Linux Lookback: How I discovered my first Linux distro (Ubuntu 4.10: Warty Warthog)

In today's thrilling episode of Veronica Explains, I look back at my first Linux distro, Ubuntu Warty Warthog (04.10). I also talk about how I first discovered Linux, open source, and a community which led to a career.
My merch store is now live! If you want a nerdy Linux t-shirt, and want to support my channel shenanigans, check out vkc.sh/merch.
I'm also live on Patreon: / veronicaexplains . Even a dollar a month helps me make more exciting content for you all!
Also, I borrowed the photo of the LightScribe'd Ubuntu CD from DeviantArt: www.deviantart.com/takyoji/ar.... (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
04:30 Downloading and installing Warty
09:24 Playing with Warty Warthog
18:24 Parting thoughts
#Linux #Ubuntu #Retro

[@austin_moore1107]

I love this video. First Linux experience was 5 months ago after getting pretty drunk (I mean not that drunk) and installed Fedora workstation for fun. Probably the best after drunk experience in my life

[@Daxter296]

Haha this resonates with me. After being forced to use Edge and after a few beverages, Microsoft forced my drunken hand to install Manjaro.

[@VeronicaExplains]

The Edge to Manjaro pipeline is totally legit! Manjaro is a wonderful distro. I used it for a number of months on my laptop a few years ago, it was fantastic.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Imagine waking up from a hangover to find a strange OS on your PC ...

[@mattsadventureswithart5764]

@@Daxter296 I got fed up with win10, so I installed manjaro on my previous box as a separate boot SSD. It worked wonderfully, but I needed lightroom, so I booted into win10 more often than not.

[@scopestacker9787]

Until you recognized that you erased your hard drive with all the data

[@pgc2455]

I can remember using both Warty Warthog and MySpace. Every teenager was on MySpace, it had massive numbers. This was before Facebook and Twitter. Ubuntu was so easy to set up. Everything was brown and orange and I hated those colors but I used Ubuntu for a long time. Thanks for the memories.

[@harshgandhi100]

My first linux experience was OpenSUSE + KDE when I was 12, got that from one of the tech magazine CDs. That looked like the future at that time, but I was a kid, had some video games, so I had to multiboot with a heavy heart, but I never stopped booting to linux whenever I was not playing.

[@MaxUgly]

Nice, nostalgia man! I think my first time trying Linux was Debian but went in thinking I was going to be able to run .exe's, I was a dumb teenager. So a few years later I went with either Feisty Fawn or Gutsy Gibbon. I had issues installing Nvidia proprietary drivers kzbin.info/www/bejne/lWSZqoGNrMRjbck (It is Torvalds not Rick, Rick would never gave it up like Nvidia has for so long) and mostly stayed in Windows for games and FL Studio but tried to use Linux as much as possible. I think at some point one of my coworkers fixed my Nvidia thing and was playing the old quake arena type games. I forget when Steam came out and released Half-Life, Counter-strike, Garry's mod, etc... but i was ecstatic! Now here i am playing stuff like Cyberpunk and Rust and it is more stable than and higher fps than in Windows! Now here I am on KDE Neon after 20+ years of *buntus and about to try dual booting Fedora 36 KDE spin. Had I come across that OpenSUSE disc I would have been you! I thought linux was just Linux, no idea what a distro was at that time.

[@bichela]

I started with Slackware 2.0 on a 486 around 2000

[@JarrodCoombes]

Fun fact, Ubuntu version are based on the year and month they are released, so 4.10 was released in October of 2004. Also, they release twice a year, generally April and October (though if the release month slips, they adjust the version number accordingly), so there was a 5.04 and a 5.10 the following year. Also, 4.10 was the first version of Ubuntu released to general audiences.

[@Hey-Yaz]

It was exciting watching this throwback. I'm now as excited as you are because I remember these days. Thank you for the video journey.

[@JeffBishopVE6EFR]

Thank you for posting this video. This sure brought back a lot of memories as I believe 4.10 was my first Linux distro. My how times have changed.

