What Was Your First Linux Experience?

[@lairizzle]

I got a Redhat CD in a "Linux For Dummies" book 24 years ago when I was 12.

[@TheLinuxCast]

Help support the channel, get a weekly exclusive podcast! patreon.com/thelinuxcast [time stamps] 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:09 Our Week in FOSS 00:01:21 Tyler's Weeks in FOSSish or Not 00:02:48 Drew's Week in FOSS 00:03:52 Nate's Week in FOSS 00:04:36 Matt's Week in FOSS 00:06:59 Our First Linux Experiences 01:06:25 Nuggies of the Week 01:07:07 Tyler's Nuggie 01:11:10 Nate's Nuggie 01:13:48 Drew's Nuggie 01:15:07 Matt's Nuggie 01:17:52 Contact Info and Goodbyes

[@zherka_pill]

pin this

[@Sub0x-x40]

My first experience was in learning how to program, watching primegean just zoom around like a ufo. I was like damn, maybe one day. Then my windows 10 desktop started to get so slow, so I was about to buy a computer and thought what the heck lets just try mint and see how we go and bam! It was like I had a new computer without spending a dime. Now I use arch and i3 and vim and all the good stuff and its great! Same pc too, 2 years after I was going to buy a new one. Works great

[@ozmosyd]

First distro for me was Mandrake ...

[@phoenixrising4995]

Fedora core 3 for me.

[@jean-francoismongrain5616]

It was a pretty good distro.

[@mikel8190]

Ubuntu 12.04 was my first distro in a VM, 14.04 was my first on bare metal.

[@xanderxk]

my first distro was mandrake

[@justinhall3243]

Linux PPC. It was a Red Hat clone for PowerPC processors. Desktop was Enlightenment window manger on X. Think this was about April 1999.

[@marqueluxuriante5571]

EndeavourOS (KDE) was my intro to Linux, very friendly community. I liked the bleeding edge & terminal based aspect of Arch but “works out of the box”. I switched over to Fedora (Gnome) when I broke system like 60 days in 🤣 Ended up switching over to XFCE spin & its been my setup for my Laptop/Desktop but I have Debian Sid on a spare notebook running as a server.

[@electric7487]

My first distro was Ubuntu 9.04 back in grade school (late 2000's to early 2010's), and the first distro that I used on a regular basis was Ubuntu 20.04, which (interestingly enough) I installed and began using right on the first of January 2020. 26:13 On my old laptop, my Windows 10 installation would always take around 10 minutes to get from pushing the power button to all booted up without lag, whereas my Ubuntu 20.04 installation took only 3 minutes. That went down to 2 minutes about a year later when I moved everything over to Ubuntu and was finally able to wipe the Windows install and partition the entire drive for Ubuntu. So far the only thing I've ever used Windows 11 for was to install Rufus and burn a Ubuntu 22.04 ISO to one of my USB sticks. And boy am I glad.

[@MSTNocte]

My first distro was Arch, then I tries tumbleweed thanks to matt. But, it wasnt for me. I then ran Fedora when it went into Fedora 40. But, after the fedora 41 switch i think i have found my forever home. Debian. It's everything i want out of linux. It just works and i dont have to stress out about maintaining it.

[@nomadic_shadow]

Great vibes with you four.

[@thedeester100]

Debian in 2007. It was awful. Then Ubuntu in 2012. Better but was still using Windows. 2015 Ubuntu again. 2016 Linux Mint. People disrespect Linux Mint. "Its for noobs". Well I dont wanna have to spend half my time fixing my OS so I can use it. Been on Mint LMDE since 2017. Its like Linux for people that actually want to use a Linux PC!

[@ImDelphox]

Mint saved me from windows 11

[@phoenixrising4995]

Archlinux is my guilty pleasure and nixos in a container

[@UbuntuPersonNoMint]

Ubuntu is for noobs too. What do yall people be doing to your Ubuntu setups to make them pro or advanced? I just install and ìt works.

[@RoughGanome]

Linux Cherry was slackware back in 2002. Trying to get an etherEZ 8416T network card to work over an ISA port so I could play counter strike.

[@edbeckerich3737]

I bought a boxed set of RedHat 5.2 from Best Buy, dont recall that i ever got ut running, but switched to Debian and loved it...back then we had to write our own hardware config file to get it to boot. When hardware detection became a thing, wow was that great!!!

