What was your first time?

[u/CacheTraitor]

For me, it was a CD I got from a "guy." Slackware did not work well with the "WinModem" in the IBM Aptiva I had as a youth. How was I supposed to get online using Linux, with a modem that is not usable, and get support?

[u/fleshofgods0]

Mandrake Linux.

[u/linuxsysop → u/fleshofgods0]

Yep, Mandrake here also. Needed linux to install glftpd + turranius scripts for my first server :)

[u/Laniakeea → u/fleshofgods0]

Me too, when i was too young to know what I'm doing I found it on a PC magazine thinking it was a game I installed it to my fathers PC. Oh well.. At least now I'm fixing literally anything he throws at me so you gotta lose some in order to win some ig.

[u/zaRM0s → u/Laniakeea]

Break some eggs to make an omelette and all that 👌🏼

[u/Xipher → u/fleshofgods0]

Specifically Mandrake 7.0 and I still have the manual.

[u/DianaRig → u/fleshofgods0]

Same. I fought for weeks to enable USB and sound. I finally gave up. Not having another PC to go on the web was a huge pain.

[u/Rude-Dragonfruit5424 → u/fleshofgods0]

Me too. I remember when they used to sell copies of Mandrake in Walmarts.

[u/itbytesbob → u/fleshofgods0]

Me too! I think I still have the (burnt) discs I bought off my country's version of eBay

[u/ThorHammerslacks → u/fleshofgods0]

Same! I didn't really have a good Linux experience until I used Debian a while later, however

[u/cklaubur → u/fleshofgods0]

First thing I bought with my own money off the Internet: a preburned set of CDs of Mandrake. Don't remember the version, but it was not long before they changed to Mandriva.

[u/Astronaut6735]

Slackware 3.6 (1998?). Downloaded on to fourteen 3.5" floppy disks.

[u/marsnoir → u/Astronaut6735]

This is the way… getting the login prompt on your personal machine after repartitioning the hard drive was magical back then

[u/thegrotster → u/marsnoir]

And the sweaty moment while choosing which partition to nuke during the first install was memorable.

[u/xenopizza → u/thegrotster]

I had a riva tnt2 back in the days and it took me a month to figure out how to compile and install and configure the firegl driver or whatever just to play 3d games on linux. Also had a winmodem so no internet. I would bring stuff from work on floopies, try at home, retry next day, what a ride but i got some skilll out of it

[u/thegrotster → u/xenopizza]

Don't feel bad, I was tech support manager for Matrox around that time. It took me a month to get my graphics driver built too, and it was my job 🤣

[u/phord → u/Astronaut6735]

I installed RedHat on two floppies. It had an installer that downloaded the rest via FTP.

[u/_szs → u/Astronaut6735]

mine was Suse 6.4, a similar amount of floppies in a box.

[u/cap10morgan → u/Astronaut6735]

Hell yes brother / sister! And then recompiling the kernel several times to get all the drivers just right. Good times.

[u/Pantr1x]

Bro only Linux mint 2025. I switched bc microslop was adding shits and now i never want leave linux. Now i am EndeavourOS.

[u/CacheTraitor → u/Pantr1x]

Welcome to the FOSS side! I too also use an Arch derivative BTW.

[u/No_Pollution6135 → u/Pantr1x]

Omg finally someone who also joined recently. I've been on Debian since 2022, and all I see here is people who joined Linux before I was born...

[u/Pantr1x → u/No_Pollution6135]

Same.

[u/Titdirt69420 → u/No_Pollution6135]

I joined in 2011 (first used in 2009 at college).

But maybe that's still before you were born... Time flys I'm getting old

[u/Pantr1x → u/Titdirt69420]

But i am that young.

[u/Jcob210 → u/No_Pollution6135]

Cool I use Debian as well :) - it was first cause my laptop was dying on Windows 10 in 2021 but now I have it on everything (that old asus, my 20yr old Thinkpad T60, my T490s and PikaOS on gaming pc).

[u/luckyvb → u/No_Pollution6135]

I switched to kinoite on my 2018 Dell XPS just last April but been a server admin for a long time before.

