What Was Your First Linux Distribution?

[Tares]

First distro was SuSE, but I don't remember which version... an early one

[nbi1]

Here's my chronology of distros de jour:

1. Slackware
2. Yggdrasil
3. RedHat
4. SuSe
5. Debian (current)

And unless the Debian folks pull their heads out of their butts Ubuntu 8.10 (which actually has working 2D for my RADEON 4850) will soon become number 6.

Although Debian has much to recommend it their philosophies and slow release cycles often combine to yield distros that don't fully support modern (or even less than cutting edge) hardware. My experiences with Ubuntu OTOH have been very positive with regards to HW support.

The main slam against Ubuntu of not having the large number of packages available that Debian does also does not seem to be valid anymore.

[gordboy]

What's In A Name ...

My first linux system was copied from someone else's hard disk with dd and a bit of cable juggling. As I recall, he made it from scratch, with a kernel and some gnu utils etc including bash. The kernel was version 1.2.3.

My first real distro as such was Slack something or other or caldera. I forget which, but I do remember it was kernel 1.2.13.

I had already been programming "proper" 32 bit systems for over 15 years when linux came around, so it was no big deal. In fact, I remember thinking that when msdos came out, it looked uncannily like a single-user, watered-down unix shell, with a few changes to avoid copyright complications ....

[klikklak]

Slackware back in 93 (I played a mud located at helsinki university thus ended up doing slip and tinyfugue on a linux box), no computer for 6 years, then debian for 7? years and now ubuntu. Very much a debian person still, I'm looking forward for gnewsense to mature.

[Forge]

I initially started out with the new SuSE 6.0. I ran with them up through SuSE 6.4, then jumped around for a while. Ran Debian for a year or three, then Gentoo, and I've recently dumped Gentoo for Ubuntu (WTF @ 6+ months and no KDE 4 ebuilds), but I'm thinking about going back. I like my distros a bit more edge than Ubuntu caters to.

[energyman]

Forge, there are kde4 ebuilds - kde-testing overlay - for a loooong time.

And why would anbyody want to use such a broken mess as ubuntu?

[Forge]

Because not all of us have time to spend 2-3 hours every day troubleshooting our overlays and trying to find out why the latest big update just won't compile.

If you want to discuss this, cool, but your post just seems like kneejerk attacking, and I'm too busy working to have a proper flamefest.

[energyman]

'every day' nice hyperbole. Interesstingly I spent 0hours a day fixing overlays. Hm.

And Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 are both very, very buggy. And has somebody told you that l10n in ubuntu is worse than in the original software? For example kde 4.2?
kde can be completly german - for example. But not if you use ubuntu - because they destroy the complete translations. If that is not brain dead, what is?

[Redeeman]

'every day' nice hyperbole. Interesstingly I spent 0hours a day fixing overlays. Hm.

And Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 are both very, very buggy. And has somebody told you that l10n in ubuntu is worse than in the original software? For example kde 4.2?
kde can be completly german - for example. But not if you use ubuntu - because they destroy the complete translations. If that is not brain dead, what is?

I think actually wanting your KDE to be german would qualify as "what is".....

[Zhick]

I think actually wanting your KDE to be german would qualify as "what is".....

Uhm yeah... because there are only americans on the world? WTF is wrong with you? That's got to be the most ignorant statement I've ever read on this forums. (ok, that's propably not true, but it ranks up pretty high)

@topic: Uhm... not 100% sure to be honest. I know it was SuSe (from some magazine-dvd), but not what version... must've been something around 7. I installed it, but keeped Windows as my default-boot-entry, and only booted into SuSe for a few times. Eventualy it was wiped when doing one of the half-yearly Windows-reinstalls.
Then two or three years ago I gave linux another try with Fedora Core. And I liked it, except the packet-manage (yum iirc), because it was slow as hell. Then I made the mistake to switch to Ubuntu because everyone was saying it was so great. But I hate it, mainly because of Gnome. But I liked the packet-manager (apt-get), so I stayed with *buntu and installed Kubuntu... which did a terrible job at integrating KDE.
So I switched again to Debian, and finally everything was great. So I stayed with Debian for a long time, and then about an year ago I installed Gentoo just out of couriosity. I liked it for it's very up-to-date packages and configurability, and so I'm still using & loving it. If I'd need to reinstall linux now I'd chose either Debian or Gentoo... but more likely Gentoo.