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Tekkip20 @lemmy.world

Your first distribution

What was the first ever distro you installed and used? For me, it was Mint as I seemed like the closest thing to Windows minus all the forced updates and chappy changes.

Currently on Fedora GNOME now but what about you? What made you choose your first distro diving into the world of Linux?

I wanna hear your thoughts!

161 comments

  • Gentoo. I figured I could learn much more that way. It was true. The Wiki was excellent. Still is as far as I know.

    • Gentoo as a first distro is scary as fuck as a common person. How did you manage?

      • Great. The Wiki explained everything I needed to do to get a working system.

      • Any distro that's well-documented is not a big deal to install and use. Never understood the big deal people used to make (still do sometimes? though I think it's mostly ironic now) about Arch. I did my first install Arch when I was kinda a dumbass but I just read the wiki (very thorough, btw, still use that wiki nearly daily) and followed the instructions. Especially with Arch, the wiki is so informative it explains the things you don't know so you understand what you're doing even though when I first installed Arch I didn't know what an fstab file was, what the initramfs was, etc. I'll disclaim that I've not installed Gentoo myself, but I hear from people who have installed it that it's very well documented, so makes sense that newcomers could install and use it if they're willing to read and learn.

    • Gentoo is on my to-do list to try out, going to set of a whole weekend to just sit down and enjoy the process of installing it. Have never touched it before, but always heard good things about it, as well as the things you learn along the way. Glad to hear you think so too!

      • it wasn't my first distro but i did the full bootstrap install so it must have been pre 2005. ran it as my daily driver for years

    • Arch wiki has entered the chat

  • There are no edgy teenagers here?

    Kali Linux to be an elite hax00r

    Then Linux mint and now Ubuntu.

  • Ubuntu Late 2000’s. I wanted it because of the CUBE. But left because the only game which worked was TF2.

  • Relatively new full-time Linux user here. My first experience of using Linux was Knoppix. I had it on cd-rom to troubleshoot Windows, got into media servers and xbmc, so had a few OpenElec machines. Now have Mint as a daily driver.

  • I kept hearing mutahar (someordinarygamers) talk about virtual machines and eventually i managed to get a laptop so i tried making one and Ubuntu was my pick (cus he recommended it for noobs), i hardly knew anything ab linux then but i figured a vm would be the perfect chance to try it :) . Later on when i first decided i wanted to try rawdogging linux it was cus my friend had an old laptop he never used so i asked if i could have it and he didnt mind. The thing was so slow the start menu (the thing u open when u press the windows button) literally took minutes to open. So i eventually checked its specs and downloaded a few distros trying them out and settled on mx linux cus it seemed to tick the most amount of boxes for me :3 (also i got around downloading linux on my main device later on, been using fedora on it.)

  • Debian I think? Probably Debian Wheezy.

    Edit: All thanks to my college professor.

  • Red Hat back in the 1990s. I had to buy it from a local stationary shop because being in a small, isolated country and the internet being in it's infancy, it was all I could find. Came with a manual bigger than a phone book and cost about the equivalent to these days $200.

  • My first was Ubuntu 14.04 on some old HP laptop my dad had lying around. I still miss Unity sometimes

    I'm all in on Fedora nowadays though, unless you count SteamOS lol

  • DiLinux. You drop a bunch of files in a fat16 folder, and run a chainloader that chestbursts out of DOS. It used the umsdos filesystem, which was a short-lived thing that lived on FAT and scribed all of the other needed fs features into bonus hidden files.

  • My first distro was PopOS! I choose it because I heard it had Nvidia drivers pre-installed into the image which sounded nice, also having the support from a bigger company that know Linux. However, I've distrohopped a lot since then, probably 2 years ago now. These days I'm finding myself liking Tumbleweed the most, and I have tried a lot of different distributions..

  • Fedora 38, one year ago. I am on 39 now and had to do a reinstall. It has its problems, a lot of problems actually, but is still miles better than windows in my opinion

  • The first I tried was Ubuntu 10.10 but for reasons I don’t remember anymore I‘ve decided to rather install Linux Mint 10.

    Used Mint for quit a while, then I had my distrohopping phase before finally setteling on plain Debian a couple of years back.

  • My first non-family PC was a Acer netbook with Linpus [Lite] Linux. I was 12, so my first priority was trying to get Rollercoaster Tycoon to work. Eventually I realized how silly that prospect was and instead managed to install Windows XP via a bootable USB. I used XP for a while until Vista came out, and then I gave Linux Mint a try and really liked it. These days I'm using NixOS and Fedora.

  • My very first linux distro is Zorin OS since it is Windows like and heard it is more light weight. After using it for a while, it didn't feel like more light weight to me so I switched back to Windows.

    After some years later, I decided to ditch Windows completely and used Ubuntu 20.04 for about a year. When I broke Ubuntu after using about a year, I switched to Arch and still on Arch to this day.

  • I started with Crunchbang in its final years. It was a great introduction to Linux, to be honest. It was also a very solid distro, as it was Debian-based.

    But, sadly, it eventually folded. It still has a spiritual sequel in BunsenLabs but, in the meantime, I'd moved to Arch (btw).

161 comments