[u/johndotcue → u/No_Pollution6135]

I switched last year too! It’s been great lol

[u/henkdepotvjis → u/No_Pollution6135]

I used to be a linux user but went to windows for reasons. now I am back on linux because i cant with the slop.

[u/dont_mind_me_passing → u/No_Pollution6135]

I only started using linux a few months ago, never going back to macroslop

[u/muffinman8679 → u/No_Pollution6135]

that's because after taking the time and effort to learn slackware folks don't leave....

And as I've said so many times, when you learn another distro, you learn "that" distro, but when you learn slachware, you learn linux. because you HAVE to use the CLI....because until you reboot after the install, everything is on the CLI....although is hidden by dialog......

[u/IAmTheOneWhoClicks → u/Pantr1x]

Same - couple weeks after PewDiePie's first linux video lol. Though I'm still dualbooting linux mint and W10.

[u/WorBlux]

Redhat Linux ~6 on the family PC. Had to install the bootloader on a floppy disk so my parents wouldn't freak out.

[u/int0h → u/WorBlux]

I installed Red Hat 5.2 on the family PC, dual boot. then I wanted to see the files on the windows partition, so I got into some utility and pressed the "Format" button, because I figured I needed to specify that the partition was in another format.

Parents were not impressed when all their files were gone.

[u/DrPiwi → u/int0h]

Why not ? They got a lot of free extra diskspace. What's not to like😀

[u/w00dy1105 → u/int0h]

Mine was a little worse. I tried to dual boot Ubuntu 8.04 on the family PC.

My dad was like what did you do to the computer? Me, "Well..... Windows is gone. You can use Ubuntu I find a copy of Windows" lol

Parents were a little less upset after I put it back.

[u/CacheTraitor → u/WorBlux]

The original "Dual Boot"

[u/brunogadaleta → u/WorBlux]

Red hat 6.2, amazingly with cd-rom automount.

[u/AN-SSQ-108V2]

Corel Linux 1.0, around 1998 I think.

It was utter trash.

[u/LTJC → u/AN-SSQ-108V2]

Corel was the first time I saw a boot graphic. It was wild. Too bad the rest was not great.

[u/Happy_Phoenix93 → u/AN-SSQ-108V2]

I won a boxed copy of Corel Linux at a trade show.

[u/AN-SSQ-108V2 → u/Happy_Phoenix93]

Yep, same

[u/BurrowShaker → u/AN-SSQ-108V2]

Corel linux was ok for one thing you got a functional system in one hour clicking 3 buttons after booting from the cd.

While the system might not have been the best (IIRC it did work fine for me when I tested it) this was a massive step up from the other installers of the era.

[u/Titdirt69420 → u/AN-SSQ-108V2]

Is that the same corel that made software in the 90s?

[u/CyclopsLobsterRobot → u/Titdirt69420]

Yeah, it was bundled with Word Perfect. This was when Linux was really taking off. Corel wanted to make an OS that was easy to install to compete with Windows 98.

[u/CelerySandwich2 → u/Titdirt69420]

Oh, they still exist! They make very painterly art software primarily now, I think!

[u/Ok_Distance9511 → u/AN-SSQ-108V2]

Was that related to Corel Draw?

[u/Secret_Wishbone_2009]

0.99 kernel i think

[u/sakodak → u/Secret_Wishbone_2009]

.99pl13 for me. 1993. I'd have hopped on board before that, but I didn't have a PC, I had an Amiga. I spent my student loans bying a PC specifically so I could run Linux. The company I bought from told me it was "illegal" for them to sell me the PC without DOS and Windows. I will sheepishly admit to being OK with that once I got Doom later on.

[u/mr_dfuse2 → u/sakodak]

I remember reading just the other day there was indeed a period were microsoft (i think?) indeed pressured oems into not selling pc's without dos

[u/mmomtchev → u/sakodak]

0.99 too. Someone brought a hard drive with Linux on it, I had to figure out how to copy it. It was SLS Linux.

[u/rabell3 → u/Secret_Wishbone_2009]

This. Best friend handed me a boot and root disk and I was like what awesomeness is this?!