[@fakecubed]

For me, I went OS X 10.2, to Solaris, and then finally got into Linux using Debian I think, in a VM. I messed around with Fedora too back in the day but preferred Debian for whatever reason and continued to mess around with that. So anyway, I was a serious terminal user on OS X and Solaris before I ever touched Linux proper, and I'd had some experience with Linux desktop environments because of the Solaris workstations I used. All-in-all, I think it was a pretty easy entry. I still didn't actually start using Linux as a proper on-metal install until years later, but by then I was quite confident in doing so. And for that I did start out with Debian, then moved to Ubuntu after about a year.

[@austincarz5342]

Join Void gang Matt

[@willybouchez5625]

The very first was Kheops. I believe it was a French distro that came with a PC magazine somewhere in 1999. Booted it, stared at a near empty desktop (probably TWM), there was a clock and...the terminal. I screamed, panicked, threw the CD out and returned to my Windows95 🙂 But my first real try was somewhere in the beginning of the century (2000? 2002?), it was SuSE (I believe 6.0), in a double boot. Kept with DOS and Windows for a long time because of the games. Then, in 2018 I met Mint and I was amazed how everything progressed. I am now on MX21, before that MX19, before that Debian. Nowadays, when I go into Windows, it feels weird and complicated...

[@apolloscuccumber385]

bought a toshiba chromebook 2 back in 2015, quickly realized i needed to play games and got xubuntu to run on it, loved it to bits this experience became the beginning of my disdain for windows

[@benderbg]

Regardless of its popularity on KZbin, Arch is for sure the favored distro when it comes to minimalist setup. I did some experimenting the other day with MATE and straight out of the box, Arch requires only 400 MB of RAM, while Debian follows with 480 MB. In contrast, Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, and Mint all consume nearly 700 MB. Some distros clearly have smaller footprint than others. Additionally, Arch is not preconfiguring anything, which might be another contributing factor for some people. Do you prefer pre-configured, opinionated applications, or do you want to understand what the application you just installed can do and configure it yourself to suit your needs? With Arch you don't get an option not to do the research. AUR is just an icing on the cake. If you need something, its probably there. It may have problems with older package but same story goes for any other distro. These are the major points and advantages of Arch, in my opinion. At the end of the day its all about distro hopping until you acquire enough knowledge to fix almost any problem. At that point choosing a distro comes down to personal preference and its no longer influenced by others.

[@tristen_grant]

Hugo is great. I've played around with 11ty, Astro and a few others but always make my way back to using Hugo.

[@t1nytim]

Back when Win8 came out, saw it, said I don't wanna upgrade to that, and started thinking about switching. Win10 came out, and after a few years they announced free upgrade expiring soon, and by then, much of the stuff I initially didn't like about it had been fixed, so upgraded. Win11 comes out, they start hiding things, removing configuration options, etc, and so I said I didn't wanna upgrade. So I start watching Linux YT videos at this point. One day, working away, HD dies, so given it was the middle of the workday, I wanted something I figured I could get into very quickly, so from my watching of videos, Mint in my head, without any research was gonna be the easiest to setup. Finally get windows to boot (poorly), setup usb, use Mint just off the USB for a couple of days messing with things. Was happy, so just reformated my boot disk to blow away windows, and setup Mint proper. From there spent one month researching, and settled on EndeavourOS, and haven't left since.

[@user-bz8qi6vu4q]

Slackware 3.0 -> Debian 2.0 -> RedHat 5.0 (because it had MetroX server that more or less supported Matrox graphic cards) -> RedHat 5.2 -> tried a couple of others (spent some time with TurboLinux) then back to Debian until lockdowns -> NetBSD, now trying 9front, but still have a Debian laptop around for specific tasks...

[@MrApplewine]

It was the latter half of the 90's and a friend had some terminal screen up that was an alternative to Microsoft DOS and Windows. Linux I think they said it was, but I have no idea what distribution it was and we couldn't make it do anything, since it was just a terminal without graphics interface. Later in the early 2000's I tried to install Debian and couldn't get it to work. Then somebody gave me a SUSE trial disk and I used that a bit but couldn't get it to do much. I eventually came back to Debian years later.

