Linux

Slackware in 1996(?), then SuSE when they came up.
I then tried a bit every once in a while, but really never got fully comfortable with it on a desktop.
A few weeks ago I bought a new Desktop PC, which is now running with the Arch-fork #endeavouros and I really love it.

@midtsveen

Arch, btw

It was the distro that my friend uses all the time, and I've had to use his laptop on occasion so I'm somewhat familiar with the distro, enough so that I've installed it on persistent USBs before and already chosen it as my next OS after Windows (I would switch now, but I rode Windows 7 till the end date, so I figured I'd ride out 10 until the final day this October)

Also! Gender fluid hello!! It made me so insanely happy to see that flag in the Linux terminal, I feel so seen!! It feels like trans girls hog all the Linux spotlight this side of the fediverse, I'm happy for them! But I still don't feel like I have a proper community where I belong, especially since I stay off of all other mainstream social media >.<

So seeing another enby, another gender fluid especially, for the literal first time since I made my lemmy account just makes me so ecstatic!! We're so rare x3

Anyways, thank u for existing and simply posting this, seeing another makes me feel seen and I can't really express enough how unreasonably happy something so small just made me c:

Thank you! And I should sleep so good night also lol

Red Hat, back when that was a distro. It was a long time ago now and my toying with it didn't last long; and began an obsession with hardware RAID…

genderfluid fetch spotted!!!! also im not sure which was first but i use arch and openbsd ;3

Linux Mint. I made a dumb decision to install it right away thinking it's just like Windows. Boy was i wrong. Took me years until I felt ready to switch to Linux.

I use Arch BTW

Ubuntu 6.06. It came on a CD with a PC magazine. I've used it to convince my parents to allow me to spend as much time as I want in front of the computer because "there are no games on Linux".

WoW worked on it.

Mandrake

I somehow could not find the Mint install so I went with Ubuntu Mate. It was fine.

Mandrake! It was a fucking disaster! Fortunately, I came back later using Kubuntu and had a much better experience.

Ubuntu, and the experience was crap lol.

Then I got to try Debian on a server and it was much nicer.

Then I saw Torvalds uses Fedora, and given that he also disliked Debian and Ubuntu for their lack of end user ease, I switched and have been happy ever since.

Seriously though, GNOME 40 really should not be the default DE. It made me think Linux UI was years behind Windows when it was actually the opposite with proven DEs like XFCE, KDE, and GNOME 3/2 etc.

I think I tried to compile Gentoo about 20 years ago for some reason.. Took many hours, and I don't remember even getting it running. Later I tried dual booting Ubuntu, but ended up using Windows all the time since that's where my games were. Started using Linux only (Xubuntu) some time around 2010.

Red Hat 5.1, which I quickly abandoned after learning the hard way about winmodems

Mine was slackware in I think 1997?

Ubuntu, like a lot of people my age (2000s)

Ubuntu 5.10 back when a random Finnish teenager could ask Canonical for free install CDs and they'd just mail them to you no money asked.

The first was Redhat Linux 7, but not for long. I moved to Slackware soon after.

litterally arch btw

Mandrake Linux. I couldn’t tell you what year but I remember booting into it and thinking it was the coolest thing.

My first Linux install was Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy. Got those wobbly windows going and felt like a fucking king.

My first was Ubuntu in the early 2000s, I think CDs were being distributed by the IT department in one of the faculties, then SUSE but Linux didn't stick with me at the time. In 2018 I installed Manjaro which helped me make the switch to arch. I've also got Debian on a server and fedora on a laptop

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.

I believe it was slackware. it was gifted to teenage me ca 1994, was on the CD of some magazine.

I wanted to try it, so went dual boot. it (or I?) partitioned my 800MB hard disk into a 300MB and an 800MB partition. stupid young me thought this was great and I just gained 300MB. when I noticed date corruption, stupid young me started to copy over important data to the assumed good partition. things didn't end well.

I took a two year break from Linux afterwards 🤣

Mandrake 6.0 in 1998. The kernel was still 2.2, and KDE 1.1.1.

SuSe Linux, I got a CD in the (late?) 2000s and installed it on my old PC. But reality got me pretty fast, I iust wasn't invested yet. Years later I started from scratch on Debian.

Mandrake Linux

Knoppix circa 2004-2005, It was in a cd that came from chip.de. I had no clue what linux was back then. I know even less now.

Mandrake 9

Knoppix live cd

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

All the old timers are coming out. In the summer of ‘98 I switched to Red Hat Linux.

Sadly, Ubuntu. I quickly moved on to debian...and ultimately landed with Arch, my true love for many years. I use Arch, btw.

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.

Lubuntu :O and Kali linux

Ubuntu lol

Slackware in the early mid-nineties. But of course there was other Unix variants before that. And what was it called, OS/2 or something like that?

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.

CentOS

Ubuntu

I used slackware, btw

Red Hat Linux, about 2002 from a CD I got from somewhere.

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 🤩

Slackware 3.1.

Whatever version of Red Hat there was in 1999. 6 point something if memory serves.

I was running Quake 3 servers a few PCs.

slackware, from floppy circa 1996