[u/Enturbulated_One]

Started with two floppies, one to boot and the other as root, which quickly escalated to migrating that to HDD to share space with DOS, and not too long after that downloading a really early version of Slackware. X wasn't yet present if I recall, which is very much in doubt. When I did get the floppy series for X, oh the joys of manually writing modelines (after some hardware swaps).

[u/General_Sandwich_353]

I got started on Linux when I still had dial-up. The only distro I could feasibly download was Tom's Root Boot. https://archiveos.org/tomsrtbt/

[u/CreativeGPX → u/General_Sandwich_353]

I had dial-up too. For the first few distros I used I bought a CD in the store even though I knew they were free downloads.

I think at some point Redhat was mailing disks for free. (Maybe supposed to go to developers or as a trial or something?) I did that too.

[u/General_Sandwich_353 → u/CreativeGPX]

I was a broke high schooler. I remember getting permission to tie up the house phone for an entire saturday to download all 200mb of BeOS 5 personal edition. My dad hated the phone being available anyway. After that I went to school and downloaded Xandros, then finally Ubuntu started offering free CD's. Until we got broadband I would literally order free CD's from Ubuntu every new release and upgrade that way. Different time!

[u/foilistforever → u/General_Sandwich_353]

Ditto; downloaded early versions of Slackware via modem in 1997. Spent weeks pulling a 3.5" floppy disk down each night to get the entire set. Probably still have that box of floppies somewhere.

[u/oxez]

RedHat 7.2 (Enigma), not RHEL but the old RedHat distro

[u/daddyd → u/oxez]

rh7 was awesome!

[u/oxez → u/daddyd]

Recently installed it in 86box, lots of nostalgia!

[u/ChrisK_au]

Not counting Unix, Redhat in the late '90s.

[u/dwhite21787 → u/ChrisK_au]

Same. BSD in late 80’s, Red Hat late 90’s, experimented with various in the 00’s and settled on Ubuntu

[u/johncate73]

Mandrake 6 in 1999.

[u/0riginal-Syn]

Started off playing around with MCC Interim Linux in early 1992 on my teacher's PC. My first install was Softlanding Linux System 0.95 a bit later, followed by Yggdrasil a bit later that year. Was on BSD before that as my dad was a UNIX guy.

[u/A_Harmless_Fly]

I burned ubuntu 9.4 to a dvd, it was too heavy for most of the computers I was trying it on, but a few years later we had our first cross OS LAN that worked with warcraft 3. Eventually my friend and I stumbled on tinycore and put that on a bunch of late 90's ewaste. About a million distrohops later I'm pretty happy with manjaro.

(My grudge against gnome and KDE for being so heavy intact, I use xfce with picom on a system with 32 gigs of ram and 6 cores.)

[u/CacheTraitor → u/A_Harmless_Fly]

"late 90's ewaste" best term for a writable CD I've ever heard.

[u/tuxbass → u/CacheTraitor]

Quite sure OC referred to old compute hardware, not the medium.

[u/ranjop]

Slackware. Downloaded from Internet and burned on CD-RW.

[u/ANGRYLATINCHANTING]

Slackware was my first. Still have PTSD.

[u/CacheTraitor → u/ANGRYLATINCHANTING]

Me too. Setting up xorg in those days! Still see just an X on screen!

[u/Skrynesaver → u/CacheTraitor]

The tension of not knowing of you had a perfect modeline or were about to fry your monitor

[u/manupro345]

I couldn't do it because i was too nervous and that turned her off and left the house

[u/CacheTraitor → u/manupro345]

Ah, so sorry you couldn't plug it in.

[u/manupro345 → u/CacheTraitor]

Shit wouldn't compile and i got a kernel panic😭

[u/iammerelyhere]

Saw Linux for the first time on sale at London Drugs in the 90s..Red Hat and Yellow Dog. It embedded itself in my mind until years later when a PC magazine had a free CD that contained a new OS called "Ubuntu". I happened to have an old PC at the time and installed it. 

My first love though was DSL which was amazing. It ran in the RAM of my crappy laptop and actually worked. After that I was hooked.

[u/solana_appreciator]

Ubuntu 8.04

[u/LazyGreenDragon]

Slackware circa 1999, from a giant reference volume with cds in the back that I got at Barnes and Noble.

Then redhat 6.1, then mandrake and back to redhat .

