Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

Ubuntu, either version 12.04 or 12.10 when I got my first computer, a Chromebook, in Christmas 2013 when I was 10. I hated how Chrome OS didn't support anything so I found a way to put Ubuntu on it and messed around with Blender and Minecraft. Despite this early start, I proceeded to do nothing productive with it, broke it out of frustration, and now I'm 20 and struggling with Arch lmao

Gentoo circa 2002. Soooooo over my capabilities at the time

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

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

Ubuntu. But that was an office pc so pretty limited. Mint was the first ever I installed and stayed there for a few years.

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.

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.

Mandrake 7.1 - it was aweful.

Debian... would recommend

OpenSuse with KDE on a Netbook

My mom brought me a disk of mandrake Linux. I tried it and I was pretty lost.

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!

Ubuntu > OpenSuse > Mint

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

Raw linux: Android

Raw desktop OS : ChromeOS

GNU/Linux : Ubuntu 18.09

Current : Debian 12

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 contact with linux was with Ubuntu Server 14.04 when I started my first minecraft project with a friend. We decided to try setting up the server on a VPS instead of using a hosting provider that takes care of all the setup and stuff automatically. That was one heck of a journey, but gave me a good quickstart into linux. Nowadays I use linux as a daily driver at home and for the entirety of my server infrastructure.

Slackware. Don't remember the version.

The first I had for work was Ubuntu.

Manjaro for a while. It broke a few times and then I started using Nix os, until I started using Endeavour.

Ubuntu -> Manjaro -> Pop! OS

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

Officially it was Raspberry Pi OS although I had messed around with Mint and Ubuntu a bit before that.

Red Hat

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.

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

Manjaro, that is the distro in my families computer

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.

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.

Redhat. I can't remember the version, but I found it at Fry's electronics in early 2000. Using Fedora now.

Had to use red hat for a cyber security class in college, but I tinkered with Ubuntu back in highschool. I had no idea what I was doing lmao

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.