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.
- Wow an Ubuntu CD just casually laying on the streets
  
  Just laying there.
  
  lying
  
  The zines from the nerds of the 00's.
- Friend of mine once found a frozen-over cd of "Shaggy - Wasn't Me" in his backyard, and after cleaned and thawed, it worked no problem. I guess someone really hated that single?
  
  Wasn't me

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.
- Ahh Knoppix :’) I think live boots were my introduction to Linux.
- I ended up learning by memory the US keyboard layout because i got tired of having to change it whenever i booted knoppix up.
  Now i have all my keyboards set to US international. Best layout for programing.

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.
- You guys only got alcoholism??!?
  
  Huh
- I told you it's not a LAN party, it's a TokenRing party!
- Hah, yeah I got a Debian floppy and then tried to install packages over DSL. Somehow it didn't immediately kill my interest in Linux, eventually ran OpenBSD as my server for a while.
- I started with floppies too, when I bought my copy of Conectiva Linux 3.0. It came with a hefty manual that was instrumental for a newbie like me.
- Shit, what games could be played on token ring?
  
  Token Ring is a network protocol where a token—a small data packet—circulates around a ring topology, allowing only the device holding the token to transmit data, thus avoiding collisions. We played Doom and Quake.

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.
- Be 12 in 1998
  Literally just ecstatic that I could wiggle around a little X on a blank screen after giving up trying to load a window manager.
  Pop in a BeOS live CD to feel like I did something cool
  
  Exact same experience. What district did you install for the cursor wiggle? Mine was slackware
  Later mandrake was noob friendly enough for me to get a real start
- Started on Slackware too. I remember building my own kernel and having to make sure it fit on a 1.44MB floppy.
  make menuconfig
- ah i had forgotten about xf86config. /silenthillvoice
- Wheee!

Whats this meme called, I need to post some things
- Just be sure to post some memes to !bikinibottomtwitter@lemmy.world !
- @coacoamelky @azha not sure if serious, but just paste a black box over the text - profit
- SpongeBob In Silent Hill / Aw Hell Naw Spunch Bob

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:
- Similarly, my XP install just died and I didn’t have a copy of Windows to reinstall. Gnome 2 taught me computers don’t have to look or feel boring and the terminal taught me they weren’t scary.
  Learned a lot that first year.
- hehe, mine was Ubuntu too. I thought I'd fucked up the emachines tower my parents just bought me.
  
  us emachines and gateway kids grew up to be lightweight distro enthusiasts
  like now my laptop has 16 gigs RAM, quad core fuck even knows GHz processor, and a GPU but if a process starts using >2% of my resources i will
  
  -killall -9
  it from orbit

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

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.

Knoppix was the shit back then.
- I tried out knoppix. I probably used the shell in knoppix more than any other distro than Irix.

Why does this capture that feeling so well lol

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.
- If the ping rate is irrelevant, then the good old sneakernet is a great way to transfer large amounts of data.

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.

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.
- Iirc Suse used to give away previous versions to highschools, so probably yours was running Yast with a lot of software included.

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!

this is truly a formative memory

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

SUSE on 6 CDs

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.

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.

This was knoppix for me!

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.

I remember back then it was easier installing the OS than installing third party software 🫣
- Both are hella easy now, flathub my beloved.

I want to powerwash that hallway.

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.

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.

Damn that was my exact experience

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

Exactly what happened when I tried ubuntu on my brothers pc back then. Couldn't even get the internet working. Right now I'm impressed its an easier time to install than windows.

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.

Still have my physical Ubuntu Hardy Heron DVD somewhere

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.

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.
- Honestly there are probably very few people who can troubleshoot dial up on Linux.

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

It was a different time.

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

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

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

this is not Something I experienced as I switch in 2021 (with a failed attempt in 2018)
can someone approve or deny of this
- Linux in the modern day is a much comfier experience for an uninitiated user. But the real nightmare is using Linux WITHOUT AN INTERNET CONNECTION (it STILL super sucks nowadays), which depending on how you were connecting your old machine to the internet, the only solution was "... Buy a different network card/Switch ISPs entirely"
  Linux has gotten a lot better about just. Supporting hardware in general. And once you GET a Linux distro (any) on the internet, your life gets much easier.

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.