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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Slackware in 1998 I think, from a cd that came in a book I bought while in university.
It didn’t stick, but it demystified it and I’ve used a lot of flavours of *nix since then.
I remember not being able to get sound to work at all on my pentium computer.
Ubuntu 8.10 in early 2009, after Windows Vista otherwise bricked my laptop. I've distro-hopped on a few occasions but most of my 16 years of Linux have been on Ubuntu. That said, I moved away from Ubuntu after a failed upgrade to 22.04 LTS, to OpenSUSE and then to KDE Neon, now I'm on Nobara and couldn't be happier.
Debian 🥔
Andromeda Linux around 2009. It had cool astronomy based theme and animation.
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.
in order (2000-present): red hat, slackware, debian, ubuntu, arch, manjaro, nix
Ubuntu - > Mint - > Manjaro - > EndeavourOS - > Nobara - > Arch
Those are the main ones, I've tried others too but all of those were my daily for a while
SUSE Linux, back in the 1990s. Because you could buy it for cheap, and you got not only the huge stack of floppy disks to install it from, but also a set of thick fat detailed handbooks (these things made from paper full of pictures and letters and glued together, like your grandparents may have had). I spent many nights with them books instead of my wife...
It was a bear to install and terribly complicated to configure back then; at least for me. But in the end, I had a nice server running well for a while.
My first was Ubuntu 06.06, but I was only messing around using a live CD. I tried it again with Ubuntu 12.04 when Steam added Linux support, but went back to Windows because gaming on Linux wasn't really there.
Finally decided to dual boot and distro hopped a bit in 2015 between Mint, Kubuntu, then KDE Neon for a bit before settling on Manjaro some time in 2017. Eventually I switched to Arch in 2022 after Manjaro forgot to renew their certs again.
Slackware, in the 90s, installed from floppy disks. I also used SuSE, Debian and now stick with Fedora.
I tried to set up arch, realized I didn’t want that kind of work for a gaming setup and swapped to debian, and i’ve used that since lol
Ubuntu, I hated it lol
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.
Ubuntu in about 2007 when my windows desktop crashed. A friend installed it in place. Never looked back
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 Lucid Lynx
Currently, I use Arch BTW.
I had Slackware running on a couple of 386 machines with 200MB hard disks. It was impossible to do almost anything as it was all compile from source but I didn't have the disk space to install all the compiler tools and what I was trying to run on them. I was originally going to use them as part of a distributed system for my degree, but in the end I didn't use them and did something different instead.
I used CentOS at work a lot for several years and liked it, but only fully switched form Windows at home 10 years ago and I went to Ubuntu at the time. Installed KDE on it, messed around with i3 and had a great time. I then went hopping and landed on Endeavour OS which I've been really enjoying for many years now and have no intention of moving from. All my servers still run Ubuntu LTS Server as it has been unbelievably solid.
OpenSuse sometime around '07
It didn't click, ended up moving to Ubuntu almost immediately. A few years later I moved to Fedora. Circa 2020 I dove into Archlinux and managed that for a couple years. Nowadays as I'm learning server stuff I've switched to Mint.
Ubuntu -- the one with the Nelson Mandela video and the picture of people holding hands in a circle.
Mandrake. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. But I did get it installed.
Mandrake 2003. Followed by Ubuntu server 5.10 in 2005.
Switched to Debian in 2020, been on Debian since.
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 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.
elementary os in 2016. I still use eos on my desktop machine, mainly because it's kinda ubuntu but not quite. Running Fedora on one of my laptops, the rest are running macos
It's hard to remember but it was some version of Mandrake probably in the early 2000's. At the time, they were one of the only distros (along with Red Hat) to offer an installation GUI. As a first time user I found partitioning a hard drive too complex to do on the command line.
I only used Mandrake for a short time before reverting to windows but it wasn't long after that when I came back and then started using Debian. Since then I went back to Windows then to OpenSuSe, then Debian, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, and now Pop!_OS.
I started with Ubuntu back when you could put in your parent's home address and they sent you free CDs. I'm on Arch (since about 2010), and I can't change.
I bought one of those Guide to Linux books back in like 2008 that came with an Ubuntu install disc. Installed it on an old family PC but I didn't really know what I was doing so I didn't get far.
Then in college I used Mint on my desktop and Peppermint on my Acer Aspire netbook. Around graduation I bought a Chromebook and ran Xubuntu in Crouton.
Went a few years without Linux and recently dual-booted with Pop OS on my gaming PC. Feels good.
Ubunutu for a server in ~2019 Arch for my workstation Jan 2025
Started with Mint and stuck with that for a year. No issues, just felt comfortable enough to try something "fancier", I guess Mint was a little too reliable lol. Went with PopOS a while for the native dock and tiling manager, loved it. Now I'm on a brand new PC build and enjoying gaming with Bazzite. No tinkering involved, it setup my 5070 Ti automatically.
Ubuntu 6.06 was my first Linux install. I still remember the pain of ndiswrapper to get Windows WiFi drivers working on Linux.
arch linux since december
I use arch btw
and I use hyprland btw
Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron. I miss loving Ubuntu
Same, really nice distro back then.
Same! I remember getting Warcraft 3 to run with wine. Ubuntu used to be exciting...
XanderOS way tf back in 2005 or 2006, but mostly just messed around and had no clue what I was doing with it... After that I did a Gentoo install. Been kinda off and on with Linux since, flirting with the possibility of switching to it fully but never actually making the jump until last year when I built a new machine and put Mint on it.