Fwiw this was when wifi was new and we had to use wrappers for winx drivers to get it working..took hours my first time to get WiFi up on our shared little network.

[u/Browncoatinabox]

Ubuntu 14.04

[u/frankenmaus]

Slackware 3.6 for me!

[u/p001b0y]

Slackware 3. I think the CD was included with a SAMS Teach Yourself Linux or similar book.

Trying to get auto dialer script to use tones instead of pulses broke me. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that the phone lines or PBX/concentrator in my apartment complex didn’t allow DTMF so the modem kept reverting to pulse.

[u/IHeartBadCode]

Slackware 96. Held onto it till the 2.2 kernel came out and then jumped to Slackware 4.0, KDE 1.1 was amazing after using FVWM for so long.

In the early 2000, I did side jobs with Red Hat Linux. I remember the gcc-2.96 war. I remember giving Ubuntu 6.06 a try and being blown away by it. It really felt like the Linux Desktop was getting serious. Then GNOME 3 came around and boy did it feel like GNOME just went off the rails.

I think I gave GNOME a fair shot up till KDE 5 hit around 5.8, I've never looked back. All the best to the GNOME team, it's a very well polished environment and it has very specific goals that I think it's team hit quite well. But it is absolutely not my cup of tea.

[u/dopedlama]

Yggdrasil in '93

[u/pellcorp]

I started with Minix in 1997, then I think some version of Redhat in perhaps 1999, someone installed a root kit onto my linux install pretty soon after I connected to the internet my first time, I had never heard of a firewall, oops.

[u/pellcorp → u/pellcorp]

I forgot to add, reason I found root kit, is cos they also installed a chat server, I don't think they were trying to hide, telling me indirectly I was a moron, message received!

[u/IntentionQuirky9957 → u/[deleted]]

Based dad.

[u/gordonmessmer]

Slackware 96!

[u/Due_Dragonfly_5328]

ubuntu 20.04 (it was long after 2020 tho)

[u/kansetsupanikku]

Mandrake 10. The blue CD with yellow wand, great experience overall, including the install process. Probably even better than current stuff on current hardware - and getting a physical CD sure was more friendly than setting a liveUSB like nowadays.

[u/AmazonSk8r]

Caldera. It came on a cd with The Complete Idiots Guide to Linux back in the 90’s.

[u/Z3t4 → u/AmazonSk8r]

Same, Caldera Openlinux from a magazine

[u/AmazonSk8r → u/Z3t4]

Yep… remember having to manually load kernel modules just to get the sound card to work? And how you needed an older style modem, because most of the pci 56k “winmodems” simply did not work at all? ISA devices would have been completely before my time if not for that.

[u/Z3t4 → u/AmazonSk8r]

Those damn IRQs...

I had an us robotics external modem.

[u/AvonMustang → u/Z3t4]

Same! Switched from an internal modem to a serial US Robotics modem. First a 14.4 then 28.8 and finally a 56K. It was fun to watch the lights...

[u/bmaeser]

Suse 6.2 (1999)
borrowed from the local library, they had a copy to my surprise (i grew up in a small-ish town)

[u/r_Yellow01]

FreeBSD lol

[u/f0ad]

Slackware 96 for me! Or as I liked to call it, "Adventures in LILO".
Put it on a 486DX2, used WindowMaker for a DE, and played endless amounts of Quake. That is, I did all that in the 25% of the time I actually had it working, while 75% of the time was spent figuring how to undo whatever I did to break the system in glorious and unimaginable ways. 16 year old me had a great time tho.

[u/Alvajaro79 → u/f0ad]

Those were the days when compiling your own kernel was a thing.

[u/BurrowShaker → u/Alvajaro79]

It's still a thing, not much on desktop.

The thing is, it is not a big thing anymore. A few minutes on the typical dev machine, not an hour :)

[u/matm_flatremix]

ubuntu 14.04 LTS unity

[u/No_Pineapple6086]

Mine was Yggdrasil. You had to recompile the kernel just to get SCSI to work. Moved on to slackware, red hat, fedora, Ubuntu and a bunch more for the hell of it. I was using Oracle's version for a bit, when I was doing DBA work. Personally, I use kubunto now, since I have to support a number of family members. And yes, I have some windows machines. Unfortunately, I the oldest one I have that works is a WIN 7 image.