[@KolliRail]

That was fun to watch! My first Linux distro was Softlanding Linux (SLS) version 1.02 in 1993. Came on a little over 20 floppy disks. No repository. All packages were simple tar.gz files on the disks. Went from there to Slackware, S.u.S.E. Linux and Caldera OpenLinux 2.something. The first Ubuntu I discovered was 8.04 hardy heron. I've been a Kubuntu user since then. Well, that's 14 years already...

[@JohnSmith-bb2np]

For me it was Rad Hat Linux/Fedora #1 with the accompanying Bible book. It was interesting, fun, educational, impressive, but in the end I wanted my XP back. This was when I was taking certification classes for the fun of it back in 2004-05, and I kept a toe in the water with Linux, but never taking the plunge. It wasn't until the RPi that I kept it and used it for realzies this time. 👍

[@ryanics2291]

This was awesome to watch. My first linux experience was Ubuntu 14 in my school, and then using peppermint os on old netbooks, also at my school. I did the switch to linux a couple years ago and I do everything on Fedora now. Thanks for making these vids Veronica!

[@Neolith100]

This was genuinely so much fun... it felt like the first time I used FreeBSD. Thank you Veronica!

[@Nomad-qm3zf]

This is such a cool video. I got into linux about 6 months ago and wasn't aware of how much it changed over the years and frankly how fast the change is happening.

[@jeffsadowski]

My first distro was Slackware that I got from a book I bought in Hastings in 1995. I read the book intently and found it very interesting. I was able to learn a lot with reading Patrick Volkerding's book. After taking a Redhat class in 2005 I started using Fedora so that I could keep up with changes I would start seeing in other distros. It has helped significantly.

[@d00dEEE]

Yeah, I've got the InfoMagic CDs from '95, with Slackware 2.2, Debian 0.91 and the 1.2.1 kernel. I keep thinking I should build Pentium I machine to see if I can get it running again.

[@imnlfn]

I have Red Hat 2.2 disks that say "Nov '95" on them and a set of Debian 2.2 disks that must be from a bit later. RPM-based distros had so many dependency issues back then, I became a DEB convert very early on.

[@d00dEEE]

@@imnlfn Do you remember what hardware you ran it on? I can't for the life of me recall what I was using in '95, lost in the mists of time... (I just checked my Big Bag of CPUs, and there's a '93 Pentium in it, maybe that's it?)

[@imnlfn]

@@d00dEEE I had a Pentium tower as my main system around that time, but that was running Windows and I don't think I ever ran Linux on it. I had so many computer parts at the time (and still have many of them) that I was running Linux on all kinds of 386es and 486es, depending on what I was trying to accomplish. One of those I built became a dedicated dial-up router and firewall, for example.

[@jeffsadowski]

@@imnlfn I remember a fried or two of mine that had issues with the graphics installer of Redhat and needed my help to configure X using what I learned from Slackware.

[@dastafford]

I am so happy I found this channel. You are amazingly positive. I am a fan.

[@VeronicaExplains]

Thank you! I try to be positive- life's too short to put more negativity out there. :)

[@tuber2kh]

I was trying distros before Warty, but I recall trying that one shortly after it came out, and loved it right away. It was one of the first, if not THE first distro that earned a full time partition on my main drive. Keep making the great videos!

[@VeronicaExplains]

It was incredible at the time, and it's still such an impressive project today!

[@duduonyu5810]

Very cool, Veronica!! Thanks!!!

[@shouptech]

Great videos Veronica! Funny and entertaining. Ubuntu is responsible for bringing so many people over to Linux.

[@stevejohnson1685]

My first linux after being a Unix user (AT&T, Microsoft, BSD, etc.) for a looong time. Very nice memories. Thank you! (I co-founded a dial-up ISP based on Linux in 1995 - by then I wasn't the technical person, thankfully).

[@deleatur]

_"Ubuntu is responsible for bringing so many people over to Linux."_ I guess Wind0ws itself is responsible for that ;-)

[@Xander_92]

Ah the throwback! My first Linux experience was Ubuntu 9.04 (I still got the CD Canonical used to ship to people!) I remember spending my school vacations up all night messing with it and playing the different games that were included! Good times! Now running Pop! daily and having a blast. Keep up the good work, your videos are very fun and instructional.

