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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?

330 comments

  • I started with Mandrake 6 when the there were lots of 9's or 0's in the year

    Then bounced from Slackware/opensuse/Red Hat/Debian/Gentoo/BSD

    Now running Kde Neon and MacOS (Debian and BSD as server OSs)

  • Ubuntu in the mid 2000s, but it's PopOS that made me a fulltimer ~2 years ago. I don't use it anymore but I'll always be thankful for it.

  • Debian Slink

    Before that, Windows NT, A/UX, Solaris and VAX/VMS.

    Before that, Vic 20 and Apple II

    Still using Debian every day whilst navigating the perils of MacOS.

  • SuSE in 1996. Then Debian between mid-1997 and late 2023, NixOS since.

    I'm not a big distrohopper...

    • Why NixOS? I've been using Debian since Slink and am interested to hear, what made you move?

      • Not the guy who first commented, but NixOS is fun because you can have the whole config in a git repo, and can easily reproduce. Main drawback is that Nix as a language is insane and that a lot of packages still aren’t available

      • I switched to NixOS because I wanted a declarative system that isnt't yaml soup bolted onto a genetic distro.

        By 2022, my desktop system was an unmanagable mess. It was a direct descendant of the Debian I installed in 1997. Migrated piece by piece, even switched architectures (multiple times! I386->ppc-i386->amd64), but its roots remained firmly in 1997. It was an unsalvagable mess.

        My server, although much younger, also showed signs of accumulating junk, even though it was ansible-managed.

        I tried documenting my systems, but it was a pain to maintain. With NixOS, due to it being declarative, I was able to write my configuration in a literate programming style. That helps immensely in keeping my system sane. It also makes debugging easy.

        On top of that, with stuff like Impermanence, my backups are super simple: btrfs snapshot of /persist, exclude a few things, ship it to backup. Done. And my systems always have a freshly installed feel! Because they are! Every boot, they're pretty much rebuilt from the booted config + persisted data.

        In short, declarative NixOS + literate style config gave me superpowers.

        Oh, and nixos's packaging story is much more convenient than Debian's (and I say that as an ex-DD, who used to be intimately familiar with debian packaging).

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

  • 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.

  • Slackware, of course, but when Debian was first released two years later I obviously switched (and it's been Debian since then).

  • In the early 90’s I downloaded Slackware to floppy disks. It took me several days to make them. Slackware holds a special place in my heart.

    To this day I still use Linux full time. Arch is my go to, but I like and recommend Endeavor often.

  • When I took my Linux class in 2007, he gave us a mountain of distros we could choose from. Ubuntu got picked first and Fedora second. This was mostly due to already having easy installs and a gui to boot with. It was also due to him having shown us these distros beforehand.

    I was third pick. I knew what I wanted right away. My teacher, an extremely smart man with photographic memory, seemed fairly bored with the proceedings. That was until I chose Damn Small Linux as the third overall choice. The grin on his face as he knew he found a student that would be fun to teach and wanted to learn.

    I was fairly sure he expected me to pick openSUSE. It was the third distro he'd shown us installations for and had us play around with. And boy, am I glad I chose Damn Small. I learned so much more than the other teens that were in there just to get an easy credit. He was an easygoing teacher. He didn't fail people really, he let them hang around and play WC3: FT DOTA on LAN if they wanted and still passed them. But boy would he teach you if he knew you really wanted to learn it.

    After that, we had to group in pairs in PC Repair class (same teacher) to take old student's orders to help fix their computers. I was allowed to work alone and he just let me do what I wanted. I stuck to the code, repaired computers, and never snooped through anyone's files. He knew I already could find my way around the Windows Registry (something Microsoft is thinking hard on how to stop you from doing now). He'd also do IT for the school during classes. Whenever he was away, I was allowed to be secondary IT if he was busy. It was easy stuff, mostly printer drivers and wifi troubleshooting.

    It was really thanks to Damn Small Linux. My first project was to get Windows Solitaire running on it. He set it for us to research as homework. When he came over to me that same day, I had already looked up the info and was playing it on the GNOME 2 DE (MATE is still one of my favorite desktops). I just said, "WINE?" and he put a finger to his lips and grinned.

    Thank you for letting an old man waffle on. Those were good times.

330 comments