Ask Lemmy

Attempted to use Red Hat 4 (pre-RHEL), but couldn't work out the partitioning. However, I tried SuSE Linux Personal 7.0 soon afterwards and YaST gave me a much smoother time when installing everything; I've been using SUSE/openSUSE ever since as my primary Linux distro.

Knoppix. Was recommended it by someone I chatted with at the time and that did not go well. This was not Knoppix's fault though, but rather me not knowing what I got into. Things worked as one would expect, the applications that were included ran without issues, but the issue came when wanted to install software. At the time didn't know anything about linux, so didn't know how to use the terminal to install software, and when trying to install new ones using exe files that didn't work for now obvious reasons. So threw that stuff out and went back to windows, and didn't touch Linux again until Ubuntu Hardy Heron which went a lot better.

I don't actively use Linux anymore but I think I first used puppy Linux in middle school. I was a strange kid and got a kick out of anything that could run off a flash drive.

Then I'd use like Ubuntu, lubuntu, and mint typically. I'm back to using windows because I only really use my computer for gaming and I honestly had a rare gift for bricking distros by installing something wrong.

VoyagerOS - no idea about anything other than Windows being a thing, less of a clue about what I was doing, think I read something about it being lightweight and guessed it fit my needs.

Arch. Went in at the deep end.

Suffice to say that I no longer use Linux. Got it built with relative ease though inevitably hit issues along the way, but got tired of having to use terminal for everything. Would not recommend Arch as your first distro unless you already love existing in a terminal.

Some version of Ubuntu. I forgot which version number.

Hard to remember because it was in 2000 on my gateway PC, but I remember trying to setup Gentoo and redhat and knoppix and failing miserably.

Backtrack then crunchbang. Eventually I moved to arch. I've been using debian and mint lately though.

for me it was: Puppy Linux for a desktop machine with 254MB of RAM when I was on 1-2nd semester in Preparatory School

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Immediately liked the interface, but was bummed by lack of software and (expected) subpar performance on my shitty hardware. Went back to Windows 7 after a month or so. It took me quite a lot of hopping between many Linux distros and Windows to finally settle on Manjaro as my desktop OS of choice

Debian 2.2 on a consulting job in 2001. I'd used Unix mainframes in college, but other than that had only ever done work on DOS and Windows before then. Didn't think much of it at the time, though it was familiar and easy to work with. Certainly a far cry from the experience we all have with Linux today.

Redhat 4.? I'm not really sure of the precise version but it was sometime in the late 99 or early 2000.

Ubuntu 8.04, and I got it on one of those free discs they used to send out.

RHEL 2.3, still have the cd somewhere

Ubuntu sometime in the late 2000's. I remember a friend showing me virtual desktops that rotated between each other.

I dual booted my machine and it was amazing... For 10 seconds until I realized thats all it did. When right back to windows.

Redhat lol back in the 90’s

Kubuntu 6.06. Got the CD with a computer magazine that had a good tutorial on how to install the thing next to a pre-existing Windows partition. To this day I miss the look of KDE 3!

Not sure but it was slackware or red hat in 1997

Installed and tinkered with Mandrake 6.0 First full time: Ubuntu 04-10. Warty Warthog

Slackware 7, year 2000. Never seen linux before. Thanks to help from IT geek next door managed to boot net-installer it from single 3.5". After many hours managed do finally get xfree86 working. As far as I remember it was running with KDE.

Linux Mint

I forget whether I did Mandrake or Redhat first. This was on a 3.5" floppy, heh.

Old GenToo, when I finally got off of dial-up, was an interesting experience. Building everything from the ground up definitely taught me a lot.

These days, I mostly use Ubuntu at home (and various at work). I may give mint a shot, however.

Deepin

I probably played with some Ubuntu live CDs beforehand, since you could order them for free, but the first time actually using it was back in 2004-2005. I had gotten one of the first AMD 64 bit laptops, with 32 bit Windows and I wanted to see what 65 bit “could do”. So I installed Ubuntu as a dual boot setup. Worked quite well! I played around a lot with customising the experience, making my desktop 3D with Compiz. Great times! I also remember the lack of game support it had, I could only play OpenTTD on it. How times have changed! I’m now running Linux full time on my game machine (EndeavourOS) and haven’t touched Windows in a long time.

SuSe Linux from an installation CD about twenty years ago. A right royal pain in the arse it was.

i think the first one i tried was Ubuntu 7.04 when i was just messing around with linux on an old Windows XP Machine. A few years later I ran Mint on my laptop and now I'm kind of getting back into it with Manjaro on my current old laptop lol.

No better way to learn about linux than to just try it out

I think it was Debian! My dad had an old cd of it and we live booted into it for fun like almost 20 years ago.

My first distro was SlackWare 7.

I'm not anywhere near my desktop(s) but it has largely been an Ubuntu box of differing flavors.

Though I experimented with Yoper, Knollix, SuSe, Mint, and a few other distros.

Some version of Ubuntu. I got a free laptop that didn't have an operating system so I just put linux on it because I didn't want to buy windows.

Ubuntu back in 2005.

I spent weeks installing Linux in 2002, finally got it up and running and was like wow this is barely usable.

Turns out I had a fundamental misunderstanding, and there were pre-made distributions of it for you to use! Took me two years to realize that. Picked up Ubuntu and it just worked (other than wifi)

DLD 5 in 1998, a colleague at work handed me a CDR and said "i think this might be something for you", and he was right ;)

My first distro was OpenSUSE (or SuSE Linux back then) sometime around 2002. I picked it up out of curiosity in a book shop. They were selling the handbook, bundled with a DVD with the actual OS. It looked something like this. And thus started decades of distro hopping.

I can't remember if it was Ubuntu or openSUSE, but I read about both in a PC magazine around 2005-2006 and had to try them out. I'm guessing it was probably openSUSE as it has a cooler logo.

I am not really sure but I think it was yggdrasil. I remember loading a ton of floppies one after the other. 5 1/4 inch ones too!

Mandrake like in 2003.

Started using Linux a year ago. My friend recommended Manjaro (not a good distro) because he himself used Arch. I was a little to stupid to use Manjaro at the time so I moved to Ubuntu, then Kali and finally Arch which is what I use now. I have practiced some distrohopping with Arco, Vanilla, Archcraft and my favourite Gentoo.In the future I want to dabble with LFS and Gentoo but I do see myself using Arch from this point forward. Linux is such an amazing operating system and it has taught me very much. Also use Neovim.