[@finite934]

I learnt Linux using Breezy Badger on an Acer laptop. At the time it was a lot of work in the terminal to get drivers working, sound, wifi etc, and figuring out which programs could replace Windows variants, and Linux has come a loooong way since then. But at that time, Ubuntu was ground-breaking in it's user friendliness (on Linux at least), and looking back, I do not regret having to learn how to get all that stuff working in the terminal, as it gave me a real skill set. I remember seeing some posts at the time, talking about, and I quote: "The joy and the pain of Linux From Scratch", and I remember thinking, 'now that's hardcore!'. I'm sure they became experts after having gone through that process.

[@MauricioGleizer]

I love this vídeo (my first Linux was 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog, that I installed on a brand new PC - and I never more installed a Windows...) My current PC is a laptop Alienware M51, running (a little) a Windows 10 factory-installed e a strong and beautiful Kubuntu Jammy Jellyfish. Finally, what a beautiful, pleasant and readable voice. For a Brazilian like me, very easy to understand...

[@silveriomantovaneli2807]

Olá, adoro o seu canal, não sou programador nem trabalho com tecnologia, mas sou um entusiasta. Parabéns pelo conteúdo do canal, você faz Linux e todas estas coisas "tecnológicas", sejam elas velhas ou novas parecerem divertidas. Congratulations!

[@thewillsfamilyaccount6486]

it's so good to see where Linux has evolved from! Wonderful video..

[@desmondsparrs]

new subscriber here, I love your style and personality :). I started using Linux 3 1/2+ years ago and I love UNIX-based distros now! they're so fun! ah man I remember burning disks... and I did that a week ago to try to install Linux on an ancient IBM ThinkPad.

[@tomsmansvards]

Thanks, this was fun to watch! I remember my first try-out of Linux which was Mandriva something something. I should put in a-top of my Fedora one day! :) And thanks for showing the OpenOffice. That was my go-to office even when I had Windows before - so fun to see it (and to remember headaches I used to make to other people at school)! :)

[@levilima9925]

You're so adorable! Cheers from Brazil. My first interaction with Ubuntu was in 2007. I was 12, lol. Submitted an email requesting the cd from the USA to BRAZIL and was surprised when the package finally arrived.

[@VanhoozerC]

This was a fun walk down memory lane!

[@Neppord]

I'm so proud of being a patrion of your channel, this video was so well made! Thanks for showing a Ubuntu I recognize but had forgotten about.

[@VeronicaExplains]

Thank YOU so much for your patronage!! :)

[@MaxUgly]

Thank you for being a patron and supporting this awesome channel and community! I don't have much to give but do pay for Premium. Thank you ​ @Veronica Explains!

[@TradieTrev]

We used redhat back in the lan party days to run counter strike, because it ran solid as a rock! Yet some of my first desktop linux experiences were painful trying to get wifi and printers to work! You're right in saying it's come a long way! Now we've got places like github too where we can collaborate with the devs to help solve bugs.

[@parasportz]

Loved the trip down memory lane. I remember running my business for years using this distro.

[@mattyrugg1]

Loved this one. I have to admit, I laughed when the sound wasn't working right. Brought back some memories!

[@lingux_yt]

what a fun video to watch, thanks for that

[@pixelpusher8986]

Hey Veronica, thanks for the video. You are funny. Im new to the Linux tarball but I have a few post 2011 iMacs I’m running Ubuntu 22.04 and love it. Thanks for sharing. Fun stuff. 🎉

[@ChrisWereDigital]

I love this. Such a lovely nostalgia trip.

[@byed1]

mine was warty warthog as well and it just floors me. that was 20 years ago.

[@warthurm]

My first distro was Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. Had a laptop that needed an adapter for the HDD I didn't have so I was trying to find a way of installing windows on an USB external HDD and found Linux. Loved it . Never went back .

