@neil I did the Slackware stack of floppies in 93(?). Moved to Redhat 2 when it had rpm but before it had any dependency management (ie manually iterate installing rpms until it stopped complaining). Still on Fedora.
@neil First for me was Red Hat 5.1 in the 90's. It came on a CD in a book. (It's possible it may have been thinly rebranded as Mandrake or something. Can't quite remember now.)
After that was Debian, then Ubuntu, then back to Debian, and still with Debian. I also have several machines running OpenBSD, including a laptop I use daily.
@neil I think the first one was Slackware in 1995 or so. The first one that made it to daily driver status was SuSE 6.0 in 1999. I think the only notable distribution I haven’t dealt with (yet) is Linux From Scratch.
@neil My first install was a RedHat CD in '96 either 3.0.3 or 4 (though I'd already been using Linux, and before that Unix, for a while before I got my own machine).
@neil The first one I used was the Mond Room Linux install at Cambridge. You put a loader floppy into any common computing terminal provided by the computing service and it would bootstrap into a Linux image from a student-maintained setup on our netware shares. The first on my own machine was Slackware.
Returned the book+CD because it wouldn't complete, and the bookstore graciously replaced it with the just-released 5.3 edition.
Embarrassingly, it turned out my second-hand computer had a duff CD-ROM drive.
@neil Ubuntu 10.10, from an install CD that someone had left several copies of in a coffee shop. I don't have that PC anymore, but still have the disc on my shelf!
Stuck with Ubuntu/Kubuntu for some time, but have been experimenting with other distros and Fedora is now the current daily driver. Have spent time on Mint, Manjaro and openSuse as well.
@neil It was the 90s and it was SUSE and it didn’t work. I kept at it and eventually got a Mandrake/Mandriva instance going, but I was most successful with Ubuntu for the hardware I was using.
@neil Redhat 5.1. Not RHEL, the original Redhat desktop in about 2001. I remember soon after really struggling to get networking going between that and a Windows 98 machine (using a crossover cable). Turned out that the drivers for the PCI network card I'd installed in the Windows machine were playing up and things worked after they were reinstalled. Seemed that Linux was fine with the ISA card I'd used for it.
@neil When I was a teenager I installed Red Hat 7.0 in dual boot with Windows. That's RH7, not RHEL7... I paid a few quid and sent off for pre-burnt CD as downloading 600mb back then was prohibitive. Red Hat just seemed like the coolest distro - cool name, cool logo, what's not to like? It all went great and installed without a problem, but I had no idea what to do with it. I tried playing CS on it, but it only ran in Software-rendering mode in Wine, which was dreadful...
@neil Slackware, 1995, from floppy disks, onto a laptop made of the working bits of two insurance write-offs. Which I thought was particularly unusual until I read through this thread...
@neil
I installed #Mandrake#Linux, probably around 20 years ago. I also tried Corel Linux at one stage.
Mandrake morphed into #Mandriva.
Then maybe ten years ago I moved onto #Ubuntu, and I've been on #XUbuntu ever since.
@neil I initially ran Redhat but then around the 1991-3 the company SOT Linux from Finland donated me a copy of their distribution which is now LBA Linux. From there I went Mandrake and then onto LFS before joining the LRs Linux team which was basically LFS with an installer and a package manager. I then went full on Arch until this year when I switched to Void Linux.
@neil some early-ish slackware distro mid 90s. Came on a cover mount CD, but wasn't bootable. You had to write out the floppy images to disks and use those. I think once you had enough installed you could access the CDROM to install more.
I didn't have a CD drive, so spent days shuttling disks between the PC at school with a CD drive and home.
@neil Walnut Creek's distribution - I think it was SLS? This would have been around ‘96 or so. I think. My ISP at the time offered shell accounts on AIX. Wow, forgot all about that.
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