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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?

314 comments

  • I started with Mandrake 6 when the there were lots of 9's or 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)

  • Ubuntu in the mid 2000s, but it's PopOS that made me a fulltimer ~2 years ago. I don't use it anymore but I'll always be thankful for it.

  • Debian Slink

    Before that, Windows NT, A/UX, Solaris and VAX/VMS.

    Before that, Vic 20 and Apple II

    Still using Debian every day whilst navigating the perils of MacOS.

  • SuSE in 1996. Then Debian between mid-1997 and late 2023, NixOS since.

    I'm not a big distrohopper...

    • Why NixOS? I've been using Debian since Slink and am interested to hear, what made you move?

      • Not the guy who first commented, but NixOS is fun because you can have the whole config in a git repo, and can easily reproduce. Main drawback is that Nix as a language is insane and that a lot of packages still aren’t available

      • I switched to NixOS because I wanted a declarative system that isnt't yaml soup bolted onto a genetic distro.

        By 2022, my desktop system was an unmanagable mess. It was a direct descendant of the Debian I installed in 1997. Migrated piece by piece, even switched architectures (multiple times! I386->ppc-i386->amd64), but its roots remained firmly in 1997. It was an unsalvagable mess.

        My server, although much younger, also showed signs of accumulating junk, even though it was ansible-managed.

        I tried documenting my systems, but it was a pain to maintain. With NixOS, due to it being declarative, I was able to write my configuration in a literate programming style. That helps immensely in keeping my system sane. It also makes debugging easy.

        On top of that, with stuff like Impermanence, my backups are super simple: btrfs snapshot of /persist, exclude a few things, ship it to backup. Done. And my systems always have a freshly installed feel! Because they are! Every boot, they're pretty much rebuilt from the booted config + persisted data.

        In short, declarative NixOS + literate style config gave me superpowers.

        Oh, and nixos's packaging story is much more convenient than Debian's (and I say that as an ex-DD, who used to be intimately familiar with debian packaging).

  • In the early 90’s I downloaded Slackware to floppy disks. It took me several days to make them. Slackware holds a special place in my heart.

    To this day I still use Linux full time. Arch is my go to, but I like and recommend Endeavor often.

  • Slackware, of course, but when Debian was first released two years later I obviously switched (and it's been Debian since then).

  • 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.

  • Redhat, in 1997. A group at my college was burning CDs and giving them away, along with some "extra" goodies like whatever version of Enlightenment was new at the time, I remember being amazed by that. Or maybe it was just some E themes, don't remember exactly. I think Redhat still came with FVWM95 and maybe OpenStep. I spent so many hours editing those damned Xfree86 configs just to get basic VGA graphics to work.

314 comments