[@braelinmichelus]

I haven't been a Linux user for nearly as long, but I still have seen it a grow and mature quite a bit. Back in 2013 was when I first discovered Linux... back when I got my first laptop... a Chromebook. Using Crouton, I discovered a whole new world of fun to have with computers, and found so much more I could do with my Chromebook than just browse the web, watch KZbin, and listen to Play Music. Than in 2015 I got a much better laptop, an Acer with an Core i5 and running windows 10. I grew up to playing with Linux in virtual machines using VirtualBox. I started playing around with all different distros, Linux Mint, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Antergos, and... Elementary OS. That was when I fell in love with Linux... in I believe, 2017. I continued testing the waters to make a permanent switch within that VM, trying to get away from any programs I used that wasn't available on Linux and switch to an alternative that was. Which wasn't many... since I already used mostly FOSS programs even in windows; Gimp, LibreOffice, VLC. The only problematic one was Adobe Illustrator, which I replaced with Gravit Designer. So over the next 2 years, I saved up to build my own computer... and install Elementary OS on it... marking my official transition to Linux full-time, on christmas day, December 2019. That's when I built the same machine I'm still maining 3 years later. It was _SOOO_ blazing fast and _crazy responsive_ ! I couldn't believe it! I never looked back... I didn't know what it was; the 2400 MHz memory, the 3 GHz desktop-class processor, the SSD, or simply the operating system. but that machine *_FLEW_* , and I mean like a soaring sparrow in the sky! Regardless, I was in total awe at my new kit, and never plan to main any windows OS _ever again_ I may have switched from Elementary OS to Arch Linux and KDE Plasma... but I'm never leaving Linux as my main OS! So... that's my story. And I also must add that I am very glad to have _finally_ discovered another KZbin channel by a female Linux user! Cheers, Veronica!

[@rathio7662]

Ubuntu was also my first long used distro, I started with 4.10 too. I remember Cannoncial shipped free copies of Ubuntu, that was crazy and also a good option for people without internet at this is time. Thanks for remembering this old time. 🙏

[@kieferhendricks6680]

Warty warthog was my first distro as well! I had been burned by Windows Vista and was looking for something different but wasn't aware there was anything but Windows until a close friend and a teacher at my high school simultaneously informed me that Linux was a thing and encouraged me to try it. I've never looked back.

[@wyattE415]

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon was my introduction to Linux, and I was in awe. Switched flavors to Xubuntu when I was restoring old laptops for people as it tended to run pretty well, but loved Lubuntu even more for legacy machines once it was released. Even more lightweight in my experience. I even began using it on modern computers. I had this super small "netbook" style lenovo laptop of my own for a time: Intel Atom processor (glorified phone), no fan, 2 GB RAM with Windows 10. Wow. Windows 10 took up about 1.8 GB at that time and on that hardware. Wiped it, put Lubuntu on it, booted it up, opened up the task manager. The entire OS in MB, not GB. Wow, ran like a whole new machine. What was a piece of junk was transformed, with no hardware changes, into a decent, functional, lightweight laptop now that lasted me several years. I recall this story because I love what you said about the stickers and it reminded me of that red Lenovo I had because, after I had perfected her with Lubuntu, I bought and slapped a Lubuntu sticker on it after peeling off the Windows one. 😂

[@peterjantzer4767]

I regret that I can only give you one "Thumbs Up" with each of your videos. You are a superlative person in every sense of the word.

[@dewdude]

My first Linux expierence was a copy of Debian that came on boot magazine's (later MaximumPC) demo CD in 1997. Never got it to work. Briefly had a copy of Red Hat from 1998 running. But Warty Warthog was where it all came together for me because it was simply the first time I ever had two computers on a desk at the same time; so being able to read online docs and forums made ALL the difference. And to make it extra fun; I was doing all of this on a PowerPC iMac. I then decided to run Gentoo on that thing. Oh...the memories. Most of my Linux these days is all console and servers.

[@fabiosemino2214]

Great trip trough the memory lane! i had an off-on relationship with linux since red hat 6.0 as a novelty but it got serious with Ubuntu 9.10 as I could free myself from dialup and winmodems only after 2007, now I'm pretty happy with Mint MATE on most of my pcs

[@JarrodMcKitterick]

"It's who I am as a person.." Fantastic! I need to steal that. Truly laughed out loud.

