Ask Lemmy

Kubuntu 6.06. Got the CD with a computer magazine that had a good tutorial on how to install the thing next to a pre-existing Windows partition. To this day I miss the look of KDE 3!

Ubuntu sometime in the late 2000's. I remember a friend showing me virtual desktops that rotated between each other.

I dual booted my machine and it was amazing... For 10 seconds until I realized thats all it did. When right back to windows.

Mint, now Artix as 2nd after 6 months

Ubuntu. If I remember correctly it was in 2016. I do remember that it was still using the Unity desktop environment, which was pretty good in my opinion. I didn't know anything about Linux back then, and I tried to run Minecraft on it through WINE. It didn't work lol.

Ubuntu. I think it was around when Unity was starting off.

I first tried Ubuntu because it was the only one I knew of besides arch and I heard that arch was hard. I hated Ubuntu immediately and started distro hopping. I'm on Debian 12 now and it's the longest I've been on a single distro.

I think mint, but after that Ubuntu and kubuntu since ~gutsy.

Ubuntu as my shitty thinkpad with Windows XP lagged like hell. It was improvement, but geeks on the internet keep saying that Ubuntu is slow and bloated. This motivated me to distrohop and finally landed with Arch Linux. Prob 8+ years with this OS 😂

The first time I used Linux was at an old job, and we used Xubuntu for desktop, Debian for servers, and Raspbian on the Raspberry Pis, but technically Xubuntu would have been the first. I currently use KDE neon as my daily driver

Minix.

But then I wised up and switched to FreeBSD.

Back in 2004, I had a SuSE Linux professional 9.2 on 5 CDs and 2 DVDs. I repeat: SEVEN DISKS!! Even without internet access - which I did not have at that time - it felt like all apps accessible through packet manager. You just had to swap discs when prompted. I just took it out in fond memory... SuSE Linux 9.2

My first was Ubuntu about a decade ago. Didn't stick with it at the time. I wouldn't choose Ubuntu for almost any purpose today, but I think at the time it was fine. (By "almost" I mean that there possibly exists a good use case, but I cannot currently think of one.)

Centos in like 2008... idk the version, i had to learn how to set up a basic internal http server with a sql database or something from zero. It was fun.

Red Hat

Zenwalk. Not sure why...

Some really old ubuntu version running in a folder in my windows partition. It kept crashing and uninstall was just removing the folder. Another os was beos which ran from a folder too.

OpenSuse with KDE on a Netbook

Debian... would recommend

I distrohopped at the start, no idea what I started with but the first one I settled on was Solus. Still a big fan of Budgie, and the OS felt easy to use, yet had the possibility to download stuff like Spotify as well.

My first one was OpenSUSE in the 00-years. I was hardly able to get it up and running on my worn out, home-build desktop.

Tried again later with ubuntu (Gnome) on an old Thinkpad and was taken aback about how smooth it ran just ootb.

This one!

I wanted to try out Ubuntu and Linux Mint in a dual boot configuration when I was about 10 years old and accidentally wiped my whole disk clean. I recovered all the data that was saveable, reinstalled Windows and didn't touch Linux until avout 4 years later, when I setup Arch on my new laptop. Since then, I've aquired many new devices and always remained true to Arch.

I think it was mint or elementry

Raw linux: Android

Raw desktop OS : ChromeOS

GNU/Linux : Ubuntu 18.09

Current : Debian 12

I tried Caldera first, but could never get it to boot. The first one I managed to actually use was Ubuntu 5.10, and that's what got Linux to be my daily driver. Lots of distro-hopping later, I'm still daily driving Linux, Debian these days.

I couldn't run Linux on my PC due too lack of hardware support at the time, but FreeBSD had support, so I ran that for a couple of years until Linux caught up.

At that time, there wasn't much choice when it came to distros. These days, it's a little bit of everything. Arch on my daily driver, RHEL on my ERP and DB servers, Ubuntu server on my Dev server, and I'm planning on deploying NixOS across the 700 PCs at our different locations.

Ubuntu > OpenSuse > Mint

Tried some others along the way but didn't liked them.

Mandrake 7.1 - it was aweful.

attempted Debian and Suse, but first one I got installed and actually used for awhile was a Stage 1 Gentoo build

Red Hat mid 90s and then Slackware, Red Hat was more polished but I learnt so much more from Slackware.

Corel Linux, I doubt anyone else here knows it especially used it. Very user friendly, got me into linux.

I played with SuSE 6.2 for a while in 1999 but only really turned to Linux in 2001 with Mandrake Linux 8.0.

Fedora. Core 3 or Core 4 according to Wikipedia and the fact that I recognize the names. An acquaintance suggested I try Linux, so I found info on it, didn't really understand what a distro was and settled on Fedora because I had bought O'Reilly Linux Pocket Guide that used that distro.

I switched pretty quickly after that, and used Ubuntu, Debian, then Mepis for awhile. I've run Arch, dual-booted with Windows for several years on the desktop and Debian testing on my remote server

Ubuntu!

I downloaded the installer in 2017 after MS forced an update to Windows 10 from 7. My laptop, from 2010, couldn't handle W10 and I heard Linux was good for old laptops. Not long after that I hopped around to other distros but Ubuntu was first.

Manjaro, that is the distro in my families computer

I installed linux mint on some really old laptop when i was a little kid but i wouldnt really consider that my first distro that i actually used on a dailybasis, that would be SteamOS on a Steam deck, it showed me how great linux could be and got me hooked on it.