7mo ago

Nostalgic Distros?

I tired Linux a few times in the past, but didn’t really start using seriously until 2019. I love poking around old OSs and distros, and I want to spin a few up in some VMs my next free evening.

Any suggestions? Open to any distro (or let’s be honest, DE). Any versions that holds a special place in your heart or that’s exceptionally novel? Really interested to see what’s out there!

72 comments

Early Knoppix live CDs have a special place in my heart
- I wonder whatever happened to Knoppix. All I've been able to find online is speculation and questions.
- Same. I also have an old Backbox distro that I used daily for years and every once in a while fire it back up for shits and giggles.
- Yeah, Knoppix was kind of a 'Tucows vibe' distro. Pretty approachable.
  Zen Linux was another short-lived 2005 liveDistro, which had a nice feel and Art.
  Also, installing all https://trisquel.info/ versions side-by-side and doing a 17 year fast-forward would be cool.

Hanna Montana Linux, just for giggles
- AmogOS too
- Gonna recommend this to all my co workers.
  It is not vulnerable to Windows viruses.
  :-)

Anyone else get free Ubuntu CDs shipped to their house? I think I had 7.10 (Gusty Gibbon) shipped to my house back in 2007.
Otherwise, Mandrake Linux was my first "good" distro. I first tried one called Lycoris which claimed to be an beginner's distro with it's own DE, and it was impressive how well it handled setting up a dual boot installation and at the time it was a revelation that I could use a computer without Windows. I didn't begin preferring linux until I tried Mandrake with KDE 3, though.
- YESS!!
- Yes, I remember these days. I had a few Ubuntu CDs from back then.

Slackware like 7-12.
Basically until they pulled fortunemod.

Early versions of Ubuntu,
Red Hat before RHEL,
Mandrake/Mandriva.

Mandrake 6.0 was my first distro in '98-'99. Mandrake hasn't existed for a long time now; I have no idea if you can still find an old iso of it. It used KDE 1.1.1 as it's DE, and to this day, KDE has remained my preferred DE.
- There is an active fork https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMandriva_Lx

Red Hat used to be a really solid choice for desktop back in the 90s and early 2000s. Some milestone releases:
6.2 was the first version to put up ISO images for install. This is the one to get if you really want a blast from the past (early version of anaconda installer, ext2, LILO bootloader, Linux 2.2, Gnome 1 etc.)
7.3 was the last version to come with the Netscape browser.
9.0 was the last version before they split into Fedora and RHEL. It's the last and most mature desktop release of that era, included the "Bluecurve" unified look and feel introduced in 8.0 but had bugfixed versions of KDE and Gnome.
- What do you mean 6.2 was the first version to put up ISO images for install? I installed 5.2 from ISO not long ago. I have installed 4.2 in the past.
  I think it was 4.2 that came with the “awesome” window manager.
  
  Before 6.2 you had to get them on actual CDs which wasn't an option in many places. Starting with 6.2 they put them online on FTP.
- Yes. I think around Red Hat 6 was the first time I compiled the kernel to make sure some hardware worked. Good times

My first distribution was Slackware 7.1 when I was in high school. It took a week to download the .iso on dialup, and I had to use a download manager (GetRight) so that I could resume the partial download any time the connection dropped (usually because someone had to use the phone).
I'm old o_o
I still vividly remember not being able to figure out how to install new packages, or knowing how to compile from source.
- I still fondly remember sitting in the Sun Lab at University downloading SLS disk by disk.
  SLS 1.0.x still had Linux kernel 0.9x on it.
  Just getting X at all on your own PC was like a magic trick.
  
  The number of hours I put into figuring out what X was, the difference between XFree86 and X.ORG , fixing resolution and DPI issues, installing video card drivers (mostly nVidia)... I think all that tinkering prepared me for my career as a systems admin.
  I think Slackware came with KDE, which is probably why I leaned toward it for so long. I've been using XFCE for many years, now.
- Slackware 2.x, on two floppies. A boot and a root disk, downloaded from a BBS using a dial-up connection (I think it was a 57.6 modem). No X, but I still loved it, so much better than DOS.
  
