Mine was Knoppix because back in the day Libraries used to let you borrow all sorts of computer software and games and that’s what they had and I was stuck on dialup lol
Soft Landing Systems (SLS). So many disks!
Debian. They mailed me the install media.
Suse 5 or 6. I think. Throw some Debian in there around that same time frame.
Early Mandriva with KDE 3.4 or 3.5 I think, but I can barely remember anything with clarity. It couldn’t have been bad though, since I haven’t used Windows on my own devices since 😉.
From my foggy memory, I think it was good for my then nocoder self, easy to use, stable, relatively lite, and had good looks.
I missed the Mandrake and pre-Fedora Red Hat era, but not by much.
Forgot to mention that I wasn’t exactly young at the time. We just didn’t have reliable broadband internet back then in my neck of the woods. So I had to download ISOs and save them in a USB thumb drive in a uni computer lab.
Raspbian Bullseye ARM32 -> Ubuntu 18.04/22.04 LTS -> Kubtuntu 22.04/24.04/25.04 (
--minimal-installto avoidsnap)BeOS ;)
I know, not Linux. But it was my first OS other than the one that came pre-installed.
Can’t remember exactly which was my very first Linux distro but probably Knoppix or another early live one.
My first “wipe Windows and install on bare metal” was PC-BSD. I know, again, not Linux.
And again, can’t remember exactly the very first “wipe Windows and install on bare metal” Linux, probably Puppy or Ubuntu.
I had a machine with multiple OSes chosen at startup with OS/2 Boot Manager, including OS/2 Warp, Windows NT Workstation 4, and Redhat 5.0 which came on a CDROM labeled Pink Tie 5.0. (It was late '90s I guess. I used MSDOS before that. And a Commodore 64 before that) I believe I put a mail server on it (the Redhat partition) while I was still on dial-up (128K ISDN). The mails waited somewhere until I got online and signalled to send them to me. But then upgraded it to DSL. I was still running Redhat 7.3 with my mail server until 2006, even though Redhat 9 and Fedora were out by then. In 2006, I shut it down and bought a Windows 98 laptop to travel around Central America for a year. The Guatemalans laughed at my Windows 98 laptop–they were running Vista. When I got back to the US in 2007, and broke the laptop screen, oops, I bought a $300 desktop PC that had Lindows installed.
Slackware on a whole lot of lettered floppy disks.
Slackware was my first linux distro, but would Solaris or SunOS count?
No, but bonus credit. I went Vax VMS, DEC Alpha Dux, Slackware, slowaris (x86 Solaris), Redhat, then LFS, Gentoo, RHEl Solaris 9, and then eventually a little of everything else.
Red hat 2.0
RedHat 6.
It came on a CD on the cover of a massive tome titled RedHat Linux 6 Unleashed.
RedHat6.
It came on a CD on the cover of a massive tome titled RedHat Linux 6 Unleashed.
Mandrake 9.2 (before the Mandriva rebranding)
Same with Mandrake, though I can’t remember what version number.
SuSE 1992 (1995?) (don’t remember the exact number, but the year was on the accompanying paper manual), on some 1.3.xx Kernel, I think. Good times.
Ubuntu 18.04 (2018) -> Manjaro (2019-2021)-> Arch (2021-2022) ->EndeavourOS (2022-present on my desktop) ->NixOS (2024-present on my laptop)
It was probably Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog, though it didn’t stick. I tried other versions of Ubuntu and even gentoo again over the following years, but none of them would stick. I would eventually tinker with something I couldn’t repair, and rather than re-installing and starting again, I’d just return to windows.
Linux finally stuck for me last year, and Linux (Arch and then CachyOS) has been my full time OS for about the last 18 months
The Ubuntu story is exactly what happened to me.
OpenSUSE Table weed is what got Linux to stick for me though. Once I learnt enough with that to get started and my OS needed a reinstall, I ended up going with CachyOS too eventually.
