What was the first ever distro you installed and used? For me, it was Mint as I seemed like the closest thing to Windows minus all the forced updates and chappy changes.
Currently on Fedora GNOME now but what about you? What made you choose your first distro diving into the world of Linux?
I wanna hear your thoughts!
I installed Ubuntu 20.10 because I got tired of Windows and liked the monkey wallpaper.
Pop!_OS in mid 2021. Switched to Fedora GNOME in mid 2022, haven’t looked back, but am looking forward to Fedora COSMIC.
Slackware 1.2. It was easier to install than Debian at the time.
I had the Mandrake Powerpack that came with two books. I basically memorized the entire console handbook while on the loo…
Mint of course, then Manjaro and MXLinux. The weird stuff people recommend. Then Kubuntu, KDE Neon, Fedora KDE and now various Fedora Atomic variants.
- mint crashed randomly
- manjaro is very shady but was awesome, convinced me of KDE
- MXLinux was great but horribly outdated. Will never use a “stable” distro as desktop. Nextcloud was incompatible so I needed to switch
- Kubuntu crashed and many Ubuntu .deb apps where horrible, Flatpaks where awesome
- KDE Neon was an unstable mess and likely still is
- Fedora KDE was nice but also had KDE blackscreens
- Fedora Kinoite also gave me issues but either they are hardware related, or upstream KDE issues, or upstream Kernel issues, etc.
Slackware. 3.x. I was studying computer science and wanted to have a similar system at home as in the lab.
My first distro was Suse Linux 8.1. I had to buy the box as downloading was not an option with my dial-up connection back then. However, the first distro that I fell in love with was Fedora Core. The original one. I bought the book which had the DVD with the full installation. I was hooked. That was more than 20 years ago.
This is really cool man, its wild how much things have changed but those are super endearing.
Mine was an obscure, short-lived distro called LibraNet. It was well done though, by just a father and son team. Unfortunately that was also why it was short lived, because the father passed away.
As for why I picked it, I didn’t really know much about how to choose a distro at the time, so I picked it based on the name, and its description of being easy to use and set up, which it was.
Yggdrasil in 1993. Why? Because it was the easiest to install at the time, and came with one of my books in college.
I think it was SLS. I know it took a pile of floppies. At some point I made a tape to make it easier to install. Why I needed to install that often eludes my aging memory but those experiences still pay to this day.
From the SLS FAQ:
Q: How do I upgrade SLS A: If from .96, you don't. You must re-install from scratch. Otherwise, read the ChangeLog file and download just the needed files manually. Q: Can I install a new version of SLS over an old one? A: Best not to. Save what you want somewhere and use mk[*]fs. SLS may be best for base installs. Updates you can often get anywere on the net. That is, unless you follow the upgrades to SLS religously.Our speciations were slightly lower then.
To this day I still don’t upgrade OSes in general and I even evangelize “rip and replace” professionally so loudly that it’s now enforced via policy at my workplace. This must be where my ethos for this practice originated.
Ubuntu back when it was decent lol. I picked it because everyone said that was a beginner-friendly distro, and I had already used it anyway as my parents had an Ubuntu ASUS laptop when I was little (though atp I didn’t really remember much from using that laptop).
Zorin then AntiX I had a potato PC
Arch was the only thing I could get working on my E200AH when I started. It’s a weird SoC x86_64, with some non-free drivers. Now I can run anything, but the default with arch was figuring out what to do… Debian installer didn’t have a mouse and the keyboard didn’t work right and I just got stuck. Arch installer dropped me into a TTY and made me figure it out
