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?
I think Ubuntu 10.04 or whatever mint version around then
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.
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 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.
CentOS
Puppy Linux. On very old hardware.
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.
Mandrake Linux. I couldn’t tell you what year but I remember booting into it and thinking it was the coolest thing.
Red Hat Linux, about 2002 from a CD I got from somewhere.
My parents had some of the ancient ubuntu (or ubuntu based?) distros that they let me play with, I myself tried Manjaro in 2017 for a month (very scuffed back then), and then full Arch Linux since March or Apr 2021
Haven’t bothered switching since, but if I did, I’m lightly curious on the NixOS hype. Why yes, I just installed Arch Linux for the archbtw, but also it feels like it just works for me at this point (yknow, till the next fuckup akin to the grub2 fiasco)
Manjaro. It broke a few times. Then I used plain arch ca 2 years without anything breaking. (Their was no guided installer yet)
The last 2 years I have been happy with opensuse Tumbleweed. Of course I have experiment a bunch of others too. Including running distros on servers.
That I played with on an old Pentium II rig? The now-defunct Crunchbang (Bunsen Labs is that distro’s successor).
That I actually used as a daily driver? Ubuntu 12.10.
I’ve been daily-driving Linux for well over a decade at this point and have pretty much settled on Arch now after multiple distro-hops in that timespan.
Red Hat 5.1, which I quickly abandoned after learning the hard way about winmodems
Kurumin, a brazilian offshoot of Knoppix, sometime in early 2007 I think. The distro has been discontinued back in 2008. I was completely amazed that the whole OS would boot and work straight out of the CD, without needing to install anything.