  Oh I remember those disks :D I think I had to either pull them off the ISO, or download them separately so that I could boot the system to the point where A: the install could occur at all and B: it had enough drivers to use the CD-ROM drive XD

Crunchbang (#!) linux breathed live into some very wimpy hardware I’ve had in the past.
Loved the minimalism.

The old Ubuntu pre snap and Amazon era.

Source Mage GNU + Linux (external wiki)
- Great distro! I ran Lunar Linux so Source Mages sister from the fork of Sorcerer Linux. Lunar I know is still going and updating. Need to drop into their IRC channel for support and what not. Wonder if Source Mage is still kicking. Amazing how great the bash scripts were to run it all. I feel like if they added binary support they would get a lot more traction
  
  Yes SMGL is still active. You can try joining one of their channels. There are still people looking for source based distros, not sure while Gentoo is the only thing that pops up for them. I used it for some time, and it's fantastic. Sadly having to build stuff takes too much time, particularly on old, and not performance oriented HW. They had support for binaries, and actually include a binaries grimoire, so you could install binaries that used to take too much time, like Firefox for example. Still it takes too much to keep a source based distro. And if you go all the way, then when changing parts of the building toolchain, like gcc, the recommendation was to build everything so that everything would be built with the more up to date toolchain, that was cool, since SMGL has tools for it, but those fancy stuff take as well a lot of time. There I learned 1st about ccache, hahaha.
  Sooo fun, :)
- I think the LARP elements of this distro put me off trying it back in the day. Calling the package manager a "Grimoire" and having to "cast" packages to install them was just too much for me.

I'm still nostalgic for CrunchBang, and I continue to use OpenBox with any distro I try... Keep your DEs, I'm good 😄
- CrunchBang was my jam in late high school. I couldn't believe how much more lightweight it was compared to Lubuntu, which had been my main for years due to having a potato laptop
  
  Right? Those terrible low-spec, off-the-shelf laptops can really cook with Openbox on a Linux distro.
- Arco, Mabox, and Bunsenlabs are my current vm favorites.
  
  I respect Bunsenlabs for lacking the chaotic instability that I loved to hate about Crunchbang in high school, and which I hate to wish I could love as a busy adult requiring a stable system...

Tom's Root Boot.
One floppy disk, one Linux machine!

Get a CD with RedHatLinux, SUSE or Debian 1 or something and try to install that

Gentus Linux comes to mind, obscure distro based on Red Hat (not RHEL mind You) released by now forgotten ABIT, a motherboard manufacturer. I was daily driving it as teenager back in 2001 for couple of weeks until I learned by trial and error how to get windows 98 installed back. Another one would be Mandrake Linux which I was dual booting couple years later.
- I read gentoo instead of gentus, found it awkward that someone would call gentoo obscure, did a websearch, came back to the post with gentus as a reply, re-read the post.

I’m nostalgic for Ubuntu when it still had Unity as default, and Linux mint around 2014. That’s when I began coding, and that’s the time I liked the look of them more than the current modern offerings. Plus there was more ease of customization it felt like

RedHat 5.3 with fvwm (or fvwm95) is very nostalgic for me because it was one of the few walnut creek CDs I managed to get working. Mandrake and early SuSe were cute as well.

Just for curiosity, where do you get these old distributions?
I might try the Ubuntu version which got me into Linux one of these days😇
- https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/
  At least Ubuntu makes it easy to roam through their archives. Have fun :)
  
  Thanks I’ll check it out👍

Wao, Mandriva and DamnSmallLinux 🤣🤣🤣

Corel Linux
- Uninstalled this recently as well. It is surprisingly slick for the time and way more modern feeling than you would expect.
  Linux was just not corporate enough for it at the time.
  In a different timeline….

Although not my first distro, I feel a lot of nostalgia for SimplyMepis
- Me: how many applications have you got installed? SimplyMepis: Yes.

