What was your first Linux/Unix distro?
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Caldera 1.3, the CD came with a book (or vice versa.) It was the era in the 90s when you got a book to learn Linux and they included the OS on CD with it so that you knew that you were working with the identical system to what they were talking about. My first many machines were CLI only, but KDE was included back then and that was my first introduction to the Linux desktop as well.
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Gentoo.
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I should add that I sought Linux out at that time because I had been using UNIX and VMS and could not stand how bad Windows was. I had been using Amiga from 1987 - 1994, then Solaris and VMS. By ~1997, I wanted UNIX at home and was looking for a way to do that.
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To make things a little more spicy, can you add:
what was your first Linux distro that made you venture over, and why? First impressions?
Or something along those lines... To the 1st post?
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I manged to get Slackware installed from a CD in the back of a 3" thick book. I remember the joy of getting Xwindows working and getting my modem to work. I'm pretty sure that was 1996.
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Well, as I previously posted, but then removed from the OP, my first dip was in the mid to late 90's with Redhat or Mandrake. They both installed from floppies.
I didn't stick with either, as I was mainly playing games on my PC and didn't get that from Linux.
I still haven't made any type of transition to using it as my desktop.
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In my Linux classes back in the days, it was mix of SUSE (KDE) and Red Hat (No GUI). But I personally was using Ubuntu for desktop and servers.
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In the late 90's, I touched Linux a little here and there to test it out, but I honestly can't remember what distro it was... it may have even been FreeBSD. For some reason, Debian comes to mind, but I don't know for sure.
I didn't like it, perhaps because I was too young, didn't fully understand what I was doing, and/or it just feel too clunky/buggy. Because of that, I stuck with Win95/Win98.
It wasn't until the early 2000's, like 2005ish, maybe earlier, that I stuck it on something again, to give it a real go, and that was Ubuntu 4 or 5.something. Back then I was deep into 2003/WindowsXP, so I compared it to that. And again, it didn't compare. But it was a so much better experience than before. That's when I realized it was actually something worth using.
It wasn't until I started using it as servers a few years later that I actually preferred it for some tasks over Windows.
Today, I prefer Fedora for home/business use, where I can get away with it if it makes sense where appropriate.
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First attempt was Sabayon. First time I actually started doing stuff was Ubuntu.
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Shortly after I graduated HS I acquired a copy of Red Hat 8 (I think, cross referenced wiki article with approx. date), like @Dashrender I didn't give it much of a chance as I was mostly gaming at the time.
Ubuntu server was the first that I really actually used a lot. No idea what version, but it was in the mid-late 2000s. I was mostly using it for LAMP stack. I know it's bad, but Ubuntu is still my linux of choice for most things as that's what I'm most familiar with.
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Mandrivia
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Ubuntu 6.06 was the first main distribution I used, at the time I was running a computer shop and installed it on a few cheap machines we sold that didn't have windows licences, It worked great. I remember I ordered a load of cd's from canonical which had the printed case and cd which I gave away free to customers to try, I did use other linux distro's as well for file and password recovery of windows machines, I couldn't tell you what they were though because I can't remember.
These days I'm quite a fan of Ubuntu Server Edition and for GUI i'm quite a fan of Deepin.
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SimplyMEPIS
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RedHat 3 or 4 setup a web server on it from my old man's place.
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@tim_g said in What was your first Linux/Unix distro?:
I didn't like it, perhaps because I was too young, didn't fully understand what I was doing, and/or it just feel too clunky/buggy. Because of that, I stuck with Win95/Win98.
I was deep into the UNIX world before Windows 3.1 even released!
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RedHat Linux 4 Colgate 1996, even had original CD box :). At about same time tried Slackware, but I decided to stay with RH. At that time I volunteered at the university computer center where we had VAX/VMS host and couple of HP-UX workstations. We used RH as PPP server, Web and email server and students used it for shell access. Great days.
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good grief... that was so long ago.. can't remember the distro.. but it ran on a DEC PDP 11/23
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@gjacobse said in What was your first Linux/Unix distro?:
good grief... that was so long ago.. can't remember the distro.. but it ran on a DEC PDP 11/23
Where the heck did you get a PDP 11? I mean I had one once, but really?
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@scottalanmiller said in What was your first Linux/Unix distro?:
@gjacobse said in What was your first Linux/Unix distro?:
good grief... that was so long ago.. can't remember the distro.. but it ran on a DEC PDP 11/23
Where the heck did you get a PDP 11? I mean I had one once, but really?
LMAO - it was where I worked,.. and it was in the very early 1990s.
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@scottalanmiller said in What was your first Linux/Unix distro?:
@gjacobse said in What was your first Linux/Unix distro?:
good grief... that was so long ago.. can't remember the distro.. but it ran on a DEC PDP 11/23
Where the heck did you get a PDP 11? I mean I had one once, but really?
My dad managed one for the paving company he worked for.
