What distro he uses? 🐧💻

The movie came out in 1999. In the movie, they state that it's 1999 (in the Matrix anyway). Neo is pretty tech savvy and a renowned hacker.

My assumption is he would've used FreeBSD. Or, maybe, Slackware. But I'm leaning more towards BSD.

Nah. It is DOS with Norton Commander.
- I just can't believe I just read the words Norton Commander.
  
  It's like the Proust story where he smells a macaroon and all of a sudden he's remembering an avalanche of things long forgotten.
  
  My brain defragging
- Bwahahahahah
Man I wish FreeBSD hadn't fallen to the wayside. It's really cohesive and feels put together in a way not Linux distro ever has.
- Except it uses push over licensing
- Is it still worth using? Say, for a web dev? Or is it less supported?
- You know, I've never used it. Maybe I'll install it in a VM tonight and give it a whirl.
- I mean, it’s decades older with a history of being used in business critical applications…
In 1999, I bet he was running Gentoo.
- The first release was in 2002.
- Definitely Gentoo
I'd argue that he'd use OpenBSD and be running his own firewall, web server, email server, and ftp server.
PC-BSD
Or SuSE Linux, the non-slackware or jurix version was bleeding edge at the time.
Maybe both? BSD for his server, Slackware for his desktop. Or something.
Remember he presses Ctrl+x to try to get rid of the message on his screen. That's Unix, right?

Realistically, Debian, because it existed when the movie was set.

And also because realistically there's no need for any other distro. :P
- Other distros exist to teach people that Debian is better.
We had tons of Linux distros then. Maybe more than today if you exclude all the Debian clones

Hannah Montana Linux

This, but maybe slackware with the hannah montana ui.
- no sane hacker would choose slackware over hannah montana

KDE NEOn

Real image from the really official archived film 👍 👍

Slackware.

Well, since the movies where one big trans allegory, the answer can only be Arch.

Wut
- Lilly Watchowski has stated as much
With a lot of shots, scenery, and concepts stolen right from the movie Dark City.
- I have to rewatch that gem..

I wanna know what the newsreader he uses is

Looks a bit like the Arachne browser for DOS.
These icons don't make no sense.

I don't know the distro, but surely the messenger is based on Matrix protocol

There is no distro.

Yeah he doesn't distribute it due to privacy and security. He wrote it himself.
- Do not try and hack the distro, that's impossible.
  
  Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no distro.
  
  Then you will realize it isn't the distro you hack, it is only yourself.

I think we all know the real answer, the matrix runs on windows XP

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yX8yrOAjfKM

I don't know but he probably has cmatrix installed.

OpenBSD

Kali

Initial Release: 2013-03-13

Neo lived in 1999.
- In a simulation 1999.
It would have been ~~BackTrack~~ Knoppix back then. And even that wasn't released until 2000.

He is Assembly, Operating Systems require him to operate.

Pretty sure he was using DOS in at least one scene.

UwUntu

i'm sure he runs his own, custom distro he spun himself

Debian, the cool guy distro in 1999. The machine overlords run on Red Hat.

In the low budget parody version, Neo ran Slackware, and the climatic battle was basically about Agent Smith somehow fucking up his libc.so.6 but then Trinity got him a copy of the file on 3.5" floppy from another system. Or something.

Probably debian or slackware, there weren't that many in 1999

There was a lot more that you’d think.
- But most of those were extremely shitty or niche and got abandoned. Except Mandrake. That one was pretty good but I think I remember they were constantly having funding issues.
  
  Mandrake was to Redhat as Ubuntu is to Debian now.
Mandrake, Suse, Corel, Red Hat, Turbo, Conectiva, PLD, Caldera, Rock, Coyote... that's just the more well known distros, there were dozens at that point already.