The distro used by the one laptop per child project. Fascinating GUI

I'll probably be alone on this one, but there was this Brazilian distro, fully translated to portuguese named Kurumin, an indigenous word for "boy," that was my first distro. The distro where I learned how to program in Python ages ago.
As a trivia, this distro main maintainer gave up on tech and was living as a monk or something far from any internet connection.

Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger, oh my god the color scheme, all the earthy tones. 😊

First distro I got to work was LibraNet. Easy to set up and use, ran by a father-son team. Died when the father passed away. 😥

Conectiva Linux in late nineties came with Window Maker as default. That’s old school as they come.

I booted a VM with BeOS for nostalgia a couple months ago. Remember booting that as a kid and drooling over how fast it was.
- BeOS or haiku?
  I have a dual 603 BeBox I haven't fired up in a while...
  
  Haiku. Was close enough for the feels.

I just started using Linux back in 2018. There is no nostalgia for me, as all the distro I used back then are still working now.

I've been meaning to fiddle with OpenIndiana and Illumos for a while, which both trace their roots back to Sun Microsystem's Solaris. It'd be really cool to poke around in a system that didn't grow off of BSD or Linux.

Lubuntu with LXDE

Kubuntu 8.04.
It was the last release with KDE 3 and very polished for its time. Many applications from back then have vanished by now. Kopete was Magic, supporting all IM protocols (Including Yahoo video calls!), Amarok was so reliable and sleek.
Of course most things have improved since then, but I remember it fondly.

Slackware 7

If you want to experience travelling back in time with an operating system then OpenBSD feels like a time capsule, albeit one which is still being maintained. I realise it is not linux but using it is very similar to what linux was like before 2010.

ZenWalk was unique and great about 15 years ago as an easy Slackware with minimalist install.
Chakra Linux was an Arch+KDEmod distro that kind of went away.
Bodhi Linux has its own desktop called Moksha.
There is a GNUstep Live CD that comes out every few years, based on Debian. It is a unique setup from a time when the future of computing was promising. I think it is distributed on LinuxQuestions or some other forum.
There was a distro called gOS about 15 years ago that used a lot of desktop widgets and Google apps. Their business model was basically, "We are going to re-skin Ubuntu and call it gOS and hope Google buys us." It did not work out.
Darwin was upstream for macOS and for many years, there was a community of users who would port the traditional *NIX stack to it. Xorg, traditional window managers, a ports system, etc.
Frugalware Linux was well polished and kind of a spiritual successor to Zenwalk.
openSUSE 10.3 had the most beautiful Gnome setup. It was unique in that it had a single panel, a modified Clearlooks theme, and a Vista-style start menu.
OpenSolaris likewise had a very unique and beautiful look, with its macOS-inspired Nimbus theme. I think this was the best looking theme of that era.
SimplyMEPIS was my first Linux on a T61. I had used FreeBSD for the decade prior. I don't know what was better about SimplyMEPIS than Debian, nor do I know what SimplyMEPIS meant versus regular MEPIS. It's kind of like Claws Mail and Sylpheed Claws. Some times we just throw words together and give it an icon and there it is.
I used all of these at some point.

I have fond memories of Kubuntu Feisty Fawn and the whole suite of KDE apps that were around back then. It's nice to see that Amarok got a new release recently after such a long time.

Lindows

Idk about nostalgic but north korea makes their own linux distro, that's gotta rank high on the interesting list

My second distro was Debian 8, initially with LXDE (which has barely changed at all since then, so it's still nostalgic) then later switching to KDE Plasma 4. I probably hold the most nostalgia for it, even more than I do for my first distro (Linux Mint 17). For a while I was into Plasma Netbook, which I find to be an especially weird, nostalgic product of its time, and the Oxygen theme in general is probably my favorite default look for any DE.

Ubuntu ca 2010
Play some Nibbles from that era

RedHat.
Not Fedora. Not RHEL. Back when it was just RedHat Linux.
- I install Red Hat 5.2 recently. Amazing blast from the past. The only web browser installed was Netscape!
  By Fedora Core 1, it was all starting to seem surprisingly modern.

Nostalgic doesn't necessarily correlate to "special place", so It Depends™.

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