this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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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?

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[–] polo@lemm.ee 2 points 3 months ago

Ubuntu, as they used to send free CD packs to distribute. Was fun booting into live CD on computers.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 3 months ago

Ubuntu in 2009 or so. Booting school computers onto the live DVD felt like hacking. I think around 2016 I installed some spin of Ubuntu on my laptop and used it somewhat regularly. Prior to that it was just random times I felt like using the dual boot function. I mostly used Windows. It took until 2025 for me to switch my desktop to Cachy OS.

[–] _____@lemm.ee 2 points 3 months ago

Arch in like 2019 maybe.

I still like Arch, I tried all sorts of distros in VMs, most feel clunky to me.

Tiling manager, GUI file explorer, minimal status bar and I'm set.

For my laptop this is swaywm, swaybar, nautilus.

I also use drun-like programs

Ubuntu, the release right before unity was the one I started actually using.

After that I switched to arch for a very long time, and now i'm on nixos.

[–] pineapple@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I guess Ubuntu when I tried to make a minecraft server a couple of years ago. I first started actually using Linux as my desktop with bazzite.

[–] jim3692@discuss.online 2 points 3 months ago

I started with Lubuntu, because of Minecraft. My PC was so slow that even Minecraft had improved performance, compared to it running on Win 10.

[–] Bravebellows@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 months ago

OpenSuSE that came with the Linux magazine

[–] the_abecedarian@piefed.social 2 points 3 months ago

I think mine was gentoo, waaaay back in the day. It didn't go great lol.

I'm loving opensuse rn though!

[–] vegetvs@kbin.earth 2 points 3 months ago

Slackware back in '96 when It was the only option. Then tried everything else before settling on Mint and never having to worry about picking another distribution again.

[–] 7arakun@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

I bought one of those Guide to Linux books back in like 2008 that came with an Ubuntu install disc. Installed it on an old family PC but I didn't really know what I was doing so I didn't get far.

Then in college I used Mint on my desktop and Peppermint on my Acer Aspire netbook. Around graduation I bought a Chromebook and ran Xubuntu in Crouton.

Went a few years without Linux and recently dual-booted with Pop OS on my gaming PC. Feels good.

[–] starshipwinepineapple@programming.dev 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Ubunutu for a server in ~2019.

Arch for my workstation Jan 2025

[–] fargeol@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It was DSLinux, Linux for the Nintendo DS. I tried it while hacking with the DS just to try that "Linux" everyone was talking about. I installed Ubuntu on my PC short after it.

[–] midtsveen@lemmy.wtf 1 points 3 months ago

Never heard of it, DSLinux looks very interesting! ❤️

[–] nfreak@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Ubuntu at the start of my college years, dabbled with Arch in the senior year. Huge learning experience, but ultimately I went back to Windows because gaming support was nonexistent at the time. Kept the dual boot up and kept it running Arch during the day for coursework, Windows when I was all done.

For the past decade since then I was entirely back on Windows. Aside from an Ubuntu VM for my last job, I didn't really get back into it until the Steam Deck launched a few years ago, and at the start of this year I decided to set up a dual boot again once I got a new full new desktop build. Tried Bazzite, really didn't like how restricted I felt, immediately wiped it and tried out CachyOS instead, and that's my daily driver today.

And just this past week I finally decided got into selfhosting, something I've been eyeballing for ages but never really got around to. Proxmox on the host, Debian VM, pretty standard and works amazingly.

[–] maryhadalittlelamp@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

Knoppix on live cd which I installed later on hdd but a few days later switched to Mandrake, I think it was... 2001? Good times, good times. There has been a lot of distrohopping since then.

[–] radio_free_asgarthr@hexbear.net 2 points 3 months ago

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx

Currently, I use Arch BTW.

[–] Matriks404@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Some random shitty distribution for netbooks.

Then Ubuntu 11.04 and I have very fond memories of it. But now Ubuntu sucks.

Using Debian 13 with KDE currently.

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[–] zemon@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago

Andromeda Linux around 2009. It had cool astronomy based theme and animation.

[–] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 2 points 3 months ago

My first was Ubuntu in a VM because everyone recommended it, I distro hopped in VMs until I just ended up using Mint in a VM almost exclusively. It was when I complained to someone about the issues with the VM when locking the laptop and they asked me “Why not just run that system as-is?” that I installed it for real.

I've also used Manjaro for half a year, a very minimal Arch+i3 install (without the install script because I wanted the “real experience”) for about 1.5 year, and dual booted Bazzite and Mint on my gaming PC for a year (it's just Mint now), all the while trying out other distros big and small on older hardware or in VMs.

I don't feel I've found “the one”, but somehow I keep coming back to Mint... Although, perhaps NixOS is it... Who knows?

[–] tehsYs@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 3 months ago

Debian 🥔

[–] procapra@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago

The first I used for any extended period of time was fedora.

[–] wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

I can't remember if it was MKLinux or Yellow Dog, either one of these around '97~99. At the time I was also playing with BeOS and NetBSD.

[–] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Forgot about BeOS (and NetBSD for that matter), and wonder what came of BeOS.

[–] wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Wow, that brings back memories. Forgot about the whole Palm thing. That was a wild ride at the time.

Thank you!

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[–] BlueEther@no.lastname.nz 1 points 3 months ago

forgot about Yellow Dog. I still have a BSD VM (Dragonfly) that I occasionally fire up

[–] antithetical@lemmy.deedium.nl 1 points 3 months ago

Hmm, the years are a bit faded but first install of Redhat in 1996-7 somewhere as a short experiment, then Slackware, SuSE, LFS, Gentoo, and since then lazy with Kubuntu.. Might switch again soon with the Snap fiasco.

