Linux

Ubuntu, before Unity and eventually Gnome desktop 🫢

Ubuntu

openSUSE

SuSE in 2003

What's the wallpaper?

Debian 💖

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.

Yggdrasil in 1998 or so.

Redhat.

Stuck with redhat on the server, had another server with Gentoo, and then Mepis and Debian for desktop.

Now days its arch and fedora.

Ubuntu, installed on a 256 gb flash drive as an experiment back in 2020. My first daily driver distro was Mint last year, then KDE Neon, and finally Kubuntu today

Distro doesn't matter to me anymore, I just like the Plasma DE and will use anything that uses it. Eventually I'm gonna have to try Arch with it and make my own Steam machine

redhat 5.5

Debian 🥔

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 🤩

Andromeda Linux around 2009. It had cool astronomy based theme and animation.

Pretty sure tails os :P

My first was Ubuntu in a VM because everyone recommended it, I distro hopped in VMs until I just ended up using Mint in a VM almost exclusively. It was when I complained to someone about the issues with the VM when locking the laptop and they asked me “Why not just run that system as-is?” that I installed it for real.

I've also used Manjaro for half a year, a very minimal Arch+i3 install (without the install script because I wanted the “real experience”) for about 1.5 year, and dual booted Bazzite and Mint on my gaming PC for a year (it's just Mint now), all the while trying out other distros big and small on older hardware or in VMs.

I don't feel I've found “the one”, but somehow I keep coming back to Mint... Although, perhaps NixOS is it... Who knows?

Some random shitty distribution for netbooks.

Then Ubuntu 11.04 and I have very fond memories of it. But now Ubuntu sucks.

Using Debian 13 with KDE currently.

Mandrake Linux

It was Ubuntu 14.10 (still had Unity) installed on a Mac mini to run a Plex server. I actually really liked Ubuntu then, it was all new and very different to Windows. I had it hooked up to a TV and used the DE to maintain it I.e console, update app etc.

There was this really annoying error that would occur every time it would boot which drove me to look elsewhere. Ended up trying Arch and didn't put a DE on there because I started to get comfortable with the terminal and SSHing in.

I eventually installed Arch on my desktop and dual booted for a couple years using XFCE. Once I discovered KDE there was no going back.

I haven't used Windows on any of devices for years, all running Fedora and KDE.

Mandrake

I first tried Mandrake for a couple days in the late 9ps because I heard it was easy. It was definitely easy to brick my system and have no idea why!

So I switched to Slackware and never looked back. I'm still daily driving Slackware all these years later.

I started with mint because of ppl recommending it. Absolutely hated it. Luckly I watched a YouTube video about installing arch. So then I tried it and loved it. Then manjaro for about 2 years. Then back to arch. Then finally Nixos, and I dont plan on ever switching again. I have Nixos on every system I own now, and a few friends machines. Those are just the main ones. I tried all the other popular ones out on my laptop. Except gentoo.

TLDR: Mint🙁>Arch😄>manjaro🙂>arch😄>NixOs😁

redhat 4.1 or maybe 5.2 back around 1996-1998 (plus a freebsd release around the same time). I got a pile of probably 15 discs from walnut creek and they were the only two I could get running. I didn't have internet access at the time.

My first linux distribution was Linux From Scratch (LFS). I printed like 300 pages at the school library so I could run it at home. My first real distribution was Gentoo or Damn Small Linux.

It started with Red Hat 6.1 in 1999 and ended up with NixOS.

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx

Currently, I use Arch BTW.

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn.

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

Manjaro -> openSuse tumbleweed -> Fedora (Desktop) and tuxedoOS (Laptop)

My first steps were with Debian 2.0 and a Suse Version from about the same time. But that was not very successful so I went back to Windows for about a year and then really got into Linux with Gentoo. I had a year of not much to do, had to wait a year to get into University, and I decided to install the complicated Linux Distribution that I could find.

Reasoning was: It will break a lot if it is so complicated, due to this I am forced to learn while repairing it.

I used slackware, btw

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

Linux Mint XFCE, it was easy to setup and could run on my really old laptop.