Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

Linux Mint

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 ;)

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.

God I am old, I remember before kali rebranded 😭.

Phlak and Knoppix were mine. Neither lasted long since I couldn't install it on my home computer. The first one I installed as a dual boot was Ubuntu. While I have strayed from them over the years they have been my daily driver for the better part of 15 years

Ubuntu back in 2005.

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.

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

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!

The first distro I used was Ubuntu as part of a computer class at school, but it was preinstalled on a school computer. The first distro I installed on a personal computer was Arch because le reddit said it was le epic hackerman's IMPOSSIBLE CHALLENGE TO INSTALL distro. It installed, and after that I didn't use it because my favorite Windows apps couldn't work.

Back in 2004, I had a SuSE Linux professional 9.2 on 5 CDs and 2 DVDs. I repeat: SEVEN DISKS!! Even without internet access - which I did not have at that time - it felt like all apps accessible through packet manager. You just had to swap discs when prompted. I just took it out in fond memory... SuSE Linux 9.2

My first one was OpenSUSE in the 00-years. I was hardly able to get it up and running on my worn out, home-build desktop.

Tried again later with ubuntu (Gnome) on an old Thinkpad and was taken aback about how smooth it ran just ootb.

Ubuntu on 1st year of college

Ubuntu 18.04

The first distro I used was Guadalinex, a distro developed by my Government (Andalusia, Spain) for education. I used it at school.

The first distro I installed was Ubuntu.

The first distro I daily drived was Fedora.

I first tried Ubuntu because it was the only one I knew of besides arch and I heard that arch was hard. I hated Ubuntu immediately and started distro hopping. I'm on Debian 12 now and it's the longest I've been on a single distro.

The first time I used Linux was at an old job, and we used Xubuntu for desktop, Debian for servers, and Raspbian on the Raspberry Pis, but technically Xubuntu would have been the first. I currently use KDE neon as my daily driver

I tried Caldera first, but could never get it to boot. The first one I managed to actually use was Ubuntu 5.10, and that's what got Linux to be my daily driver. Lots of distro-hopping later, I'm still daily driving Linux, Debian these days.

I think it was mint or elementry

I played with SuSE 6.2 for a while in 1999 but only really turned to Linux in 2001 with Mandrake Linux 8.0.

My first contact with linux was with Ubuntu Server 14.04 when I started my first minecraft project with a friend. We decided to try setting up the server on a VPS instead of using a hosting provider that takes care of all the setup and stuff automatically. That was one heck of a journey, but gave me a good quickstart into linux. Nowadays I use linux as a daily driver at home and for the entirety of my server infrastructure.

Had to use red hat for a cyber security class in college, but I tinkered with Ubuntu back in highschool. I had no idea what I was doing lmao

Slackware. And it was a bitch to get everything working is all I remember.

attempted Debian and Suse, but first one I got installed and actually used for awhile was a Stage 1 Gentoo build

Slackware to start with, then redhat which seemed very slick and convenient in comparison. Had to drive all the way across the city to buy it on several CDs from some bloke cos my dial up internet was not up to the task. Then I found Debian and stuck with it for about 20yrs, but I think I had some kind of broadband by that point.

Some version of Ubuntu around the time they were doing the Ubuntu phone

Fedora from a cd around 2006

Fedora, then moved on Debian after I did break my install 😌 No windows since 2013 and snowden reveals.

My mom brought me a disk of mandrake Linux. I tried it and I was pretty lost.

Ubuntu, which I pretty much only installed so I could also install compiz fusion because it looked badass. Nothing like a 3D cube for my multiple desktops, and windows that jiggle when I move them and burn up when I close them.

I think mint, but after that Ubuntu and kubuntu since ~gutsy.

Corel Linux, I doubt anyone else here knows it especially used it. Very user friendly, got me into linux.

Red Hat mid 90s and then Slackware, Red Hat was more polished but I learnt so much more from Slackware.

Caldera, followed by redhat followed by Slackware which I stayed on for quite a while.

Officially it was Raspberry Pi OS although I had messed around with Mint and Ubuntu a bit before that.

Ubuntu -> Manjaro -> Pop! OS

Slackware. Don't remember the version.

The first I had for work was Ubuntu.

Ubuntu > OpenSuse > Mint

Tried some others along the way but didn't liked them.

Mandrake 7.1 - it was aweful.

I couldn't run Linux on my PC due too lack of hardware support at the time, but FreeBSD had support, so I ran that for a couple of years until Linux caught up.

At that time, there wasn't much choice when it came to distros. These days, it's a little bit of everything. Arch on my daily driver, RHEL on my ERP and DB servers, Ubuntu server on my Dev server, and I'm planning on deploying NixOS across the 700 PCs at our different locations.

Manjaro for a while. It broke a few times and then I started using Nix os, until I started using Endeavour.

Debian... would recommend

I distrohopped at the start, no idea what I started with but the first one I settled on was Solus. Still a big fan of Budgie, and the OS felt easy to use, yet had the possibility to download stuff like Spotify as well.

Zenwalk. Not sure why...