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?

  • floppybutton@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    5 hours ago

    I had a friend back in the day that was a big Linux geek. He got me hooked when he showed me this crazy system that let me just type in a command and within a few minutes or an hour (internet wasn’t super fast in my house in 2002), I could have something installed without having to search the internet for some potentially cooked installer.

    That’s the long way around to say I started with Gentoo, installed over the course of 3 long Saturdays with my friend over my shoulder and the install guide printed out on a stack of papers because neither of us had a laptop to look at.

    I moved to Debian after a few months, but man portage was life changing.

  • robojeb@lemmy.world
    1·
    6 hours ago

    I think the first I used was Fedora Core 5, but the first I installed myself was Fedora Core 6.

  • mostprolificbrick@lemmy.world
    5·
    15 hours ago

    Ubuntu 6.06. It came on a CD with a PC magazine. I’ve used it to convince my parents to allow me to spend as much time as I want in front of the computer because “there are no games on Linux”.

    WoW worked on it.

  • folaht@lemmy.ml
    1·
    11 hours ago

    Red Flag Linux 3.0,
    taking the RedNote route decades before it was cool,
    but did not get much further than the installation screen,

    After that it was Ubuntu -> Mint -> Arch -> Parabola -> Manjaro.

  • nabladabla@sopuli.xyz
    3·
    15 hours ago

    Ubuntu 5.10 back when a random Finnish teenager could ask Canonical for free install CDs and they’d just mail them to you no money asked.

  • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
    2·
    14 hours ago

    Slackware in the early mid-nineties. But of course there was other Unix variants before that. And what was it called, OS/2 or something like that?

  • dukatos@lemm.ee
    3·
    15 hours ago

    The first was Redhat Linux 7, but not for long. I moved to Slackware soon after.

  • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    17 hours ago

    Ubuntu, and the experience was crap lol.

    Then I got to try Debian on a server and it was much nicer.

    Then I saw Torvalds uses Fedora, and given that he also disliked Debian and Ubuntu for their lack of end user ease, I switched and have been happy ever since.

    Seriously though, GNOME 40 really should not be the default DE. It made me think Linux UI was years behind Windows when it was actually the opposite with proven DEs like XFCE, KDE, and GNOME 3/2 etc.

  • stev3yd@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    16 hours ago

    Mandrake Linux. I couldn’t tell you what year but I remember booting into it and thinking it was the coolest thing.