[@AnalyticMinded]

I am so jealous of vintage Linux users!! How I would have loved to be a Linux user in those early days of the system. I've only been using it for a little less than 2 years, and the only bit of tech nostalgia I have is for windows '98. lol

[@VeronicaExplains]

Nothing wrong with that! I still feel like a new user compared with some of these Slackware folks who've been around for decades now.

[@istvanbarta]

As a still beginner in Linux, I'm jealous of their (early) experience/"muscle memory". Now my fingers are able to write 'ls' instead of 'dir' without thinking, but I still feel my decades of disadvantages. Learning is a lifelong process. :)

[@njbrx]

@@istvanbarta it'll improve with time, I have been a Linux user since March of this year but I still feel like a noob. It's a working progress

[@travisb1757]

Awesome video. Nostalgia is such a popular topic nowadays. I remember ordering the cd's from Ubuntu back in the day as well as Red Hat. I use EndeavorOS and Linux Mint at the moment with KVM/Qemu virtual machines. I am so sad to hear Windows 11 is requiring users to sign up with an online account as well as locking your computer so you can't run the software you want anymore. I had to let Windows go. I am fully a linux user on my home systems. The freedom of Linux is one the the greatest perks I think. I am all about open source software. Also, tutorials on recent open source software would be awesome too. Great job Veronica!

[@rogercarder7720]

You don't look old enough to have had an IBM Aptiva and use Netscape Navigator but you are bringing back so many memories 🙂

[@ASMRaphael]

I loved every single second of the video :) it was so super good :)

[@VeronicaExplains]

I'm so glad you liked it!

[@EddieSlabb]

Hi Veronica! Thanks for the background story on your nerdness with Linux. My first distro was Lycoris, a $20 delivered to your door Linux, but that company folded long ago

[@paulfedorenko2301]

Slackware, back in 1993/94. Installing it was hell, making it useable was even worse. High school me eventually gave up, and set up a dual-boot MS-DOS and OS/2 PC for family use. I eventually read about these newfangled things called "desktop environments." Got excited about this thing called the GNU Network Object Model Environment, and the more pedestrianly named KDE. Bought a copy of Caldera Linux as an impulse buy at a grocery store, of all places. Caldera was much more useable than the previous Slackware attempt. Over the years, I've played around with Fedora Core, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu. Always as a Windows/Linux dual-boot system. These days it's Windows 11 and openSUSE tumbleweed. Fun times over the years. Your videos are entertaining and informative.

[@makidoko]

My first Ubuntu edition was Hoary Hedgehog, and that was a shock. After times switching between Linux and Windows on the same machines, from Kheops Linux to Mandrake and then Debian, I never switched back to Windows since Hoary, despite always having a partition with Windows somewhere, just in case. The gorgeouse brown theme, the ease of non-free packages, the wide and active community. Great days back then. Even I'm not using Ubuntu for about 10+ years (I didn't catch with the orange approach, and more, some technical and political choices) these years, were great, giving a really new hope to free software (beside other projects like Firefox, for instance)

[@MikeWood]

Netscape was the style for the time for sure. :) And that is a cool way to get introduced to open source.

[@slowlymakingsmoke]

My first Linux experience was Corel Linux in the 90’s and I actually bought it as boxed copy from a shop. It was super cheap, I remember that. A friend was experimenting with Slackware at the time. We also had a SGI machine at work which was running Irix. It was a fun experiment but I never used it seriously for work.

[@JMassengill]

I was working for a county it department in 2005-2006 and I rebuilt a spam server with CentOS5. I had used other distros but that was jumping in head first. At my next job I built a TACACS server for network access. Great times. Great video.

[@GrahamAtDesk]

Great video. Warty was a game changer. It was the first ever distro to ship with a really solid package manager (apt was the only game in town on that front) and an up to date GNOME desktop with all the moving parts properly integrated. I was a big Debian fan (and still am), but the effort Canonical put into the desktop made Warty a big step up on the desktop. I don't think I've been so excited by a new distro since. Also, I remember the Palm sync worked reliably, but I don't think it could sync with the desktop apps, it was more a case of sticking text files in a folder. And I remember those white Macbooks being a bit revolutionary too. Good times!