[@Biotico]

My first Linux Distro was SuSE Linux 6.0 around 1998

[@brunombardi]

My first distro was Zorin OS. It looks gorgeous but I switch to other distros o find what more Linux had fo offers me. Since then I couldn't stop distro hopping. Right now I'm running Fedora 41 and I'm enjoying it a lot. Untill now my top 3 distros tested is: Tumbleweed, Pop OS and CachyOS.

[@SnabbKassa]

SunOS / Solaris command line. Then OpenWindows and CDE. Then IRIX in 1999. They were a lot more stable for surfind the web than anything on real mode windows. Do they count?

[@gimcrack555]

I started onto Linux 3 months before Ubuntu appeared onto the surface. So what was my first distro. It was SimplyMEPIS KDE with the 2.6.36.4 Kernel. It really wasn't that hard to navigated. After knowing the names of the Linux applications and what they do. I also learn The Linux File Hierarchy Structure. Discover Synaptic Package Manager and I was learning Linux. 5 days I was completely comfortable using Linux. I never look back. Windows XP was my last Windows OS. I went 100% with Linux. I'm now using MX KDE as my Linux distro. Funny thing, it's the same developers that help created SimplyMepis. So it's like I went full circle with Linux.

[@viarnay]

Ubuntu in 2004 when trying to install usb stuff on windows was a pain in the bass but I had no problems installing a canon printer and a canon eos 350 software included on ubuntu

[@YouTubdotCub]

I actually can't remember my first ever distro since I messed around with a handful in the pre-ubuntu days but never for long, it was always just me messing around and being like "what is happening" until ubuntu came out and then I was hearing people say it was pretty easy to use for quite some time and I grabbed it and messed around more extensively so I consider ubuntu my first distro even tho practically speaking it was probably like...Red Hat or Slackware or something? But realistically it was Lucid Lynx Ubuntu (I tried ubuntu prior to that, maybe Feisty Fawn? but encountered some problems that made me abandon it at the time)

[@Arek1125]

i tried to revive my old laptop,i changed hdd to ssd disc and windows 10 did not work well ,some errors ,well did not worked at all...this time i came to idea to try linux mint and i fell in love in linux,right now i use cachy os on my main laptop and mx on the old one

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

My first experience of Linux was Slackware back around 1996-1997. I even ended up ordering it on a CD pack from Walnut Creek in the USA from over here in Europe. I distro hopped for about 6 years through SuSE Linux, Mandrake Linux, Red Hat Linux and then Linux From Scratch. Linux From Scratch was a wonderful learning experience (I recommend every new Linux user builds it at least once) but when I built it I ended up thinking "so what comes next?" given there's no package management on it. That led me to Gentoo Linux in 2003 where I have been ever since - it gives me the flexibility to build the same distro across many different systems (in my case everything from a Raspberry Pi Zero through to a multi-CPU Xeon server in a rack in my "man cave") and has a fantastic package manager in Portage. If I introduce other people to Linux then I usually build them systems with Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

[@TheGhostOfRandy1-2-3]

Installed Mint in 2020 and have since moved to garuda/kde neon/ubuntu studio. On purchasing a new MoBo in 2020, windows 7 drivers were not supported by the hardware, and it pissed me off and was the final nail in the coffin for microsoft.

[@Fender178]

My 1st distro that I used on a daily basis for a while during the middle of the Windows XP era (2004-2005) With my Pentium 4 3.0ghz Machine Was Ubuntu because I messed up my Windows XP install. I got Team Speak and SNES Emulation to work as well.

[@raughboy188]

Mine was ubuntu but that was during time when they had gnome 3 or older.

[@ryebread095]

I know I played around with Arch in a VM for awhile before I switched, but the first distro I used for any period of time was Pop!_OS. These days I run Fedora, but I've modified GNOME to behave much like how System 76 modified GNOME for their distro.

[@bjre.wa.8681]

Okay, here goes. I'm a two year Linux Mint (Cinnamon I think) user and I'm dyin' in the land of acronyms. I mean either its Mint or it isn't? About 60 percent of the things you guys talk about I just don't know what that thing is. Lets talk "terminal" Repository/Suppository (humor here); snaps maybe snap pack. The root system, like when do I use the sudo command; and where the hell is the USB flash drive installed at (I miss the tree structure menu) and what is the operation that loads the drive/file? Mount/Unmount? Why? So do I partition a drive format to a ext4 and be able to read it (a file) in windows OS. Pretty Complicated. Other than I'm Totally freakin' lost, life is good. Okay

[@raportmercado1165]

Slackware Kernel version 1 point something then freebsd 3 point something for servers then my beloved Suse, yes I'm old

[@mr_hardy5329]

Before installing Linux on PC I "tested" few on live usb. First was MX Linux. To be honest clicking in live usb is not a real test. First distro that i installed on hard drive was EndeavourOS and I fall in love in it. Later I tried Mint and something else but always it wasn't good as Endeavour. Few times I came back to Windows (For me Windows is still better) Two weeks ago i came back to linux but i don't know how long i will stay on it.

