2y ago

(Linux users !) What was the first Linux distro that you used ?

Are there any linux users here, am i asking this in wrong community ?, If yes then sorry

Anyways the first linux for me was kali linux, I was a hopeless kid who wanted to learn hacking, and as everyone thinks linux is for hackers i just did some random google search about "Best linux distro for hacking" and the result was kali linux (since parrot os was not there at the time)

I watched a tutorial on how to install it, and that's where it got worse. We didn't have that much data to download a 3-4GB of iso file, so i went to a nearby friend to use their wifi and downloaded it. When I was installing it I selected the partition in which we stored all our family photos and other memories ( At the time I didn't knew much about partitions and just wanted to try out linux). As I selected the wrong partition the windows installed on that partition and the files got deleted and I got into Kali linux, it took me some time to realise what I have done, but eventually I realised that many files were missing and was not able to boot into windows. Eventually I got scolded so much from my parents, but I don't regret it because that opened up a new world of linux for me (but with some sacrifices)

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Mandrake. Emailed to me on a CD. I feel old.

Mandrake in 2003, I was young and didn't know what I was doing...
- Mine was also mandrake in the early 2000's. There was no Ubuntu back then, and Mandrake was the "home desktop" for Linux, specially if you didn't need servers running. I think it worked fine, not sure why it got so much hate.
- Yay another Mandrake user! I actually bought the box from a computer store back in 2003. Mandrake was actually a decent effort for a user friendly distribution and the standard installation included tons of software. Getting pppd to connect that serial ISDN modem to the internet for the first time was magical. I've been a Linux user ever since. The other main alternatives at the time were Debian, Slackware both too complicated for a newbie.

It was no distro, it was kernel 0.99 and bunch of gnu utils on like 8 floppy disks, and 10 more floppies or so for X11. I was running it on a 486DX50 iirc.

Red Hat Linux back in 1999.

Mandrake 7 was the first one I installed on my pc. In those days you could buy a boxed version with about 10 cds to install from.

Slackware, installed from a big stack of 3.5" disks
- Same. I pulled a copy originally from CLEVNET that had a local mirror of CWRU ftp at the Cleveland Public Library. I believe it was 2.3, I know it was while they were still on a.out before the swap to ELF.
  Don't forget to read your install.end files.
- Same. What a task…

Mandrake 9.1.

Linux 0.2, not.joking. a friend came with it to me, just downloaded from a newsgroup (I think) around 1992, on a floppy! We tested it on my PC, didn't know what to do with it, and promptly removed it. A few years later we gave it another try, and the rest is history

Slackware, dont remember the version but it was 1996.
- Slackware was my second, version 3 or 4 was the first I used, I don't remember what year it was, but I've learned so much from it.
- Same here, but 1998. Red Hate soon after.

Ubuntu. I couldn't afford a new laptop for college so I desperately googled for some way to make my old machine last.

Knoppix Live CD back in 2004!

Slackware, and it took years before I tried again.

A friend of mine gave me an official Ubuntu 4.10 CD and that was my first Linux distro that I have tried.
I still have that CD.

Ubuntu... before Canonical nuked it.

@deepinderbrar Ubuntu 8.10

Red hat linux

Ubuntu (can't remember if it was 6 or 8) was the first distro that I used, my cousin and another family friend used it and I got interested and asked to have it installed on my home desktop.
For years, every LTS release of Ubuntu I installed as dual boot to try and experiment for a few weeks and then uninstalled it, using Windows for everything.
2 years ago, I decided that I wanted to try other distributions and to switch and use Linux as my daily driver, so I installed Manjaro on my laptop and I have been using it daily since.

Slackware. Version 3.1 if I remember rightly, with Linux kernel 2.19.x.
It was installed from floppy disks, you needed about 10 of them to do a full install including X Windows.
At the time (1997 or 1998) I only had dial up internet at home, so over the period of several days I brought blank floppies in to work, downloaded the relevant images and copied them on to the disks.
I then spent most of a weekend trying to persuade an (even then elderly) PS/2 with 4 MB of RAM to become a Linux box. Got there in the end, though!

Slackware. Fall of '93. Well over 20, 3.5" diskettes. Sacrificed my OS/2 machine to do this.
- Oh, and writing the XConfig file with all your monitor timings. Sweet memories…

Knoppix in 2006, arch today.
- Knoppix here as well.

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn
- Same! I spent days trying to get Beryl with wobbly windows and cube workspaces to work and tinkering with Wine to try and run Windows games.
  I think back then the 64 bit version couldn't even run any 32 bit applications and you had to carefully choose, but I'm not entirely sure.

Linux Mint. It's been a while since I used Mint now, but I do missTimeshift

Gentoo.

Mandrake ! Autumn 1999 if I remember well...

Started with Red Had 6 and then moved to Fedora Core 1. Have been on Fedora releases since.

Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake :)

Mint, because it's what my dad put on my first laptop when I was like 10 or something. I remember playing minetest and FTL on it.