[@martykong3592]

:) WOW! I remember THAT! I had ordered the 1st CD from Ubuntu, and many mare and then some, boxed Linux for my Daughters :) Yep I am THAT OLD:) I do miss the day where Mac's COULD install Linux on them :( GREAT SHARE and Video! ALL the BEST and Cheers! :)

[@AgentFortySeven47]

My first Ubuntu was 9.10 (Karmic Koala). I used Linux on and off again for years, but switched to Fedora full time last year. These early Ubuntu releases were the perfect gateway to Linux.

[@GManWrites]

Wow! You were years ahead of me, my first Linux was Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 in 2010.

[@donaldwilliams6821]

Great video! I started with an early Debian OS. I worked a storage company then and debian provided a SNMP trap system, monitoring, and SNMP server for our storage systems. The storage arrays only had DB25 pin serial ports. In fact they booted from 3.5 inch 720K FLOPPIES! haha This was before networking was common on large storage devices. We hung a bunch of serial ports off the debian server to monitor multiple storage systems. When my son "retired" his old, slow Macbook pro, I reloaded ubuntu on that and am still using it today. Often as a QEMU/KVM host. So definitely re-use your old Macbook. Maybe find a super light distro to maximize its potential.

[@doctormo]

The hardware support problems are the hardest to see in a VM retrospective, it's almost certainly the thing that stopped a lot of users. Thanks for the cool video.

[@VeronicaExplains]

Absolutely the case. If I had a working 2004-vintage laptop or desktop, I might have done that instead of the VM. Thank you so much for watching! Big fan!

[@Biotico]

I also started with Linux SuSE + KDE in 1998 then moved around for years between Redhat/Fedora and Debian. Some time around 2003 I got crazy and tried some *BSD before moving back to Debian. Around 2007 moved to Ubuntu and Linux Mint where I stayed for some time until l discovered Arch and fell in love with it and is now my $HOME 😍

[@eznix]

I remember when Ubuntu came on the scene. I had been using Linux regularly since 2000, so Ubuntu was not a huge improvement to me. Where it excelled was in promotion and shipping free CD's around the world. I used Ubuntu and Kubuntu for the longest time because it was updated regularly, unlike Debian at the time, and had stabilized newer packages than Debian. I still use the ncurses Debian installer, so the install process looks quite modern and familiar to me still 🙂

[@praus]

“Evolution hasn’t changed much.” Ironic.

[@oldator60]

I discovered Ubuntu 5.04 in 2005. Had been a Mandrake/Mandriva user for 5 years, and was starting to check out other distros.

[@TheNomadluap]

I remember my first Linux experience as a young'un was booting to the 4.10 Live CD on my family's G3 iMac. It took 10 minutes to boot from the slow disc drive at the time.

[@JanJanuszNosacz]

I remember using Ubuntu in like 2007. Yeah those old school login sounds are great to hear today :) Also Gnome 2 is really nice, that's why I've got so much nostalgia for Mate.

[@samsowden]

i remember falling in love with the ant screensaver

[@chrismcdonnell7448]

My first Linux Distro was Fedora Core 2 in a college Linux class in 2005 even though FC 3 had just been released. It was a good class and I learned a lot.

[@MarkHyde]

Ubuntu 8.10 was my first exposure to Linux installed on my machine - but I had used Red Hat Linux 8 on a school friends' computer. Love the memories.

[@garth56]

Gawd this takes me back!!!

[@cyberp0et]

Neat intro :)

[@tvsmed]

Just got into Linux (mint, cinnamon) for real for the first time. i really like it. Only problem has been getting the zoom right with text in different programs. I have on a lenovo yoga 14". I love old hardware and software. Please do more of these videos. First PC bought in 1988. DOS. Got a Thinkpad from 19997 to play old Sierra Online games, the only games I ever played while at university. Somehow that means a lot to me. Got it working, even the usb port on the back so transfering the old Space Quest games etc is so easy. VERY SATISFYING. Difficult to explain why. But we spend soo much time on these machines and their software. But I don't care about smartphone hardware or the programs. No emotions, no nostalgia. Which I can't explain either.

