What was the first ever distro you installed and used? For me, it was Mint as I seemed like the closest thing to Windows minus all the forced updates and chappy changes.

Currently on Fedora GNOME now but what about you? What made you choose your first distro diving into the world of Linux?

I wanna hear your thoughts!

    • Sips'@slrpnk.net
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      9 months ago

      Gentoo is on my to-do list to try out, going to set of a whole weekend to just sit down and enjoy the process of installing it. Have never touched it before, but always heard good things about it, as well as the things you learn along the way. Glad to hear you think so too!

      • BlueÆther@no.lastname.nz
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        9 months ago

        it wasn’t my first distro but i did the full bootstrap install so it must have been pre 2005. ran it as my daily driver for years

    • nfsu2@feddit.cl
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      9 months ago

      Gentoo as a first distro is scary as fuck as a common person. How did you manage?

      • communism@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        Any distro that’s well-documented is not a big deal to install and use. Never understood the big deal people used to make (still do sometimes? though I think it’s mostly ironic now) about Arch. I did my first install Arch when I was kinda a dumbass but I just read the wiki (very thorough, btw, still use that wiki nearly daily) and followed the instructions. Especially with Arch, the wiki is so informative it explains the things you don’t know so you understand what you’re doing even though when I first installed Arch I didn’t know what an fstab file was, what the initramfs was, etc. I’ll disclaim that I’ve not installed Gentoo myself, but I hear from people who have installed it that it’s very well documented, so makes sense that newcomers could install and use it if they’re willing to read and learn.

        • nfsu2@feddit.cl
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          9 months ago

          What would you say is a distro that is badly documented? Genuinely curious.

          • communism@lemmy.ml
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            9 months ago

            Tbh, as a current Artix user, I think the Artix documentation is lacking. Their full disk encryption installation guide doesn’t have any UEFI instructions and while they have a wiki, it definitely doesn’t cover a lot of the things that differ from systemd, which is the purpose of the Artix Wiki, ie to cover everything from Arch Wiki which needs to be changed without systemd. I get most of my info from the Artix forums. I even used the Arch wiki installation guide for installing Artix instead of Artix Wiki’s installation guide (it’s only like 3 commands that are different, they use basestrap instead of pacstrap and you install a different init system with basestrap, they use fstabgen instead of genfstab, and artix-chroot instead of arch-chroot (that last one should be obvious though)). I still like the distro ofc, otherwise I wouldn’t use it, but I think it’s lacking in good documentation. Maybe that’s just my perspective after being spoiled by the Arch Wiki for so long though lol. I can’t really speak for many distros though, I’ve not daily-driven many

  • shortwavesurfer@monero.townEnglish
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    9 months ago

    Ubuntu 10.10 on a Dell Latitude D505 with an intel core 2 duo and 512MB RAM running Windows XP. It was a school laptop that i cracked the admin password for and installed virtualbox. It ran like crap!. I knew it wasn’t ubuntu’s fault and later always booted from a nub sized USB that i always had plugged in with persistance. I can’t remember the name of the OS at this moment, but it was made for low-end hardware and was specifically environmentally friendly with a green leaf as its logo.

  • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    I think the first distribution I tried was Fedora on my PlayStation 3 around 2007. From what I remember, you had to use terminal a lot so I couldn’t do anything with it.

    Then a few months later I tried Ubuntu on an old Dell computer from my father’s office.

    Dual booted windows and Ubuntu for years until fully switching to Linux around 2021.

    Now I’m only using Fedora with a few virtual machines for some specific needs.

  • MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    The first distro I tried was Red Hat 5 back in the late 1990s but I never got a GUI working so I guess the first one I used properly would have been Mandrake iirc. These days it’s Tumbleweed.

  • Dave.@aussie.zone
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    9 months ago

    Red Hat 5.0, 1998.

    Had to get it on a CD as it would have taken 37.5 years to download according to Internet Explorer.

    Kernel 2.0.36 represent 🤘

    • assembly@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I was RedHat 3 back in 1996. Not even sure how we got the CD but we all passed it around and were amazed.

    • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
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      9 months ago

      5.2 for me. I got it as a gift, in a offical retail box. I think the box with manuals is still around somewhere, but I’m not sure where.

  • juliebean@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    my first time installing linux was ubuntu, because it was what i’d seen a friend using. i meant to install it to dual boot with windows, but instead ended up wiping everything from the family PC, which was very distressing, and my dad quickly reinstalled windows. this was back around '06 i think.
    in '08, i first installed linux on my own system and actually got to use it. i’m not sure what i installed first, cause i did a fair bit of distrohopping, but i settled on ubuntu mate for a while.

  • Goku@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Ubuntu, and I’ve been using it for 10 years without trying anything else until this week, I use arch now.

  • TrivialBetaState@sopuli.xyz
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    9 months ago

    My first distro was Suse Linux 8.1. I had to buy the box as downloading was not an option with my dial-up connection back then. However, the first distro that I fell in love with was Fedora Core. The original one. I bought the book which had the DVD with the full installation. I was hooked. That was more than 20 years ago.

  • Murdoc@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    Mine was an obscure, short-lived distro called LibraNet. It was well done though, by just a father and son team. Unfortunately that was also why it was short lived, because the father passed away.

    As for why I picked it, I didn’t really know much about how to choose a distro at the time, so I picked it based on the name, and its description of being easy to use and set up, which it was.

  • rpr@lemmy.ca
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    9 months ago

    Yggdrasil in 1993. Why? Because it was the easiest to install at the time, and came with one of my books in college.