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?
Welcome to Lemmy stranger.
Slackware back in the early 90s on a Compaq 386/SX20 💾
Go Slackware!
Honestly it still feels like home. Because I was kind of a moron and figured it would mean less to figure out, I registered darkstar.org (the default domain Slackware came set up with).
I few years later I actually emailed Patrick Volkerding about something and he mentioned it… I felt this strange mix of pride and shame ;-)
The Alien repo was a godsend
When I took my Linux class in 2007, he gave us a mountain of distros we could choose from. Ubuntu got picked first and Fedora second. This was mostly due to already having easy installs and a gui to boot with. It was also due to him having shown us these distros beforehand.
I was third pick. I knew what I wanted right away. My teacher, an extremely smart man with photographic memory, seemed fairly bored with the proceedings. That was until I chose Damn Small Linux as the third overall choice. The grin on his face as he knew he found a student that would be fun to teach and wanted to learn.
I was fairly sure he expected me to pick openSUSE. It was the third distro he’d shown us installations for and had us play around with. And boy, am I glad I chose Damn Small. I learned so much more than the other teens that were in there just to get an easy credit. He was an easygoing teacher. He didn’t fail people really, he let them hang around and play WC3: FT DOTA on LAN if they wanted and still passed them. But boy would he teach you if he knew you really wanted to learn it.
After that, we had to group in pairs in PC Repair class (same teacher) to take old student’s orders to help fix their computers. I was allowed to work alone and he just let me do what I wanted. I stuck to the code, repaired computers, and never snooped through anyone’s files. He knew I already could find my way around the Windows Registry (something Microsoft is thinking hard on how to stop you from doing now). He’d also do IT for the school during classes. Whenever he was away, I was allowed to be secondary IT if he was busy. It was easy stuff, mostly printer drivers and wifi troubleshooting.
It was really thanks to Damn Small Linux. My first project was to get Windows Solitaire running on it. He set it for us to research as homework. When he came over to me that same day, I had already looked up the info and was playing it on the GNOME 2 DE (MATE is still one of my favorite desktops). I just said, “WINE?” and he put a finger to his lips and grinned.
Thank you for letting an old man waffle on. Those were good times.
SuSE in 1996. Then Debian between mid-1997 and late 2023, NixOS since.
I’m not a big distrohopper…
Why NixOS? I’ve been using Debian since Slink and am interested to hear, what made you move?
I switched to NixOS because I wanted a declarative system that isnt’t yaml soup bolted onto a genetic distro.
By 2022, my desktop system was an unmanagable mess. It was a direct descendant of the Debian I installed in 1997. Migrated piece by piece, even switched architectures (multiple times! I386->ppc-i386->amd64), but its roots remained firmly in 1997. It was an unsalvagable mess.
My server, although much younger, also showed signs of accumulating junk, even though it was ansible-managed.
I tried documenting my systems, but it was a pain to maintain. With NixOS, due to it being declarative, I was able to write my configuration in a literate programming style. That helps immensely in keeping my system sane. It also makes debugging easy.
On top of that, with stuff like Impermanence, my backups are super simple: btrfs snapshot of
/persist, exclude a few things, ship it to backup. Done. And my systems always have a freshly installed feel! Because they are! Every boot, they’re pretty much rebuilt from the booted config + persisted data.In short, declarative NixOS + literate style config gave me superpowers.
Oh, and nixos’s packaging story is much more convenient than Debian’s (and I say that as an ex-DD, who used to be intimately familiar with debian packaging).
Ubuntu (because I have seen it on laptops in shops), Debian (because I found out that Ubuntu is based on Debian, is a community distro instead of a company distro), OpenSuse (I wanted to try something different to apt, it looked different), Zorin (because I loved the custom desktop environments), Mint (because a software I needed didn’t work on Zorin, and because Cinnamon DE was very friendly), Trisquel (because it’s 100%, recommended by FSF). I also tested other distros in VM’s (Steam, Guix System, Pure OS, Dragora, Dynebolic, Alpine, Slackware and that’s all I remember). A really beautiful journey!
Kali Linux. Because I was a kid who wanted to be a hackerman.
❤️ Ah yes, the hacker-man vibes!
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Mandrake! It was a fucking disaster! Fortunately, I came back later using Kubuntu and had a much better experience.
genderfluid fetch spotted!!! also im not sure which was first but i use arch and openbsd ;3
Ye, gender-fluid human living life over here! 😁 ❤️
Red Hat, back when that was a distro. It was a long time ago now and my toying with it didn’t last long; and began an obsession with hardware RAID…
am a simple noob who started with Mint, and remain on Mint on my main gaming machine.
i have fun distro-hopping on my other old, cheap laptops though
Slackware in 1996(?), then SuSE when they came up.
I then tried a bit every once in a while, but really never got fully comfortable with it on a desktop.
A few weeks ago I bought a new Desktop PC, which is now running with the Arch-fork #endeavouros and I really love it.Slackware back in '96 when It was the only option. Then tried everything else before settling on Mint and never having to worry about picking another distribution again.
Knoppix circa 2004-2005, It was in a cd that came from chip.de. I had no clue what linux was back then. I know even less now.
Knoppix live cd
I think I learned about knoppix from the TV show “the screen savers” in the early 2000s. Played with it a few times on old laptops, scanning for open Wi-Fi lol
Mandrake Linux. I couldn’t tell you what year but I remember booting into it and thinking it was the coolest thing.
Mandrake was my second distro, I think, I think I had knoppix before that. Used neither for long, switched to Ubuntu in the first or second major release. I was on Ubuntu until gnome 3 was released, then I threw up a little in my mouth and dustro hopped s bit until I landed on arch, which I also had for almost 10 years,
Now I am on NixOS,
No I am not sadomasochistic for using arch or nixos. There are benefits and trade offs, and I would not have used them for so long if it didn’t make sense for me.
I’m against distro shaming, and DE shaming. Everyone can like what they like for different reasons. That makes Linux better!
BTW, fun fact, both Arch and NixOS is older than Ubuntu, just fun to think about
