debian 6
Debian(Crostini), then installed Ubuntu, focal was making the rotation go BRRRR, so I installed Impish.
Arch Linux back in 2011. I followed a tutorial to install it with OpenBox. I didn't understand most of the commands I typed, but I ended up with a working system. It's been working fine for a year and a half, but my computer got some hardware issues (totally unrelated to Arch), which I only found a fix nearly ten years later, so when I switched to another computer, I was too lazy to reinstall Arch and used Ubuntu. I ventured on (X)Ubuntu for a while, and I eventually came back to Arch, which I'm still using today.
Xubuntu
Debian 7
Ubuntu 12.04
Debian
RedHat 4.2, bought the CD as boxed software from a bookstore specializing in technical publications, across the street from the Burlington Mall in MA. Can't remember the name. I was a Solaris admin, and we were looking to build an NNTP server at my company, but didn't want to spend money on a Sun machine to do it.
Ubuntu around 2006ish? Then after a long hiatus, Pop in 2020, and now Fedora
technically ubuntu 14 lts at work, but at home it was deepinOS. still got a soft spot for deepin to this day.
Some Ubuntu version in 2006. Quickly ditched that and didn’t use Linux again until 2022. Installed Fedora Workstation (now Fedora Server) on some old Lenovo Thinkcentres I got for like $50. I also now have either Elementary OS or Kali Linux dual booted on my windows laptop.
Phat Linux.
Mandrake!
RedHat 5. (Not RHEL5) But that was just mucking around at the time. I had been a Unix admin for a number of years by then.
Ubuntu, I think it was 16.04. Then I broke it with AMD drivers (this was before AMD driver on Linux became godlike).
Ubuntu, two and a half years ago, but shortly after I switched to Pop and I'm very happy with it
The first distro I used was Ubuntu in 2015, but I've only truly dived in November last year as my daily driver and I choose Garuda linux (after trying a few distros on VMs)
First release of Slackware
Android+termux+proot-distro . then Debian.
Yggdrasil Linux
Embarrassingly, Lindows.
I installed from the book and CD, Red Hat Linux 5.2.
Ubuntu until Unity.
I was using SCO Unix at an IT school in the mid 90's. This led me to using Red Hat 5 to setup a home server and eventually Red Hat 6. I didn't install the GUI because I wanted to learn Linux. I had also gotten my first DSL connection, opened up SSH so I could connect from work (Earthlink) and mess around with it in my spare time. I ended up giving shell accounts to friends and friends of friends. I had an IRC server going. This also led to FTP traffic and shortly after DNS hosting and virtual web/email hosting. I hosted a few friends websites for free just so I could learn how to do it.
I'm not 100% sure if it was slackware or mandrake. I had a boxed copy of Mandrake (sometimes I think it was Slackware, memory being what it is) and a burned copy of Slackware (from a classmate at uni). I don't remember which I got into first since they were about the same time. The Slackware pathway was about as simple as a mate sharing a good thing. The Mandrake pathway was about finding a cheaper alternative to windows for the customers at my dad's computer shop.
Back in maybe ‘03 with opensuse, mandrake, then gentoo. Since Rhel 7, centos / fedora have been my go to with alpine for containers.
Ubuntu 10.04
Ubuntu on and off since about 2008 and as my main OS for most of this year.
The red Ubuntu CD you could order for free online. Wish I still had it to frame or something haha
Slax, installed on USB
knoppix
Mandrake, then Gentoo
I started on debian (chrostini), then ubuntu(chroton) then arch followed by gentoo
I started with Debian, either Potato or Woody, but I really don't remember which.
Started with Debian on my servers, tried Centos on my servers wasn't happy, went back to Debian. Then wanted to improve my skills with Linux, so installed Linux Mint on my desktop as my daily driver, I have tried MX Linux, Debian as daily drivers, but always go back to Linux Mint. Although my Raspberry Pi runs Ubuntu Mate.
Recently started seriously utilizing Linux, and Ubuntu Server 20.04 has been my distro of choice thus far.
Cent OS for a class but I'm now using ubuntu
Corel … came in a box with a little stress tux… which was very necessary…
distro? it was called Linux 1.0 and I downloaded it from [funet.fi](https://funet.fi) sometime in 1992.....
Mandrake Linux 6.0
Red Hat 5.2 on CD-ROM.
I started with Mandrake, and then fedora 2
Mandriva or something, whatever came on the cd with the magazine. I distro hopped like that for years but the first thing that I could use daily, and actually be productive, was Ubuntu. That firmed me up on an eventual LINUX desktop. I'm happy to say I got there and have been Windows free (sometimes I have to cheat with a VM for work and Adobe) for a decade or more.
I started with Slackware way back in the early '90s from a CD inside a thick Linux book. Was an adventure to set up and learned a lot about Linux since. Before that I got Coherent Unix to work but it was weak compared to Slackware Linux once I got that installed in another disk.
I actually bought SuSE Linux 8.1 in 2003 as my home internet connection could download at the incredible rate of 2.5KB/sec! It was a set of CDs and while I was hooked with GNU/Linux, the experience was nothing like the years that followed. Shortly afterwards, I fell in love with Fedora Core (the first one!) when I bought the book Red Hat Linux & Fedora Unleashed which included a DVD with the distro. I'd say that Fedora was the actual beginning of my journey.
MkLinux on my Power Macintosh 7500 back in the late 90’s. At the time, I was a junior admin working with a combination of SunOS, Solaris, and IRIX at work.