Linux

am a simple noob who started with Mint, and remain on Mint on my main gaming machine.

i have fun distro-hopping on my other old, cheap laptops though

My first was Ubuntu 14.04. and then 16.04. at school 💀. as early as 2015 iirc

Though Blackbox or Kali might be a contender too (one of the distros my father had installed for fun)

I had rly cool CS teachers, which also administered our infrastructure

then we used Linux Mint in the "Linux" club run by one of said teachers

For personal use, my first one was Manjaro in 2018 (I switched to it with a Windows dual boot, I got rid of Windows entirely in 2020 I think?). Somewhere I switched to Endeavour OS, tried out OpenSuse Tumbleweed on my laptop and eventually settled on Fedora bc of the Grub fiasco Arch had. Am using it to this day.
Though it's in the form of Nobara on my desktop; I also plan on switching to Bluefin eventually

Mandrake Linux

My first distro was the Asahi Linux Beta which was using Arch Linux ARM. EDIT: Now I use Void Linux

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

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 🤩

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

Ubuntu > Mint > Manjaro > Arch > PopOS > Debian

(History, not ranking [Debian wins])

SuSE in 2003

Turbo Linux in the late 90s. It didn't go well.

Later I gave Redhat a shot - 5.0 or 5.1, I forget. Stayed with RH and now Fedora.

Yellow Dog Linux ~2004 or so

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 🤣

I used slackware, btw

I inherited a Sony Vaio in 2009 which was really slow with windows, but unsurprisingly was ok once I swapped that out for Ubuntu 9.04. Took me a while to get the brightness up as the buttons didn't respond, but I kept that machine running for 7 years, the HDD controller died in the end so it stopped detecting any HDD.

Mandriva. Yes, old and no longer exist. Forst distro i started to to use permantly on desktop is Fedora. The server has always been Ubuntu since the Mandriva time when I first learned about Linux. I think 2005. CS server etc. Desktop was 2024 when MS screwed up Windows too much

Ubuntu. But I think that will be almost everyones answer who starter with Linux in the late-mid 2000s.

Edit: Oh wait. Might have been Knoppix to resuce some data from a broken windows installation.

Deepin in 2019 or so. Yeah don't ask...

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

Slackware96 from Walnut Creek purchased at Staples back when software came in boxes with manuals. Netscape Navigator 3.0 anyone?

Ubuntu lol

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, before Unity and eventually Gnome desktop 🫢

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

The first was about 1995-ish Redhat on school computers, after that was Suse on a 2000s laptop, and currently Mint+Mx on a self-built pc. Hardware support and ease of use has come a long way since then.

OpenSuse with compiz going hard on an old laptop

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.

Mandrake 9

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.

Ubuntu Karmic Koala. To be fair, I was a kid and that was, according to people on the Internet, the most likely to work. And so it did - it had out of the box support for my wifi adapter, which some other distros I tried later did not, I had to use something called ndiswrapper. Of course I did not yet know about compiling my own configured kernel, that came a month or 2 later.

I only stayed on Ubuntu for a while, then tried Mint, used that on and off for years, dabbled with Arch at some point, too. In the last 5 years I've used PopOs, Gentoo, OpenSuse, NixOS. I'm not gonna bother with capitalization and punctuation on some of these.

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

It depends how you define it. I first installed Slackware at work on a retired IBM PS/2 in '94 or '95, because somebody was working on MicroChannel bus support. (That never materialized.) Later, we checked out Novell Linux Desktop, maybe Debian, too. At a later job, we had some Red Hat workstations, version 5 or 6, and I had Yellow Dog Linux on an old Power Mac.

At home, I didn't switch to Linux until Ubuntu Breezy Badger. It was glorious to install it on a laptop, and have all of the ACPI features just work. I had been running FreeBSD for several years, NetBSD on an old workstation before that, and Geek Gadgets (a library for compiling Unix programs on Amiga OS) before that.

Debian 💖

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.

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.

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.

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.