Linux

Mint

Technically I first experuenced Linux as a very small kid in 2009 in my school computers, but my first time trying Linux for my personal desktip usage was in December 11, 2021, when I first tried Linux Mint. My setup was a very humble, 14 years old, ddr2 board, and I was amazed at how much faster Cinnamon was compared to Windows 10. Since then, I already helped about 5 people to move to Linux too 😁

Redhat 4.1 back in 97. I even purchased the CD from PC World, seems wild now to buy a CD/DVD of a distro.

First PC I installed it on was a work laptop, had to compile a bunch of kernel modules and then the kernel to get everything working but get everything working I did, Thinkpads being good for Linux even then.

One of the first slackware (so many floppies) on my mighty 486 DX 50. Linux wasn't at 1.0 yet at the time.

Linux (many versions) has been my daily driver ever since, with windows as a gaming backup a lot of the time. I still have it on a single machine in a small partition because of VR :‐/

Red Hat 9 in 2004

Red Hat 7

I guess Ubuntu? 10 years ago or even more? can't remember... Tried it for a bit but didn't stick at first and went back to Windows until 2020.

Installed my first homelab and selfhosted application on my old spare laptop with Debian (only over command line).

So I gave Linux desktop another try... Ubuntu for a few days => Manjaro for a few days => EndeavourOS !

Got hooked and are now a proud EOS user for about 3 years and never will I look back into Windows !

I'm still in the learning process, but in the long run I will probably switch to bare bone Arch.

SuSE, about 1999, although I didn’t really start ‘getting’ Linux until I tried Slackware a couple of years later. After that I’ve just been bouncing between trusty old Debian and different distros based on it.

Edit: I’ve also tried Gentoo, Arch and Mandrake briefly many years ago.

Debian 3.1, but was not successful in getting X to work, but didn’t put a lot of effort into it. Then I got Mandrake running with X, but went back to Windows. On a small computer, I got FreeBSD running as a server but never used it, so that went away again. Knoppix a couple of times to recover data from failed Windows installations.

Yeah, it’s not until recently that I installed Debian 12 on a old work laptop and was very impressed. Now I’m on the fence of having a stable distribution or sumthin with newer packages. I love the philosophy of Debian and the wide usage on servers but Arch is personally also up my alley, however I have not used it at all.

Bodhi Linux. It had to be something that could run on a 32 bit laptop, because that's what I used as a testing ground before committing to Linux.

I came in just about as Debian Woody was coming out, in 2002. (Main reason I can even date it beyond "Idk, about 20 years ago?").

Tried Mandrake a while after that, often recommended as pretty much the equivalent of Linux Mint at the time in terms of noob friendliness. I did enjoy that but stuck with Debian for my main system for years, though.

Whatever Ubuntu was available in 2015. I only dabbled in Linux over the past 10 years. More seriously switching over in the last year or so.

I have Unraid as a server OS (~~Debian~~ slackware based, running a lot of docker containers and a couple VMs). Debian on my laptop. And Bazzite (fedora based) on my Lenovo Legion Go.

Still need to swap my gaming PC from windows. May try Bazzite on that as well. I've also tried Mint, Manjaro, and Zorin

Corel Linux.

Linux Mint XFCE, it was easy to setup and could run on my really old laptop.

My first steps were with Debian 2.0 and a Suse Version from about the same time. But that was not very successful so I went back to Windows for about a year and then really got into Linux with Gentoo. I had a year of not much to do, had to wait a year to get into University, and I decided to install the complicated Linux Distribution that I could find.

Reasoning was: It will break a lot if it is so complicated, due to this I am forced to learn while repairing it.

Manjaro -> openSuse tumbleweed -> Fedora (Desktop) and tuxedoOS (Laptop)

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn.

redhat 4.1 or maybe 5.2 back around 1996-1998 (plus a freebsd release around the same time). I got a pile of probably 15 discs from walnut creek and they were the only two I could get running. I didn't have internet access at the time.

I first tried Mandrake for a couple days in the late 9ps because I heard it was easy. It was definitely easy to brick my system and have no idea why!

So I switched to Slackware and never looked back. I'm still daily driving Slackware all these years later.

It was Ubuntu 14.10 (still had Unity) installed on a Mac mini to run a Plex server. I actually really liked Ubuntu then, it was all new and very different to Windows. I had it hooked up to a TV and used the DE to maintain it I.e console, update app etc.

There was this really annoying error that would occur every time it would boot which drove me to look elsewhere. Ended up trying Arch and didn't put a DE on there because I started to get comfortable with the terminal and SSHing in.

I eventually installed Arch on my desktop and dual booted for a couple years using XFCE. Once I discovered KDE there was no going back.

I haven't used Windows on any of devices for years, all running Fedora and KDE.

Pretty sure tails os :P

redhat 5.5

Ubuntu, installed on a 256 gb flash drive as an experiment back in 2020. My first daily driver distro was Mint last year, then KDE Neon, and finally Kubuntu today

Distro doesn't matter to me anymore, I just like the Plasma DE and will use anything that uses it. Eventually I'm gonna have to try Arch with it and make my own Steam machine

What's the wallpaper?

openSUSE

debian

scientific linux. I failed to get most things running and switched to ubuntu. this was about 10 years ago

Ubuntu. For Work purpose in 2020 as a development VM.

Since then i moved privately to Zorin and now to Nobara. At Work it still is Ubuntu for me, but hopefully i will soon change positions and can shelve that stuff.

Started in 2022 on Kubuntu, moved to Fedora in October 2022, switched back to the Fedora KDE Spin in 2023, and been there since.

Debian 1.3, Bo - 1997

Mklinux. It was the only thing you could run on one of those jank-ass PowerPC/nubus Macs.

XanderOS way tf back in 2005 or 2006, but mostly just messed around and had no clue what I was doing with it... After that I did a Gentoo install. Been kinda off and on with Linux since, flirting with the possibility of switching to it fully but never actually making the jump until last year when I built a new machine and put Mint on it.

arch linux since december

I use arch btw

and I use hyprland btw

It depends how you define it. I first installed Slackware at work on a retired IBM PS/2 in '94 or '95, because somebody was working on MicroChannel bus support. (That never materialized.) Later, we checked out Novell Linux Desktop, maybe Debian, too. At a later job, we had some Red Hat workstations, version 5 or 6, and I had Yellow Dog Linux on an old Power Mac.

At home, I didn't switch to Linux until Ubuntu Breezy Badger. It was glorious to install it on a laptop, and have all of the ACPI features just work. I had been running FreeBSD for several years, NetBSD on an old workstation before that, and Geek Gadgets (a library for compiling Unix programs on Amiga OS) before that.

Ubuntu Karmic Koala. To be fair, I was a kid and that was, according to people on the Internet, the most likely to work. And so it did - it had out of the box support for my wifi adapter, which some other distros I tried later did not, I had to use something called ndiswrapper. Of course I did not yet know about compiling my own configured kernel, that came a month or 2 later.

I only stayed on Ubuntu for a while, then tried Mint, used that on and off for years, dabbled with Arch at some point, too. In the last 5 years I've used PopOs, Gentoo, OpenSuse, NixOS. I'm not gonna bother with capitalization and punctuation on some of these.

Elementary OS