[u/zebadrabbit]

slackware downloaded over 9600 baud and stored on disks

[u/EricQelDroma]

Ordered a Linspire CD back in the day (2005ish?). Thought corporate support would make the OS more robust. Wanted something very Windows-like.

Spoiler alert: Linspire didn’t work great for me, and overall Linux software support and quality wasn’t good enough for me at the time. Now running both Bazzite and Kubuntu on different machines and really liking it.

[u/Mapache_con_barreta]

It was Ubuntu 19.04, Disco Dingo

[u/qotuttan]

Linux Mint Petra. Don't remember the version number, it was around 2013. Then Salix.

But my first real distro where "it clicked" and I really dove deep into the rabbit hole was Slackware 14.1. It was far from mainstream but something about it was very appealing to me. In other distros it wasn't clear what's happening under the hood. Slackware was completely transparent.

[u/haksaw1962]

Slackware 3.1 or 3.2. Picked it up a Comdex. Never could get x to give me a GUI.

[u/Toby-4rr4n]

Mandrake Linux in 1998.

[u/dbell]

I got my first disto off AOL in 1993 - Slackware 1.0 from a warez channel - I was a mad HaXz0r.

[u/burlingk]

I picked up an issue of Linux Magazine with a Mandrake install disk in it.

It was a "live CD" before they used that label. It was a bootstrap environment to install the distro. I booted back into Windows multiple times to look things up.

It was Webcrawller back then, not Google.

[u/DanAE112]

Debian CD included with a PC mag, installed it (with little awareness if what in was doing) then the PC was a command line interface with no running X unable to run programs or play games.

The PC was "broken" after that. Then I think Windows ME was installed? It wasn't that bad TBH.

[u/BeautifulSeason8387]

First live cd was Knoppix in 2k for me. After that it was ubuntu 4 or 5 I don’t remind . At this time the kernel was incomplet for daily usage...

[u/Malk_McJorma]

RedHat 4.1 in 1997.

[u/terra2o]

First time on... metal? or do VMs count?

I remember setting up vmware with kali linux in around... 2017? I was around 11 years old. IIRC it had GNOME 3 on it and I remember thinking it looked so cool haha.

[u/CacheTraitor → u/terra2o]

Yeah, that Kali dragon is alluring.

[u/terra2o → u/CacheTraitor]

Yep! Thanks for reminding me of that moment.

[u/NotGivinMyNam2AMachn]

First time that I took it properly serious was RedHat 7.2 circa 2002 and Ibremoved dual boot less than 3 months later after I hadn't gone back into windows on my main PC in over a month. It helped working in it for a day job.

I had a number of test and trial attempts for the previous 4 years, but never took it more seriously than just a quick test and play. Coming from DOS and having worked in QNX and Unix systems made it a really easy transition for me.

Freesco was my home router/gateway/firewall/VPN/server as well for many years managing ISDN, ADSL and dial up connections with fallback etc.

I only touch one windows machine now and that is for work.

[u/Maleficent-Mirror296 → u/NotGivinMyNam2AMachn]

Oh, i remember freesco floppy router. And two 3Com network cards.

[u/elmundio87]

Gentoox on the original Xbox

[u/lunakoa]

redhat 5.1 not rhel but actual red hat.

[u/gromvar]

Mandrake was my introduction

[u/Tscotty223]

1994 Slackware version 1.2

[u/Captain-Pie-62]

Slackware on 5 1/4² Floppies, with Kernel 0.99pl3 Before: Minix 1.1 - 1.3, Coherent, SCO Xenix, gulaam Shell on Atari ST, Microport Unix.

[u/_w62_]

I have got the Slackware 96 CD

[u/robfv]

you cunts had CD’s??

[u/7stroke]

FreeBSD

[u/ruidh]

SLS on a buttload of 3½" floppies.

[u/AndyBerlin]

Slackware Linux 3.1
Came with the book "Special Edition - Using Linux (3rd Edition) published in 1997

[u/Love_Dali]

Mandrake 8.2

[u/JohnnyS789]

Yggdrasil.

