What Was Your First Linux Distribution?

[kodabmx]

Slackware 3.3 on a 486dx2/66 with 4mb ram and a 10/2 coax network between my house and the house nextdoor it was a NAT router splitting the first cable internet that was offered here.

[Paradox Ethereal]

First distro I used at home was actually Kubuntu. I didn`t like gnome for some reason. Later realized it actually was quite good. Now I use IceWM though, because it is from a time in computing culture, that appeals to me.

I had used linux elsewhere though, and many other operating systems, and understand general computing concepts, so it wasn`t "new" in anyway. But the opensource, and particular "make menuconfig" made me feel very much at home, thinking I could have done something similar myself. It has that enthusiast/hacker feel over it.

And ultimately use it now, alongside windows and OSX. And find it to perform better for what I like, and generally prefer it, and think open-source is really what enthusiasts like.

Peace Be With You.

[Elv13]

Solaris with KDE 2.* in like 2001. Then Mepis in 2004, Mandrake, Fedora 2-4 then Gentoo ever since. I also use Ubuntu or Debian at work or on my laptop when I don't want to spend too much time getting productive. From a DE perspective:

KDE2
KDE3 (2002-2005)
Fluxbox (2005-2007)*
AwesomeWM (2007-* )*

I used most WM/DE too, but after I am done playing, I go back. I am developing both KDE and Awesome, so it kind of fit my needs, if it doesn't, then I fix them.

*With KDE apps

[mercutio]

caldera openlinux for "playing" with, then "debian" pre-apt for real use.

i hated how slow and cumbersome debian was, and how everything was really bloated.

now it's like nothing. but when computers generally had <= 32 mb of ram, lots of linux daemons etc were taking 300 to 3000k, and they all add up.

like each getty was using up noticable ram. i found a "solution" cos i wanted more gettys, and that involved some tweaks to mingetty, and compiling statically which reduced per process overhead.

part of the bloat came with glibc though, there was a significant memory increase per process.

also dselect was damn slow and cumbersome. and debian liked to release packages with minor changes while i had dialup internet. very frustrating. so i ended up compiling things frmo source often,
and just downloading patches etc. when you're doing at 5k/sec, with 24mb of ram, and a "486 class" cpu things were pretty cumbersome.

now days i use ubuntu, and my download speed is much higher, and I have 16gb of ram. I can even use X (well, kind of, )

that said, i tried windows 98 back then too, and even with tweaking/tuning it got cumbersome real quick.

[ayandon]

1st OS: DOS 4.x
1st Linux: RedHat 5.x

[dee.]

The first open source program I ever tried was the DOS port of Nethack. I downloaded it from a BBS with a 14.4 kbps modem. Only rich people and universities had internet connections at the time.

I was introduced to unix back in the 90:s. Not sure what exact OS it was, there was this computer club that had acquired a server (it was one of these huge refrigerator-sized things) and some VT100 terminals as a donation, and we got to play around with it. There was also one 286, but it was more fun playing around with unix. We ran our own MUD on the server. It was fun, even though there usually was only a couple of guys playing it at a time.

Back on the subject, my first linux was Ubuntu. I'm still using it but I'm increasingly considering switching to Mint because I don't like the direction the distro is going, with all the amazon crap and unity in general. I'm now using Mate but it doesn't work that well because it doesn't like cohabiting with Unity. I could just get rid of Unity but it'd probably just be easier to switch to Mint.

[dee.]

Just wanted to post an addendum - I just migrated to Linux Mint and so far, I'm loving it. Much nicer than Ubuntu. IMO. Faster, too. I've just about almost set up everything the way it should be.

Migration was very painless, I kept my old /home partition and all my preferences were transfered seamlessly - even the same webpages were opened which I left open in ubuntu! Never did I have such an easy transition from one OS to another in the windows world, that's for sure. So far, haven't found any problems or conflicts from keeping the old /home partition.

[nightmarex]

Just wanted to post an addendum - I just migrated to Linux Mint and so far, I'm loving it. Much nicer than Ubuntu. IMO. Faster, too. I've just about almost set up everything the way it should be.

Migration was very painless, I kept my old /home partition and all my preferences were transfered seamlessly - even the same webpages were opened which I left open in ubuntu! Never did I have such an easy transition from one OS to another in the windows world, that's for sure. So far, haven't found any problems or conflicts from keeping the old /home partition.

Mint is the new Ubuntu after all =).

It must be nice to have a positive experience with Linux right off, back in the day... oh the pain. I still have nightmares about staying up for hours and hours resolving dependencies until early morning before school.

[dee.]

Mint is the new Ubuntu after all =).

It must be nice to have a positive experience with Linux right off, back in the day... oh the pain. I still have nightmares about staying up for hours and hours resolving dependencies until early morning before school.

Well... in full disclosure, my first experience with (running my own) linux wasn't totally positive - I installed ubuntu 11.04. That... was horrible. After I had managed to mess up the entire system so that nothing worked - in attempts to "fix" things that were wrong with unity - I gave up and started over with 10.04. That was ok I guess, but 12.04 was what really sold it for me - after 12.04 came, I never booted to windows again. With 10.04 I had been switching between them, kind of on the fence, but 12.04 was the first release that made me say "hey, I don't need windows at all".

Sadly, lately it seems ubuntu is looking to become the new apple rather than doing what's right. So now I use Mint, and it rocks. It's like they say - ubuntu done right

One little quibble - mint had gimp 2.6 preinstalled, which I had to remove so I could compile 2.8 myself. Oh well, doesn't matter that much, compiling software is kind of fun anyway. Makes me feel all like an elite computer expert or something.

[masinick]

That IS old... in Linux years at least!

Feeling old..my first distribution was SLS back in 92 or was it 93.

I did not get my Linux start until 1995, and I waited until I could purchase a book... Patrick Volkerding co-authored a book around that time along with Johnson and Reichard, if I remember correctly. The Linux kernel was early, but I do believe it was V1.something, perhaps around 1.2. I believe that the Slackware release that came with the book was either V2.0 or something close. I ran that from 1995-1998, then got Red Hat 5.1, then Mandrake 6.5, but the first distro I ran on a broadband network was Caldera openLinux eDesktop 2.4; that ran quite well on a laptop with only 2.1 GB of disk space and 16 MB of memory, if you can believe it! Wow, we have so much more these days. I remember going from that 100 MHz system to a 400 MHz system, which also went from 16 MB of memory to 128 MB memory, and from 2.1 GB disk to a 20 GB disk... all VERY miniscule today!

Once I got used to Debian in 2001, I learned how to use Debian Sid, and I've used it more than anything else since then.
But my computing days go back much earlier to microprocessors (not even called PCs in the late seventies, LARGE minicomputers (in size, not power) running on PDP-8 and PDP-10, and later PDP-11 minis; that's where I saw my first UNIX system in action; that was in the late seventies. I actually started regularly using UNIX software in 1982 though, so I suffered with other systems for several years prior to that time. My VERY earliest computing was on IBM mainframes in 1974 and HP minis running DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing System) in 1973.