[@hellomiakoda3782]

Yes do a video on Evolution! It's my second favorite. Kontact has taken my top slot as favorite PIM suite, but Evolution is a close second and I still use it on machines that don't play nice with Plasma.

[@fubaralakbar6800]

My first Linux was Fedora 9, my first Ubuntu was 9.10 Karmic--I don't think I've ever loved any OS that much. Now using Pop 22.04, and lovin' it.

[@thedykewholovesswords9316]

Nice video reminded me of the first time I used Linux. It was an Os called super X when I was 14.

[@EarlofRochester]

My first Linux experience was getting on the computer in my college's library in 2005. They had installed Red Hat with Firefox and it blew my mind that something other than Windows or Mac could be user-friendly.

[@nassirmreyoud4415]

Popped my cherry with Lucid Lynx. Having been used to downloading and running installers, I remember discovering apt-get and thinking "Wow! This is genius!"

[@Vegan_Touring_Cyclist]

I was watching your video, I saw that color scheme and I am literally started to smell my old PC :D

[@mononobius]

Great job.

[@tompov227]

Love the use of the "which was the style at the time" I cannot tell you many times a day I say that verbatim and I don't think anyone knows what I'm saying

[@pctlc]

Nice trip down memory lane :)

[@eDoc2020]

My first Linux experience was after I found the CD for a dead distro called Freespire at a yard sale. It took what would feel like forever to boot up or launch anything on a Celeron 466 but it was still fun to play with. When I got a newer PC and installed Arch and Xfce I was much happier.

[@Daniel15au]

I remember trying Ubuntu back when they mailed out free CDs upon request. I think it was around the same era. I loved getting it on CD since I still had dialup internet at the time.

[@supercheetah778]

My first experience with Linux was when I was 16 with Debian, and I couldn't directly connect my computer to the internet at the time, but I had plenty of access to my school's computer lab and its internet. I used soooo many floppy disks to get it installed! And I couldn't use a CD burner because they weren't that common at that time, and they really couldn't be found in school computer labs anyway. That was fun!

[@Smiles4Kids]

Ubuntu was also my first long used distro, I started with 4.10 too greetings from Chicago.

[@vikingnoise]

Nice stroll down memory lane. My first distro was the volatile mess that was Fedora Core 2 back in 2003, followed closely by Red Hat right before they went commercial. I settled on Slackware for a while and then went with Ubuntu until Gnome broke the desktop.

[@GSBarlev]

17:51 Just hearing that name sent an involuntary shiver up my spine. While the trauma of nvidia-xserver-settings and Xorg.conf editing are still fresh in my mind, the horror of NDISwrapper is something I'd completely repressed until just now.

[@arkoprovo1996]

My first experience was Ubuntu 10.04 when I was in class 9 and couldn't get the internet connection working. I used the 10.04 CD that I'd got for free via ShipIt. My connection was 1 GB per month, so couldn't download. But I'd to quit using it, as I was expecting it to be like Windows XP which I was using. And the person who used to fix the PC advised against it. My first successful install was in 2014, the day before my JEE Mains exam. I was a cmd user then and XP would crash every week, and I was tired of reinstalling, and finally decided to "dive into the deep to learn swimming". Was so thrilled when I understood the command line, as I could start up firefox by just typing firefox from the terminal. I installed 10.04 and then updated that to 12.04 and after 14.04 got released a few days later, to that. Unity was wild. Also, 32 bit Pentium 4 with 1 GB DDR1 ram wasn't a good experience and I started exploring other lighter distros, and hopped a lot until I realized what a DE was and started using Ubuntu with various DEs. Still have a box of CDs & DVDs I burnt then. An Archer now, but I still can't get over that startup sound of 10.04. Yes, I used MATE until recently and switched to Cinnamon and enabled that sound. That desktop, is thankfully upgraded to 4GB DDR2 & Core2Duo 64 bit now, running XFCE on Arch.