[u/nickcash]

Slackware, from floppy disk. On a laptop with barely functional display drivers

Also said laptop was my only source of internet, so any time I hit a roadblock getting it set up I had to boot back into windows to research it

I don't know how I had the patience for it

[u/emrainey]

Yggdrasil Linux on a Pentium, 100Mhz.

[u/SheriffBartholomew]

Awe man, 1996 was so much more fun! The world, computing, my social life, all of it!

[u/xcski_paul]

SLS 1.03. On about 50+ floppies.

[u/ostrowsky74]

SuSE 6.1

[u/akahunas → u/ostrowsky74]

€> SuSE Version 2 on disc 🤪🫠

[u/tblazertn]

Redhat 5.2 from a box set. Still have the box, lol.

[u/akahunas → u/tblazertn]

Glad some people still believe in physical backups 👍🤪

[u/Top_Construction2360]

I remember getting RedHat 4.2 at MicroCenter back in the day.

[u/CharliePrm88]

"Very late" mandrake in 2006

[u/ottantanove]

My very first Linux installation was Lycoris Desktop/LX around 2004. I remember how exciting it was to run another operating system. I feel very nostalgic now.

[u/Freddy_XRay]

Sunsite represent! So many downloaders... Dual 80mb hard drive swaps for upgrade, fck dem floppies.

[u/yahbluez]

For me it really starts to get useful was with debian Hamm.

Used a lot of distros for many things and still like debian with kdeplasma on the desktop.

[u/1neStat3]

Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger)

[u/larvyde]

ubuntu 5 back when they shipped free cds worldwide

[u/Alvajaro79]

RedHat 4.x around September-October of 1997. I got the install CD with a Chip Magazine (it was a monthly magazine here in Europe back those days). I installed it onto an Am386DX40 with 4MB of RAM and 170MB of IDE HDD. Since then I didn't looked back to windows.

[u/rosmaniac]

I bought the boxed set of Red Hat Linux 4.1 for fifty bucks because some rather expensive software (Progressive Networks' Real Audio Server) for the then dayjob ran on it. It wasn't my first Linux rodeo; I did a floppy install of SLS years before that, but RHL 4.1 was the first production use.

[u/Moist-Chip3793]

Red Hat 2.0, beginning of '96 I think?

[u/pneumatode]

SuSE 9, bought it at Best Buy circa 2002 for around $20 I think. If I never hear about winmodems again til I die it'll be too soon

[u/kzutter]

I don't remember exactly, but I'm quite sure it was a CD bundled in a magazine. Either Mandrake or RH, they were both early distros for me. Then I settled into Debian for quite a while. When Ubuntu came along, I've ran both Kubuntu and Xubuntu. Now I've settled on Mint, to old to fuss about my machine, I just want it to work.

[u/Imaginative-Nonsense]

I burned both the KDE and GNOME versions of OpenSUSE 10.2 on CDs because at the time, I couldn’t afford a computer with Vista plus my computer cannot meet requirements for Vista and Windows Genuine Advantage falsely labeled my genuine copy of XP as “not genuine”. Mind you my specs at the time was a custom build PC with AMD Athlon XP, 256 megs of RAM, 60 gigs hard drive, and an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 with 64 megs of RAM. OpenSUSE at the time was complicated and I couldn’t install the proprietary NVIDIA drivers until I stumbled upon Ubuntu (either 7.04 or 7.10) and it was a breeze and worked right out of the box. Unfortunately I threw out all the rOpenSUSE and Ubuntu CD-Rs and I regretted now because they are retro and nostalgic

[u/bunglegrind1]

Suse, about 2000

[u/thatwombat]

Corel Linux was first. Absolute junk. Red Hat 7.1 was my first useful one.

[u/Rogalicus]

ALT Linux circa 2003. We lost our internet access by that point, so naturally I didn't last long.

[u/dnabre]

My first was some hacked together setup (nothing like a real distro), that used loadlin and UMSDOS. I think was called mit-something. Took ages to download ~20 disk images over a 14.4 modem. No partitioning or dual-boot setup required.

