Horror

I remember finding an early ubuntu CD just lying in the street. Took it home, and I'll be damned if it didn't turn my ailing laptop right around. Got 5 more years out of that thing.

I remember getting a copy of linux from my friends at a local LAN party (though it was tokenring party for us) around ‘96. 2 floppy disks. I’m 99% sure it was slackware.

Whats this meme called, I need to post some things

It forced me to learn. It took me weeks to get X configured and working correctly. I had an internet subscription and a modem but it also took weeks to get it to work on Linux. My distribution came on a CD from a magazine but some dependencies were not included, so I had to reboot under Windows to download a missing package, reboot on Linux and try again, then need to get the next dependency. We came a long long way from having to specify the vertical refresh rate of the monitor in xf86config.

Starting with a French version of Slackware was brutal but I had nothing else.

Okay, I finished installing Debian. Why am I only seeing an X formed cursor flying around in nothing? What the hell is a Xorg?!

me after installing Ubuntu because it was the only other OS I'd ever heard of, because I accidentally nuked my Windows Vista install by trying to overclock the CPU in a Gateway laptop:

Dude I remember when live booting knoppix was impressive. Hell my intro to Linux was mandrake. We have so many great distros and documentation available now it’s crazy.

Knoppix was the shit back then.

CD? Hah! Luxury!

We 'ad to install off floppy disk! And the disks had bad sectors and the drive kept grinding them down! Then we 'ad to build the kernel wi' two bare hands! And the only window manager we 'ad would spontaneously delete itself and we'd 'ave to start all over at 2am, half an hour before we finished the last install!

Why does this capture that feeling so well lol

this is truly a formative memory

I remember first learning about linux OS and how to create a Linux USB installer using rufus to bypass the password my parents had put on the windows side. In those days there was no eifi boot loader lock you could access the files just by trying out the new OS you had in your USB. LOL.

My first system was hacked so fast. Thank you RedHat for defaulting all services on.

Never really thought about it, but that first time exploring after using XP/2000 really did kinda feel like a backrooms kind of experience. It's all so familiar, but nothing is in the right place.

Seems like the experience difference is less so these days, what with everything being mostly web apps or mobile.

My first was SuSE 6 or something like that, back in the 90s. And my mom freaked out, because the PC didn't boot Windows95 anymore. And I had a huge book, telling me what to do. It came with the CDs.

Definitely describes my switch back in 2008 when canonical still sent out Ubuntu CDs for free in the mail. We had dial up so it was faster for them to mail me a CD than to try and download the image myself.

This was knoppix for me!

I am in this picture and I don't like it.

This is me on my first PC that I built myself... and Windows XP lacked the S-ATA drivers. Suse worked fine, tho.

My first experience with Linux was trying to install TurboLinux 6 from a CD I got at a HAM Fest.

Short story shorter, I didn't successfully use Linux the first time until I tried a different distro (probably Debian?) a few years later.

Damn that was my exact experience

Hm. I started using Linux (Ubuntu) somewhat around 2007. And I was quite fascinated how flashy it was with all those desktop effects compared to the rather boring XP. Only problem I had back in the day was wifi, but I didn't play a lot of games at that time.

But yeah, once I solved that wifi problem I had internet, so there was a difference.

I want to powerwash that hallway.

One of the things I like about Linux is the feeling of likely being eaten by a grue

My first Linux distro was Puppy Linux, on a computer with no internet. I downloaded it on an internet cafe to replace Windows XP Fenix Edition.

My PC was too weak to run any flavor of the major distros, and I wanted to give it a go.

Best computer-related decision of my life to ditch Windows and use Linux as my daily driver.

SUSE on 6 CDs

Yes, with Mandriva. I had just switched from 98 to Xp and was like “No, no, no, this sucks!”.

Mandriva looked so nice in comparison. But no internet, it just wouldn’t connect and I didn’t know how to troubleshoot it.

Meanwhile I'm sitting here having grown up on among other things (like a TI-99A) with access to a Macintosh 128k, an Apple ]|[, a Commodore 64, and various 286, 386, and Pentium machines, as well as some SGI machines by the time I was 8 years old, so it would seem that I would have embraced Linux. It just never happened because consoles, and later windows dominated gaming so much that despite the fact that I have tried Linux out maybe 20 times at this point, it's only recently that I can seriously consider switching off of windows and consoles.

It was a different time.

I used xp for 15 years and i miss it. Fuck this ribbon nonsense too. Where is the desktop cloud? My precious is lost... i'm lost...i have no fucking idea where that file i just saved went.. i built a pc in 2002 and progranned a vcr as well. Now i'm toast.

Windows wouldn’t boot so I burnt an Ubuntu live image to a cd and used that to copy my files off my windows partition

That amazing experience of having to print out instructions at a friends house to recover a dual-boot system after either grub fucked up or windows XP fucked up. Good times.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Only had dialup when hedgehog was released and could not for the life of me figure out how to enable PPP

I remember back then it was easier installing the OS than installing third party software 🫣

thats me installing windows in the 90s, waiting for hours, not sure if it just froze

Still have my physical Ubuntu Hardy Heron DVD somewhere

this is not Something I experienced as I switch in 2021 (with a failed attempt in 2018)

can someone approve or deny of this

Lmao I did this exact thing. Installed Ubuntu on the home desktop. Immediately occurred to me that I couldn't connnect to the internet to look up how to do anything else. Scrambled so hard to find that XP disc and atone for my reckless folly.

My Linux journey was pre XP, I was still in 98Se edition and my Linux disk didn't have a working GUI on it.

I love bricking my entire installation by trying to downgrade OpenVPN

Me as a kid booting into Corel Linux that I got from a used bookstore.