Linux

Deepin in 2019 or so. Yeah don't ask...

Ubuntu, before Unity and eventually Gnome desktop 🫢

Yellow Dog Linux ~2004 or so

Mandriva. Yes, old and no longer exist. Forst distro i started to to use permantly on desktop is Fedora. The server has always been Ubuntu since the Mandriva time when I first learned about Linux. I think 2005. CS server etc. Desktop was 2024 when MS screwed up Windows too much

My first Linux install was Slackware sometime in the late 90's. I didn't really use it though, as I never managed to get it working with my dial-up Internet. Stupid winmodems.

The first distribution I actually used was Mandrake. Others I've used since then include Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS. I've landed on using Manjaro on both my main desktop and laptop, though I have secondary machines running Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, and EndeavourOS.

I inherited a Sony Vaio in 2009 which was really slow with windows, but unsurprisingly was ok once I swapped that out for Ubuntu 9.04. Took me a while to get the brightness up as the buttons didn't respond, but I kept that machine running for 7 years, the HDD controller died in the end so it stopped detecting any HDD.

Turbo Linux in the late 90s. It didn't go well.

Later I gave Redhat a shot - 5.0 or 5.1, I forget. Stayed with RH and now Fedora.

Ubuntu back in the Gnome 2 days.

CentOS

Red Hat Linux, about 2002 from a CD I got from somewhere.

Slackware in the early mid-nineties. But of course there was other Unix variants before that. And what was it called, OS/2 or something like that?

Red Hat, back when that was a distro. It was a long time ago now and my toying with it didn't last long; and began an obsession with hardware RAID…

Slackware in 1996(?), then SuSE when they came up.
I then tried a bit every once in a while, but really never got fully comfortable with it on a desktop.
A few weeks ago I bought a new Desktop PC, which is now running with the Arch-fork #endeavouros and I really love it.

@midtsveen

Started in 2022 on Kubuntu, moved to Fedora in October 2022, switched back to the Fedora KDE Spin in 2023, and been there since.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pop!_OS in early 2023, I used it for about 3 weeks before my bootloader broke so bad even Pops own recovery tool couldn't fix it. I went back to Windows 10 for another month before trying again with EndeavourOS and haven't had to use Windows since.

Funnily the thing that triggered me to install Linux on a spare SSD was I couldn't play Battlefield 4 on my Windows install anymore because the EA app randomly stopped working even after reinstalling the whole thing, Got the EA app and BF4 working on Pop within an hour.

XanderOS way tf back in 2005 or 2006, but mostly just messed around and had no clue what I was doing with it... After that I did a Gentoo install. Been kinda off and on with Linux since, flirting with the possibility of switching to it fully but never actually making the jump until last year when I built a new machine and put Mint on it.

arch linux since december

I use arch btw

and I use hyprland btw

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~~ slackware 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

debian

Pretty sure tails os :P

Ubuntu. For Work purpose in 2020 as a development VM.

Since then i moved privately to Zorin and now to Nobara. At Work it still is Ubuntu for me, but hopefully i will soon change positions and can shelve that stuff.

openSUSE

I think Ubuntu 10.04 or whatever mint version around then

One of the first slackware (so many floppies) on my mighty 486 DX 50. Linux wasn't at 1.0 yet at the time.

Linux (many versions) has been my daily driver ever since, with windows as a gaming backup a lot of the time. I still have it on a single machine in a small partition because of VR :‐/

What's the wallpaper?

Redhat 4.1 back in 97. I even purchased the CD from PC World, seems wild now to buy a CD/DVD of a distro.

First PC I installed it on was a work laptop, had to compile a bunch of kernel modules and then the kernel to get everything working but get everything working I did, Thinkpads being good for Linux even then.

redhat 5.5

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.

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.

Red Hat 9 in 2004

scientific linux. I failed to get most things running and switched to ubuntu. this was about 10 years ago

Debian 1.3, Bo - 1997

Elementary OS

Arch, btw

It was the distro that my friend uses all the time, and I've had to use his laptop on occasion so I'm somewhat familiar with the distro, enough so that I've installed it on persistent USBs before and already chosen it as my next OS after Windows (I would switch now, but I rode Windows 7 till the end date, so I figured I'd ride out 10 until the final day this October)

Also! Gender fluid hello!! It made me so insanely happy to see that flag in the Linux terminal, I feel so seen!! It feels like trans girls hog all the Linux spotlight this side of the fediverse, I'm happy for them! But I still don't feel like I have a proper community where I belong, especially since I stay off of all other mainstream social media >.<

So seeing another enby, another gender fluid especially, for the literal first time since I made my lemmy account just makes me so ecstatic!! We're so rare x3

Anyways, thank u for existing and simply posting this, seeing another makes me feel seen and I can't really express enough how unreasonably happy something so small just made me c:

Thank you! And I should sleep so good night also lol