Debian Woody PPC. I also downloaded Yellow Dog but don't remember ever installing or using it.
- I remember having Yellow Dog installed on my PS3 for some time. I was sad when Sony took away "otheros" capabilities.

I did some research on what would be a good OS for someone coming from Windows and at the time Linux Mint was recommended a lot so that's what I chose.

Debian 2.2 on a consulting job in 2001. I'd used Unix mainframes in college, but other than that had only ever done work on DOS and Windows before then. Didn't think much of it at the time, though it was familiar and easy to work with. Certainly a far cry from the experience we all have with Linux today.

This is the weirdest attempt to get my website security question answers... But... Slackware on floppies.

The very first Linux? That would be DSL (Damn Small Linux).
I don't know whether it still exists but in 2003-ish, I was looking for something on-the-go and came across DSL.
I recently (2 years now) started using Linux as a daily driver again. Had to learn a lot of new things. This time someone on GamingOnLinux adviced me to start with Mint. But it wasn't for me. So it's been a great journey.
- I have fond memories of DSL! Sadly it hasn't been updated since 2012. I think nowadays people use tinycore for that.

It's all a blur because I was maybe like 6 or 7 at the time, but I'm fairly certain it was Red Hat. The original, not RHEL.
I have vivid memories of playing a game that involved collecting gems and avoiding falling rocks in a maze, similar to Boulder Dash or Emerald Mine. I have no idea what it was, but I know it wasn't Rocks'n'Diamonds because I played that a lot and the graphics were different.

Slackware 0.97 (if I recall correctly) it must’ve been in 1993 I think
- Which Kernel was that? I used Slackware with the 1.0.20 kernel.
  
  Phew… digging deep in my memories. I am almost certain it was pre-1.0.
  We got it from our Prolog teacher at school. It was a huge stack of disks. I think we compiled the kernel on a daily basis to tweak things, or get hardware working. Fun times!

for me it was: Puppy Linux for a desktop machine with 254MB of RAM when I was on 1-2nd semester in Preparatory School

I daily drove Puppy Linux live booted off a USB for a few months probably 15 years a go when my hard drive died and I couldn't afford a new one.
- Also started with Puppy. Then went on to Red Hat and finally settled into Mint.

Ubuntu 16.04

I think it was probably Ubuntu 6.10. a friend from high school have me a CD to install it.

Hard to remember because it was in 2000 on my gateway PC, but I remember trying to setup Gentoo and redhat and knoppix and failing miserably.

VoyagerOS - no idea about anything other than Windows being a thing, less of a clue about what I was doing, think I read something about it being lightweight and guessed it fit my needs.

Redhat 4.? I'm not really sure of the precise version but it was sometime in the late 99 or early 2000.

Redhat. When it came time to upgrade i dug myself into rpm hell so many times. I struggled, had to reinstall. Next redhat upgrade, same experience.
I tried debian potato, and dist-upgraded to next stable with no issues. I was floored. Have been dist-upgrading ever since. And run a few hundreds of debian servers.

Knoppix. Was recommended it by someone I chatted with at the time and that did not go well. This was not Knoppix's fault though, but rather me not knowing what I got into. Things worked as one would expect, the applications that were included ran without issues, but the issue came when wanted to install software. At the time didn't know anything about linux, so didn't know how to use the terminal to install software, and when trying to install new ones using exe files that didn't work for now obvious reasons. So threw that stuff out and went back to windows, and didn't touch Linux again until Ubuntu Hardy Heron which went a lot better.

DSL (Damn Small Linux) was what I started plying with, but my first daily driver was PCLOS.

- Technically this does not answer OP's question, but thank you anyways. Now I don't feel that old.

10 years ago Arch and it was a bloodbath. No background and both IT bros said I should not do it. Took about 4 days and countless rescues, so much manual fstab editing, looking up what the thing I destroyed even is. Glorious times. Dual boot because I thought I might need windows, not anymore.

Oh god it's been so long (20+ years). I only remember that whatever distro I installed had that great game preinstalled in which Tux slides down a mountain. Ah... Nice memories of easier times.

Arch. Went in at the deep end.
Suffice to say that I no longer use Linux. Got it built with relative ease though inevitably hit issues along the way, but got tired of having to use terminal for everything. Would not recommend Arch as your first distro unless you already love existing in a terminal.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Immediately liked the interface, but was bummed by lack of software and (expected) subpar performance on my shitty hardware. Went back to Windows 7 after a month or so. It took me quite a lot of hopping between many Linux distros and Windows to finally settle on Manjaro as my desktop OS of choice

Knoppix, on a live CD. Then shorty after, Aurox Linux, distributed as a number of CD with a magazine. Around 2004-2005. Then Mandriva.

Backtrack then crunchbang. Eventually I moved to arch. I've been using debian and mint lately though.
- Backtrack was my first consistent distro as well. Ah, the good old days of wardriving WEP! Also landed on Debian as my daily driver since Ubuntu is a bit chonk.

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