[@nosotrosloslobosestamosreg4115]

Lubuntu... And was using LXQt almost exclusively as DE until I tried Cinnamon...

[@knofi7052]

Slackware, back then at the University and later, SUSE Linux.😊

[@marybaxter7714]

first time trying was on my PS3, other OS option, using YDL (yellow dog linux) PowerPC version. summer of 2008

[@CyrusBrinkworthRAS]

Xunil looks good!

[@CyrusBrinkworthRAS]

Mint-Cinamon 17.3 was my first on after XP...... "64 bit" my 32 bit sound card was really happy!

[@northwanderer800]

My first Linux distro was ….FreeBSD 😂 to run counter strike server .. well I guess actual first was red hat back when it was free in 2001-2002. Those were both just to run an old Pentium 2 with no graphical interface not as everyday use. Next was Linux mint on Asus netbooks. For my actual transition to Linux on my main rig was 2020 arch .. just dived right in and haven’t changed.

[@TrustJesusToday]

Ubuntu Budgie. It was a good experience. 18 months later...CachyOS Hyprland.

[@gregglenentine7660]

For me, the late 90s with version 0.92 beta 1, cli only, no gui.

[@salmon85]

backtrack 2 when it was based on slackware

[@salatwurzel-4388]

My first distro was Ubuntu 5.04 i think. I was 15 and the only reason i downloaded Ubuntu was that i wanted to be a cool hacker guy (lol) After a short time i liked it in general and now i use Debian as my main distro since a couple years.

[@cajewi]

Red Hat around 1995-96.

[@anthonyscardullo5779]

Matt the fact is I think your cool

[@detectiveinspekta]

2000 with linux router project. Making a mp3 player

[@sachinchaudhary1310]

was ubuntu cuz didn't heard of anythig else was on window switched

[@50-50_Grind]

It was Zorin OS.

[@CalebeCopello]

The fun part is: pipewire is broken on this month arch iso 😅

[@Dan_Hardy]

Workaround is to not install any audio packages then manually install pipewire after the arch installation has finished

[@anonymous-rj6ok]

Red Hat > Gentoo > Linux Mint

[@theclient6251]

Lindows.

[@NreKonkoro-vt2fo]

EeeeeendeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaavooouuuuurrrrrrrOS

[@w0ode198]

Knoppix

[@mattkeith530]

I was watching porn once and closed the browser but it like kept playing on the background lol. Awkward!!

[@UbuntuPersonNoMint]

Been using ubuntu since i was 13, distrohopped and even used Ubuntu based distros but all of them suck ass. Ubuntu just works for me and i dont want to be a pro linuxer anymore just install and move on with no fuss.

[@fecklesstech929]

2018: My first was Mint Cinnamon. It wouldn't boot. I switched to Zorin "Lite" (the free one) and it ran like a scaredy cat. I used Zorin happily for many weeks until I discovered "disto hopping". But Zorin was my first and is still my favorite.

[@rodsands7646]

Ubuntu>Mint>MX Linux.

[@moneyfr]

I prefere when you are alone

[@YaySyu]

watch his channel then, not the podcast lmao

[@_Lumiere_]

Very ominous comment lol

[@northwanderer800]

Bro don’t like Matt having friends 😂😂😂

[@iripbongs]

shi made me laugh

[@rawmeateater]

Raspberry pi, then linux mint, then straight debian

[@mikebarton]

A friend, P, at work gave me a Linux disk that had come in the mail. He said I should try it. I didn't try it. Jump forward about eight years and I had an old laptop that I was playing with. I thought I'd install Linux as P must be a Linux head. I installed a distro, Ubuntu I think, and was pleased with myself. I called P and said I'd installed a Linux distro. Then he asked me lots of questions. Me: but you must know this. P: Why? Me: you run Linux don't you? P: nope, never tried it.... 🫣🫣🫣