What was your first Linux distribution?
I'm new to #Lemmy and making myself feel at home by posting a bit!
My first Linux distribution was elementary OS in early March 2020. Since then, I’ve tried Manjaro, Arch Linux, Fedora, went back to Manjaro, and since early January 2023, I’ve landed on Debian as my home in the #Linux world.
What was your first Linux distro?
The thoughtful, capable, and ethical replacement for Windows and macOS ⋅ elementary OS
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the_visitor
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈
in reply to the_visitor • • •the_visitor
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Thorned_Rose
in reply to the_visitor • • •My monitor is visible to a public footpath and I honestly am waiting for the day that I get a knock on the door from the cops because Jo Public saw me do a system update
sudo pacman _Syu 💀
Buffalox
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Now I use Manjaro, because I like the rolling release concept, and it's easy to use different kernels, and it's a good KDE distro IMO.
In my experience it's also among the best for Steam games.
wildbus8979
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •sramder
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Welcome to Lemmy stranger.
Slackware back in the early 90s on a Compaq 386/SX20 💾
curbstickle
in reply to sramder • • •Also Slackware!
But I skipped from my 286 to a Pentium 133 (then went a bit backwards to a 486 dx100, then ahead to some cyrix and AMD).
sramder
in reply to curbstickle • • •curbstickle
in reply to sramder • • •Such a wild time... I started building PCs for people (even my gym teacher), it was so fun - and yeah, such a huge jump every time!
Now I have the same build for nearly 15 years with upgrades along the way, and my servers are all decom'd t/m/m PCs.
Edit: Jump had a typo
PetteriPano
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Slackware in 1997.
I ran it on a 486SX/40 with 32MB of RAM and a 2GB harddrive.
It turned me into the man I am today.
Spider89
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Ubuntu > Mint > Manjaro > Arch > PopOS > Debian
(History, not ranking [Debian wins])
474D
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •BlueÆther
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •I started with Mandrake 6.1 when the there were lots of 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)
cygnus
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •harsh3466
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 somewhere around 2000. Ran that for a year or two until the PC it was on died.
Next time I was able to run it was 2008ish on a pos dell laptop on which I installed Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). When that laptop died a year or so later I went macOS and was happy there until about 2022ish.
Now I'm running it across several machines for different purposes.
Arch dualbooting OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my tinkering laptop.
Ubuntu Server 22.04 on my server (started with 18.04)
Fedora 41 on family computers/laptops
Asahi on the last bit of Apple hardware left in the house
Raspberry Pi OS on a number of PiS serving different purposes.
☂️-
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •darklamer
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •buh [she/her]
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •ubuntu some time in 2010, but I eventually switched to fedora in 2011, went back to commercial operating systems (windows and macos) in the mid 10s, but returned to fedora some months ago, and that's what I'm using now (I do still have a macbook running macos lol 🤷♀️)
strangely I don't think I've tried other linux distros all these years, I may have tried to install gentoo and/or arch for meme reasons but gave up and went back to ubuntu and fedora
LeFantome
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Started with Soft Landing Systems (SLS). Pre-Slackware. Many hours downloading floppy disk images at school.
Moved to Red Hat (pre-Fedora and pre-RHEL) until I think 7.3 or so and then Mandrake. I did trial runs with many distros over time but none of them really stuck. Fedora for a release or two. Spent a few years on Manjaro for desktop and CentOS for server. Have been on Arch for many years now (or EndeavourOS). Never used Ubuntu really.
Moved to Proxmox for server. Although I never used Debian historically, quite a few of the containers I have on Proxmox now are Debian based as is Proxmox itself.
Lately, I have been using Chimera Linux for desktop though I have an Arch Distrobox on it so I guess I am a bit of a hybrid at this point.
chronicledmonocle
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •MessyEh
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Mike
in reply to MessyEh • • •Me as well. I don't remember where / how I got the CD. Linux as a desktop has come so far since then!
This brought back some memories:
mandrakelinux.org/
Linux-Mandrake Home
www.mandrakelinux.orgseestheday
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •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.
urandom
in reply to seestheday • • •Billegh
in reply to urandom • • •Slackware was my first intel Linux. First linux ever was red hat for DEC alpha. Quite weird after OSF/1.
Still use slackware, though mostly now actual work is done on debian, arch, and alpine.
mrgnz
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Rawrosaurus
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •It was Slackware... Back in the late 90s. Do not ask me about how kid me managed that, all I recall is endless terminals, kernel panics and eventually getting a desktop through some arcane means I can't remember.
I didn't return to linux for many years after that experience.
I still have the 1996 edition of Slackware Linux Unleashed and the CD in my bookshelf as a reminder.
AnUnusualRelic
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •One of the first slackware (so many floppies) on my mighty 486 DX 50. Linux wasn't at 1.0 yet at the time.
Linux (many versions) has been my daily driver ever since, with windows as a gaming backup a lot of the time. I still have it on a single machine because of VR :‐/
The Menemen
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Ubuntu. But I think that will be almost everyones answer who started with Linux in the late-mid 2000s.
Edit: Oh wait. Might have been Knoppix to resuce some data from a broken windows installation.
emb
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •oKtosiTe
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •SuSE, about 1999, although I didn’t really start ‘getting’ Linux until I tried Slackware a couple of years later.
After that I’ve just been bouncing between trusty old Debian and different distros based on it.
