What was your first Linux distro?

I also tried OS/2, but it came on about 100 floppies (only slightly exaggerated), & of course took ages to get installed. I also didn’t have much Software at my disposal for that OS. I mainly did some testing with it for the company I worked for at the Time. But they then decided to use Windoze for Workgroups.
Novell NetWare was the OS that ran on the servers I managed, that was up to version 5.x. We had several servers distributed at different locations in Switzerland. That was a fine server OS!

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My first job was managing Novell NetWare 3.11 servers later upgraded to 3.12, the next version I used later was NetWare 6.x. Agreed, was great, pity it fell out of favour pretty much when Windows NT was released and slowly interest in it dissipated. And I know the pain, Windows 95 when first released came on 30 floppy disks as booting from CD-ROM direct from the BIOS wasn’t at that point possible then.

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Started out with Slackware after trying BSD. Guess that dates me.

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RH 6.x around 99. OS/2 before that. All this in parallel with Win3.1 and WinNT. I actually created a dual boot of side by side NT installs so that my spouse could use some Cysco software that didn’t play well with other users.
Back in the DOS5 days I had this WYSWYG software called GEOworks. That was back in 92 when writing my thesis.

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Redhat Linux 4, in the mid/late 1990s. I don’t miss the old kernel compile routine. I turned on rip and my ISP did not have filtering configured on their network so my RFC 1918 (192.168) addresses were briefly accessible world wide.

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That must have been fun :smiley:

I was “just a user” until someone hacked the machine I had used.

After that I took interest on the system. First thing learned: one cannot disable all services.

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I’m a hobbyist with a professional career in Windows System Administration and Network Engineering (no professional Linux experience yet unfortunately.)

I started with Ubuntu, and I cut my teeth tinkering with Arch installs. I then spent some time with CentOS in my projects.

I found myself wrapped up in expanding my networking skills and knowledge for a period of time, and now that I’ve returned to my Linux ambitions I am settling in with Rocky Linux for the long haul hopefully.

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I switched from Desqview on DOS to SLS Linux in 1993, and ran a BBS on it called The Pantheon as the HQ for the ANSI art group iCE. Then Slackware, Redhat, Gentoo and now Fedora on the desktop, and redhat/centos/rocky on the servers.

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In 1998 I installed Slackware onto a Zip drive so I could boot my otherwise Windows 98 desktop (Gateway with the old cow logo) into Linux to use perl. By 2000 I was on RedHad 6.x, running a server at home with my personal website over an SDSL link. One day I was surprised when I ran “uptime” and is said 1 day. I though the computer must have crashed and rebooted itself. No… the processes still showed that they had been started before yesterday. I had overrun the 32-bit uptime counter after about 435 days of uptime. Those were the days!

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Ah, OS/2.

Long story short: My 1st distro was Linux Mint with the MATE desktop.

Now for the long story:
I’ve been keeping on using the “successor” to OS/2 from Mensys, the famous eComStation aka “eCS” until I suddenly realized that the whole shebang became more and more ridiculous: Why fighting an uphill battle just to be able to use something … instead of simply USING something. I went to Windows 7 and it was more or less OK. I knew DOS, then Windows since 3.11 WfW, then 95, 98, XP… all while dual-booting into whatever flavour of OS/2 was alive at that time. I skipped Vista and found 7 to be pretty okay. That was the point when I said farewell to OS/2, eCS and its great community. But when Windows 10 came out, I was sure that now the time has come to finally shift to whatever else. MacOS is a 100% no-f*ing-way-never-ever thing for me 'and so I was left with Linux.
And despite I had various exposures to Unix and Linux flavors during the last 20 years, none of them really felt “okay” to me. Someone showed me Ubuntu (back in its early days because “it was so easy to use”) but I knew it’s not what I wanted. Well, so when Windows 10 was around the corner I opted for Linux Mint. 1 Year later Ubuntu, then Fedora (for quite some years) and when I got sick of the bleeding edge with every gnome extension broken on each upgrade I shifted to CentOS. CentOs was great! Sadly, my shift to CentOS happened like 2 months before they decided to, well, “kill” whatever was great about CentOS, we all remember that moment in time I guess and so it’s Rocky for me. I also looked at Alma but I can’t remember what made me prefer to use Rocky instead. Anyways, no regrets ever since.
Cheers, Thomas

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Another OS/2 user here, starting with 16-bit 1.x and moving up to 32-bit Warp. The company I worked for, Kensington Labs, made semiconductor fab equipment that used a PC running OS/2 under the hood. It was a great embedded operating system. I loved writing that code.

I bought RH 5.2 in the 90s to run on our engineering file server. We’d previously used Sun 386i’s for development, and I loved the *nix world. I moved us to Fedora when that came out, only to find I’d need to update it every six months. That was a non-starter for a department server when I had engineering things to do. That’s when I discovered CentOS with its long update cycle time, and switched over to that.

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Surprised to see so many of us that have messed around with OS/2 at some point. That said, pretty cool though as always thought maybe it was niche and not many people actually used it :slight_smile:

I’m pretty sure I had a copy of OS/2 at one point that I got for free somehow. A demonstration or trial copy of some kind.

I remember having a box with whole pile of 3.5" floppies in it and some kind of a giant manual, but I don’t think I ever actually did anything with it.

At one point I sold some DOS computers that came with Geoworks as part of a bundle (computer/keyboard/monitor/Geoworks). I did use that a bit and I thought it was cool, but there was no easy way to write your own Geoworks programs so that sort of shot the whole thing down as far as I was concerned.

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I saw OS/2 laptop in a laboratory, where it was used to program a pipette or something. “To control an instrument”. Then again, they had Evans&Sutherland, SGI IRIX boxes, DEC Alpha, Macs, …

Slackware on a 486 in early 1995. Then switched to Red Hat Linux 2 the year after.

So, yes, with the compilation of a Linux 1 kernel to get all the hardware working. Also remember when Linux switched from a.out to ELF.

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Red Hat Linux 5.0. I’ve used Red Hat, Fedora, Debian, CentOS, and even FreeBSD. Currently using Rocky 8.7. Microsoft-free since 1998.

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Hi Happy Hollidays :slight_smile:

First real usage of UNIX/Linux for me was around 1997 with SCO UNIX… After that it was Sun OS around 2002… Got to Linux Fedora around 2003… Then got more wrapped up in Windows world and escaped back to CentOS :slight_smile:

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Slackware 2.1, with a 1.1.59 kernel. It would have been on a 40 Mhz AMD 386, with, I think, 4 MB of Ram and an enormous 200 MB disk. Wow! I had multiple systems, all bootable, on that HD, and as I (vaguely) recall, probably 20-40 MB for Linux.

Before that I had run Coherent/386 for a couple of years. Rather bare-bones (no VM/Swap, no X) but otherwise a nice unix-like system. Came with a really excellent 2-3 inch-thick manual that covered pretty much EVERYTHING.

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Slackware, it was to long ago to remember details, it could have been 1.0 but I’m not sure, I only remember it was about 20 3"1/2 floppy disks, the machine was a 386 (probably 16 MHz) with 2 Mb RAM, the HD was a Rodime SCSI that had to be kicked to start rotating :smile:
However this was not my first home unix, I had an instalation of ESIX/V for some time.
As time went by I drifted to Red Hat and I remember I even bought a boxed version on CDROM.

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