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?

  • phantomwise@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    13 minutes ago

    I actually wanted Arch but everyone was saying that you HAD to do a manual install first and I had been miserably failing at doing it in a WM for a few weeks. I had finally decided to try it directly on hardware so that I had no choice but to complete it if I wanted to use my laptop, and just as was about to burn the ISO on a USB stick the power went out and my hard drive died 😑 On a saturday evening, obviously…

    All I had was a Haiku USB I had made to check it out, and a Linux Mint USB a friend lent me that I hadn’t tried because I assumed I would hate it. So I used Haiku for about 30 minutes (let’s say it had a few bugs), and Mint for the rest of the weekend and did, in fact, absolutely hate it (Windows PTSD 😭 ).

    So until the computer store opened on Monday, I spend 48 hours browsing the web to find a better distro and when I got my new SSD I installed AntiX, because it was very light and likely to run well on my potato-grade laptop, it came without a DE and 7 different window managers to try (which seemed cool at the time, but I didn’t actually try any of them except the default one IceWM and after a few weeks I installed i3 😅 ) and also because YouTube had convinced me that systemd was the Antechrist (thanks YouTube 😑 ).

    After two months I decided to try Manjaro on my other laptop… it didn’t go well : incompatible dependencies preventing updates, Nvidia + Wayland making games not display correctly, and if I had to fix all that manually what’s the point I just might as well use regular Arch. So I gave up after 48 hours and decided to install Arch, and just as I booted from the Arch ISO the laptop died (fan malfunction) and I had to send it back 😑.

    After three months, the third laptop, bought with the refund from the second one, did actually allow me to install Arch without throwing a fit 🥳 using archinstall to preserve my mental health this time.

    Arch has been really great but I need to switch to a bigger SSD and I am probably going to try Nix because it seems really cool 🤩

  • downhomechunk@midwest.socialEnglish
    1·
    55 minutes ago

    I first tried Mandrake for a couple days in the late 9ps because I heard it was easy. It was definitely easy to brick my system and have no idea why!

    So I switched to Slackware and never looked back. I’m still daily driving Slackware all these years later.

  • hobbsc@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 hour ago

    redhat 4.1 or maybe 5.2 back around 1996-1998 (plus a freebsd release around the same time). I got a pile of probably 15 discs from walnut creek and they were the only two I could get running. I didn’t have internet access at the time.

  • Unmapped@lemmy.ml
    2·
    2 hours ago

    I started with mint because of ppl recommending it. Absolutely hated it. Luckly I watched a YouTube video about installing arch. So then I tried it and loved it. Then manjaro for about 2 years. Then back to arch. Then finally Nixos, and I dont plan on ever switching again. I have Nixos on every system I own now, and a few friends machines. Those are just the main ones. I tried all the other popular ones out on my laptop. Except gentoo.

    TLDR: Mint🙁>Arch😄>manjaro🙂>arch😄>NixOs😁

  • univers3man@lemmy.world
    2·
    3 hours ago

    My first linux distribution was Linux From Scratch (LFS). I printed like 300 pages at the school library so I could run it at home. My first real distribution was Gentoo or Damn Small Linux.

  • Magiilaro@feddit.org
    1·
    3 hours ago

    My first steps were with Debian 2.0 and a Suse Version from about the same time. But that was not very successful so I went back to Windows for about a year and then really got into Linux with Gentoo. I had a year of not much to do, had to wait a year to get into University, and I decided to install the complicated Linux Distribution that I could find.

    Reasoning was: It will break a lot if it is so complicated, due to this I am forced to learn while repairing it.

  • sbird@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    3 hours ago

    Linux Mint XFCE, it was easy to setup and could run on my really old laptop.

  • piranhaconda@mander.xyz
    1·
    4 hours ago

    Whatever Ubuntu was available in 2015. I only dabbled in Linux over the past 10 years. More seriously switching over in the last year or so.

    I have Unraid as a server OS (Debian based, running a lot of docker containers and a couple VMs). Debian on my laptop. And Bazzite (fedora based) on my Lenovo Legion Go.

    Still need to swap my gaming PC from windows. May try Bazzite on that as well. I’ve also tried Mint, Manjaro, and Zorin

      • piranhaconda@mander.xyz
        1·
        2 hours ago

        Yea I’m running a much leaner Debian on my laptop now. Base OS was very bare, slowly adding only what I need because it’s a 2016 laptop and noticeably slower on some more bloated OSs

  • Jess@lemmy.world
    2·
    5 hours ago

    Oof. I am pretty sure it was Mandrake in 97. I bounced around trying what was around before settling on Gentoo for a decade plus. Then both my laptop and desktop got too long in the tooth to make distcc even worthwhile and migrated to Arch. I figured it was the closest distro to Gentoo that I wouldn’t have too many problems. I don’t know howong it’s been now, but I’m an Arch fangirl. I’ve installed it many times since on work computers as well. For remote systems though, it’s always Debian stable.