Edit: I’ve also tried Gentoo, Arch and Mandrake briefly many years ago.
Eggyhead
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •starshipwinepineapple
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Ubunutu for a server in ~2019.
Arch for my workstation Jan 2025
nfreak
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Ubuntu at the start of my college years, dabbled with Arch in the senior year. Huge learning experience, but ultimately I went back to Windows because gaming support was nonexistent at the time. Kept the dual boot up and kept it running Arch during the day for coursework, Windows when I was all done.
For the past decade since then I was entirely back on Windows. Aside from an Ubuntu VM for my last job, I didn't really get back into it until the Steam Deck launched a few years ago, and at the start of this year I decided to set up a dual boot again once I got a new full new desktop build. Tried Bazzite, really didn't like how restricted I felt, immediately wiped it and tried out CachyOS instead, and that's my daily driver today.
And just this past week I finally decided got into selfhosting, something I've been eyeballing for ages but never really got around to. Proxmox on the host, Debian VM, pretty standard and works amazingly.
vandsjov
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Debian 3.1, but was not successful in getting X to work, but didn’t put a lot of effort into it. Then I got Mandrake running with X, but went back to Windows. On a small computer, I got FreeBSD running as a server but never used it, so that went away again. Knoppix a couple of times to recover data from failed Windows installations.
Yeah, it’s not until recently that I installed Debian 12 on a old work laptop and was very impressed. Now I’m on the fence of having a stable distribution or sumthin with newer packages. I love the philosophy of Debian and the wide usage on servers but Arch is personally also up my alley, however I have not used it at all.
lemming741
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •lagoon8622
in reply to lemming741 • • •Oh yeah well I still boot Bell Labs Unix that I load off of punch cards
^^^That's ^^^awesome ^^^that ^^^you ^^^used ^^^Slackware, ^^^I'm ^^^just ^^^joking
Unmapped
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •I started with mint because of ppl recommending it. Absolutely hated it. Luckily I watched a YouTube video about installing arch. So then I tried it and loved it. Then manjaro for about 2 years. Then back to arch. Then finally Nixos, and I dont plan on ever switching again. I have Nixos on every system I own now, and a few friends machines. Those are just the main ones. I tried all the other popular ones out on my laptop. Except gentoo.
TLDR: Mint🙁>Arch😄>manjaro🙂>arch😄>NixOs😁
phantomwise
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •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 🤩
Matriks404
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Some random shitty distributions for netbooks.
Then Ubuntu 11.04 and I have very fond memories of it. But now Ubuntu sucks.
Last
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Hotzilla
in reply to Last • • •AugustWest
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Redhat.
Stuck with redhat on the server, had another server with Gentoo, and then Mepis and Debian for desktop.
piranhaconda
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Whatever Ubuntu was available in 2015. I only dabbled in Linux over the past 10 years. More seriously switching over in the last year or so.
I have Unraid as a server OS (~~Debian~~ slackware based, running a lot of docker containers and a couple VMs). Debian on my laptop. And Bazzite (fedora based) on my Lenovo Legion Go.
Still need to swap my gaming PC from windows. May try Bazzite on that as well. I've also tried Mint, Manjaro, and Zorin
starman2112
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Ubuntu, installed on a 256 gb flash drive as an experiment back in 2020. My first daily driver distro was Mint last year, then KDE Neon, and finally Kubuntu today
Distro doesn't matter to me anymore, I just like the Plasma DE and will use anything that uses it. Eventually I'm gonna have to try Arch with it and make my own Steam machine
pyu :3
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •EDIT: Now I use Void Linux
helvetpuli
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •untakenusername
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •arch linux
I use arch btw
and I use hyprland btw
toddestan
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •My first Linux install was Slackware sometime in the late 90's. I didn't really use it though, as I never managed to get it working with my dial-up Internet. Stupid winmodems.
The first distribution I actually used was Mandrake. Others I've used since then include Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS. I've landed on using Manjaro on both my main desktop and laptop, though I have secondary machines running Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, and EndeavourOS.
Matty Roses
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •qweertz (they/she)
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •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 20220 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
DFX4509B
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •That I played with on an old Pentium II rig? Crunchbang.
That I actually used as a daily driver? Ubuntu 12.10.
kylian0087
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •Manjaro. It broke a few times. Then I used plain arch ca 2 years without anything breaking. (Their was no guided installer yet)
The last 2 years I have been happy with opensuse Tumbleweed. Of course I have experiment a bunch of others too. Including running distros on servers.
Clairvoidance
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •My parents had some of the ancient ubuntu (or ubuntu based?) distros that they let me play with, I myself tried Manjaro in 2017 for a month (very scuffed back then), and then full Arch Linux since March or Apr 2021
Haven't bothered switching since, but if I did, I'm lightly curious on the NixOS hype. Why yes, I just installed Arch Linux for the archbtw, but also it feels like it just works for me at this point (yknow, till the next fuckup)
nightmare786
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •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
Broken
in reply to nightmare786 • • •There's something about simplicity that is underated.
Technically my first ditro was SuSE a loooong time ago but I didn't stick with it. Then back when Ubuntu became he new hit thing I tried that, but again didn't stick with it.
I have now loaded up Mint and that's the one I'm running with. Mind you, all distros have come a long way since my prior Linux dealings but Mint is the one to make me permanently switch.
fmstrat
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •folaht
in reply to Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🌈 • • •