[@thebets457]

Reminds me of my first Linux experience - I think it was 1998 or 99, I went to Best Buy and bought SuSE Linux (because it wasn't opensuse back then) and since I didnt know anything about Linux at the time it was the only distro at Best Buy that had a beefy manual to learn how to get going. It used KDE and thanks to the guide i was able to get going knowing next to nothing about what i was doing. SuSE Linux for that reason holds near and dear to my heart even though its not my main distro now-a-days.

[@3osufdh4rfg]

Reminds me of installing FreeBSD on my Pentium 133 MHz with a netinstall floppy and a 33.3k modem back in 1999 or so. Didn't get into Linux until a year or two later when some computer magazine came with a Linux CD.

[@rob.taylor]

Whoa, haven't seen that in a while. I started with YellowDog Linux back around 2000 I ran on a Mac PowerPC, then switched to PCLinuxOS for few years. Then like you, I discovered Ubuntu Warty Warthog, which I ran on an old iMac G4. Those were the days. Yesterday I picked up a mid-2007 23" iMac for a $40 donation. It has El-Capitan and Office 2007 on it, but I plan to try LinuxMint. Should be fun! I love taking old hardware and seeing what i can do with it.

[@pikachuchujelly7628]

Holy moly, that Bop It brought back memories!

[@javaman2883]

Video support is sooooo much better than late 90s. I remember using my video capture card to record TV shows to watch later ( like a PVR). Like 10% of the time there would be some glitch that prevented me from watching the whole show, and I would frequently have to close the player and restart it mid way through the show. Audio support is better too. My laptop sound didn't function correctly after startup, I always had to open the shell, type in some ALSA configuration command, then it would work properly.

[@peterstefanov3594]

Light scribe. Man, that unlocked a core memory.

[@raghav9000]

I have been using ubuntu for more than an year now. It was my first linux experience and it has been a pretty good one too. I am glad I started with ubuntu

[@robinkuster1127]

My mother is STILL running Ubuntu on my ancient 2007 MBP. She had to replace it because the aluminum frame broke right above the hinges. The computer was literally in action longer than the aluminum survived after it kissed the pavement right after I bought it.

[@leotilson942]

Veronica - thank you for this, and other superb videos that you released. I seem to remember that Warty was the first Linux distribution I used that just worked, and did everything. I had been playing with other distributions such as SlackWare, and single floppy distributions such as Tomsrtbt. A question: I seem to be the only person who remembers this: There was a distribution that could be downloaded not as a single iso image for CD or DVD, but consisted of 500 floppy images. Can anyone else recall that?

[@makar_m]

A-ha-ha-ha-ha! You 're kidding !. I'm from Russia. I enjoy watching your videos . I don't know how Google Translator will translate, but respect and respect to you! Keep delighting with your clips!... 😆👍

[@shreemaan-abhishek]

Oh yes, I would love to see you do stuff with your old macbook.

[@ganth0re]

16:00 - I remember rockbox. It was a fun thing to hack around on. IIRC, I ran DOOM on it for the novelty of playing with the click wheel.

[@drewzero1]

Wow, this really takes me back. I couldn't download Ubuntu over dialup at the time and couldn't run it on my PC (not enough RAM) so I left the computer connected overnight to download Feather Linux (a whopping 50MB) and burned the liveCD. We've come so, so far! I've also got the same 2007 MacBook as well as the 2005 iBook that preceded it. Both fine machines, some of my favorites, but the MacBook has aged much, much better than its predecessor. I think I ran Ubuntu 12.04 on the MacBook and Debian 6 or 7 (but more usually OSX Leopard) on the iBook.

[@stephenjones5051]

A good video Veronica. My first Linux experience was in '98 with Slackware. I dual booted my laptop with a FAT partition in the middle. My wife at the time was furious. She was also angry when I tried OS/2. I have dual booted my laptops since. I don't bother with Windows anymore. I figure my next phone will be a Linux one. I always chuckle when I hear an American pronounce the letter G in Gnome. Although in this case it might be the proper pronunciation.