[–] AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago

Sometime in maybe 2021-22 I messed up something on a shitty laptop of mine at the time. Changed something on win10 and was trying to fix it to get admin privileges back on the single account on there. Some website recommended flashing Ubuntu onto a thumb drive and entering some commands on the live boot. Didn't work out and I didn't wanna go through with a fresh win10 install for close to, if not, $100 for everything. Ended up with Ubuntu 20.04 installed because I wanted to use that laptop.

I've since tried many and currently have MX on a better laptop. At some point I'm gonna try to either find something new I can learn so that way by October I can make my desktop have a priority Linux boot with an internet disconnected win10 partition, or just go with Mint or MX. Definitely got a small list of distros I might wanna try, so we'll see.

[–] IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 1 points 3 months ago

Ubuntu 16.04, dual booted on my laptop before I knew how much of a hassle that could be! Fortunately, never had any of the infamous issues.

[–] buh@hexbear.net 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

ubuntu some time in 2010, but I eventually switched to fedora in 2011, went back to commercial operating systems (windows and macos) in the mid 10s, but returned to fedora some months ago, and that's what I'm using now (I do still have a macbook running macos lol 🤷‍♀️)

strangely I don't think I've tried other linux distros all these years, I may have tried to install gentoo and/or arch for meme reasons but gave up and went back to ubuntu and fedora

[–] whiskers165@hexbear.net 1 points 3 months ago

In the fall of 2006 my friend in high school (shout-out to treyx.net) donated to the Ubuntu people and they sent him a stack of Ubuntu live CDs, must have been 5.10 or 6.06. I remember being so excited when I got it up and running on my computer

[–] stargazingpenguin@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 months ago

Ubuntu was my first when I started poking around with it. Not sure which version, but it was during the Unity era. Pop!_OS was the one I started using when I switched full time. I'm still using it on my main computer, but I'm also using Fedora, Ubuntu, NixOS, and Mint on other devices because I like variety!

[–] hex123456@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago

Mklinux on my powermac G3

[–] Carrot@lemmy.today 1 points 3 months ago

I grew up a windows user, as was my father before me. I first started with Linux in my teens, initially on Raspbian as I was gifted a raspberry pi 2b with a camera, and I wanted to try goofing around with python and computer vision (which was the style at the time.) Once I entered university, I dual booted Windows 7 and Linux Mint, since my professor suggested moving to Linux for C++ homework to make things simpler. I was scared of jumping to a new desktop OS due to my upbringing, so I couldn't abandon Windows, not yet anyway. Following that I had a cheap Summer fling with Kali as it was a requirement for a cyber security course I took. This replaced my Mint install. After college I got into self-hosting, and my server ran Debian for stability (and still does to this day), however I was still scared of leaving the safety of my littlr Windows garden I called home. But then Windows betrayed me by putting ads on my taskbar, and I got fed up. I installed EndeavorOS on my main machine which was a laptop. I immediately fell head over heels for the AUR, and not needing a deep understanding of linux during the install was a plus. I got comfy with the ins and outs of linux over the next year and a half or so, and when I finally went to build myself a new desktop PC, I made the switch to Arch. It's been great, and I felt like I understood all the decisions I made during the install. That was 6 months ago. If Arch ever fails me catastrophically,(which would be pretty hard as I am using an os snapshot manager, and backing those snapshots up to my server) I will move to either Debian or Mint for stability, as I am kind of tired of hopping around at this point.

[–] russjr08@bitforged.space 1 points 3 months ago

Welcome to Lemmy!

For me the first Linux distribution I used was Ubuntu 8.04 - though I never had installed it on physical hardware, just a VM - VirtualBox IIRC (that didn't occur till Ubuntu 8.10). I was in my early teenage years and had discovered Linux and found it interesting, I used the WUBI tool to install it through Windows and updated the bootloader to keep Windows as the default (with a one second timeout) since it was the family computer, I think my family would've shat their pants if they randomly rebooted the PC and was greeted with Linux heh.

Though a few years later on an old secondary family laptop (it was the "someone else is using the other computer" spare/backup) that was running Vista, it had gotten so buggy and bogged down that I installed Kubuntu for my family and they happily used that until eventually that laptop was retired. It never got them to really look into permanently switching to Linux, but I think that's more than fine - I've never been one to "proselytize" Linux: If it is the right tool for you, fantastic - if not, no hard feelings is how I see it. In the aforementioned case, it was the better tool over the bogged down and buggy Vista.

As for nowadays, its CachyOS on my desktop (I'm not married to it, but its been working alright for me for about a year now), SteamOS on my Deck, Fedora on my secondary laptop (an old intel macbook), and then Bazzite on my ROG Ally. Windows is still installed on a secondary drive on my desktop, but I very rarely have to boot into it.

[–] mrgnz@feddit.org 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I guess it was suse or red hat somewhen end of 90s or beginning of 2000. Anyhow I didn't like KDE back in the days and haven't touched it since. Although the screenshots I've seen of the latest kde looked kind of good. But I'm mostly running arch or manjaro today and prefer gnome or some tiling manager like herbstluftwm.

[–] boiledfrog@hexbear.net 1 points 3 months ago
[–] Uebercomplicated@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago

Lubuntu — what a horrible experience (back then)! Now I'm happy with openSUSE Tumbleweed, Void Linux, and Nobara (for my wanna-be gaming PC, lol; trying to get just enough frames for CS2). Every once-and-a-while (I feel like hyphenating that), I do a fresh install, just to get rid of the cruft. Nowadays that makes me wonder if I should be switching to immutable...

[–] Culf@feddit.dk 1 points 3 months ago

I started using Linux this year. I first tried out Debian, but then switched to mint. Has been very happy with mint every since, so I don't think I will switch again in the near future.

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