Redhat 2.1, a cd stuck to a huge book
7.0.90 here, that one had kernel 2.4. Been a minute.
Wow, nice! I started on 6.1.
Ubuntu, before Unity came along
to be fair gnome3 was a hot steaming pile of shit when it released, and was still bad for literal years. i say that as a gnome user, but i’m sorry, it was unusable for a big stretch of time there.
as much as i dislike canonical for pushing snaps, Unity makes sense to me under that light.
Slackware 3.0 in 1996
Then this new promising distro called Debian
Got my own PC, went with Slackware again for some God-forsaken reason
Debian again and that’s where I’ve stayed for most part - I tried using Ubuntu as a desktop laptop distro for a while but at some point I realised I should have installed Debian to begin with so I went with that there too
Slackware on 3.5" floppy’s FTW!
Slackware for me at about the same time. Installed from 3.5" floppys.
Knoppix STD
Klaus would be proud
Mandrake mid 1990s
My people! Their screenshot gallery was the sole reason I got into Linux back when I was in the sixth grade. The skills I learned by using it as my daily driver got me a job at a web hosting company and started a very fulfilling career.
I’ve still got my Mandrake 9.2 CDs somewhere that a friend burned for me. Didn’t dig the rebranding to Mandriva.
Ubuntu, it was an on-off-relationship until I finally made it
Slackware.
Me too, on floppy disks, kernel 2.0.something… I remember I struggled to get X11 running, so I tried with redhat next
Getting X to work required mucking about with a textfile where you specified parameters directing the operation of the electron gun inside a CRT monitor that were so down to the metal, that you could create your own resolution or even blow up your monitor.
Ah, those were the days ;)
Same. The year was 1997…
Red hat on a disc from a for dummies book at the library.
Same here. Red Hat 5 from the Linux for Dummies book.
Fedora from 2015, to circumvent my school laptop’s OS with it installed on a USB stick.
Mandrake Linux. I’m old, I know 😊
There is another :D
The first I tried was Ubuntu 7.04 but I didn’t stick with it and went back to XP. Until I ended up with a hardware setup that wouldn’t work on Windows XP (widescreen monitor + Intel graphics driver with no widescreen mode options) but worked perfectly on Ubuntu 9.10. I never truly went back to Windows since.
Tried a few other distros in 2011 then switched to Arch for a couple years, Xubuntu for a couple years, Ubuntu GNOME for 7-8 years, and finally switched to Fedora last year.
When I saw the numbers “7.04” I immediately heard the login drum-like sound “bu-du-bup” and remembered Feisty Fawn. It’s one of my fondest computer memories. It felt like a friend.
Yggdrasil LGX, back in ‘93.
Damn, you got in on like the ground floor haha
It was quite the interesting thing to run back then — it was all very “Wild West” of software, and a LOT of stuff didn’t work well.
It wasn’t my daily driver; it really wasn’t ready for most workloads back then. But it was nearly free, and we shared around the CD-ROM amongst hacker friends interested in giving it a try.
I attempted to install RedHat 5 in the late 90s, but I had no idea what I was doing since I was like 12 or 13 and we had just gotten our first computer. I never got around to actually using Linux until a few years later with Ubuntu 5.04
You can learn a ton installing your own OS, even if you don’t get things working in the end. Especially back in the 90’s when things weren’t quite as plug-and-play and hardware auto-detection was immature. So even if your RedHat experiment failed, good on you for attempting it anyway!
Removed by mod
Slackware 3.5 because my friend thought it’d be funny and didn’t tell me fuck all about distros.
Helped me learn a lot though.
Could you hand me the X floppy?
Ubuntu Server 14.04. Years later I tried Arch+Win10 dual boot, but during a forced update, Windows ate the boot partition and then unalived itself. That’s when I nuked the SSD and hard-switched to Manjaro (first daily driver, never had Windows since), later Endeavour, and most recently, Arch. If/when Arch breaks, I’ll most likely hop to Nix.