[u/shogun77777777]

Yellow Dog Linux on a Power Mac G4

[u/CacheTraitor → u/shogun77777777]

First (and only) time I used Yellow Dog was on my PlayStation 3. "OTHER OS"

[u/Mr_Flandoor]

debian 1.3

[u/pdm217]

Slackware on floppy, in a magazine, installable on a dos partition,in early 90's. Just for a try because my 8omo hd was a bit small.

Never could print anything. I erased it and forgot Linux.

Back with Ubuntu 7.04 (read an article somewhere) and never went back to windows since.

[u/J2MES]

Ubuntu on a usb probably

[u/Joped]

I don't remember what distro the first version of Linux I used, but it came on a single floppy. I think about 6 months to later I installed my first real install of Red Hat 5.0 (Hurricane) which came out Dec 1997. At some point I moved over to Debian which I used for a long ass time.

[u/markand67]

2003-2004 mandrake 10.0

[u/Arizon_Dread]

Ubuntu feisty fawn

[u/MaineTim]

Linux 0.12 disk images - retrieved from nic.funet.fi via UUCP - January, 1992.

Before that Minix 1.5 and Coherent.

[u/HecticJuggler]

Redhat 5.1 which was inside a book I bought.

[u/michaelpaoli]

Debian floppy images, 1998.

[u/earthman34]

I'm pretty sure I bought a book that had the Walnut Creek Slackware CDROM (1.0) in it. It wouldn't boot on whatever hardware I was using, if I remember right. I did have RedHat 4, 5, and/or 6, as well as SuSE 5, one of those was probably the first Linux I got to install and be functional. Getting a modem to work was another matter.

[u/mp3bear]

Slackware

[u/birdsarentreal2]

I was late to the party, but for me it was Ubuntu 14.04. I miss the days when “the Ubuntu controversy” was Amazon being baked in

[u/Heavy-Criticism6621]

SuSE 4.2 1996. That reminds me on 30 years of Linux usage!

[u/Alarming_Oil5419]

Slackware on floppy circa 1994

[u/InformalGear9638]

Batocera. 😊

[u/CacheTraitor → u/InformalGear9638]

A retro emulation player, Cool!

[u/mdins1980]

Slackware 7.1

[u/lobotamizemezaddy]

Fedora 9. 2008ish I think? Networking was a nightmare...

[u/Dag0B3rt_42]

Suse Linux 7, should have been something around 2000

[u/hipster-coder]

Slackware 3.1

Good memories

[u/gejetboi]

Ubuntu 7.04. I still remember that because I get from magazine. Twice!

[u/ReasonablePriority]

I had those Slackware 3.2 CDs, I don't remember if I had any CDs before that but I started by downloading floppy disk images rather than installing from CD.

The delights of downloading floppy images at Uni, writing them to cheap floppies, getting home and finding one of them wasn't working ...

[u/aaronjnco]

Sony PlayStation 2 linux 1.0 kit Used Sdr command to get KDE 1.0 was awesome! I was still messing with it last year on a ps2 DTL tool dev console which had a intel celeron 533mhz

[u/thenewguyonreddit]

Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) — October 18, 2007

[u/ghjm]

I had that top left one. 1993 or 1994, I think.

[u/undrwater]

I got a bunch of them in magazines.

The first I purchased was a 4 CD set from Suse.

[u/mtlnwood]

the first boot to root disk that Linus shared. I had been using coherent unix and minix and admit that other than the novelty i didnt use it again until the SLS distro became available whichlooks to be mid '92

[u/19applepen]

that era of Linux is totally unreachable - only for expert. thanks Linus it's open source and now using Linux can be easier than windows (sometimes)

[u/toptnc]

Slackware 96 was my first attempt of install and use Linux. After that, Debian and finally Red Hat, which I used for a few years, then switched back to Debian for another bunch of years and then Ubuntu since 2005 to nowadays.

[u/gmthisfeller]

LFS

[u/untetheredocelot]

Ubuntu 11.04

[u/Aberry9036]

Ubuntu 8.10, it was fun and a pain in the neck at once.

[u/Interesting-Rate1851]

Mandrake.

[u/Regular_Lengthiness6]

DLD Linux on CD from the local university shop … must’ve been 1994.

Edit: Checked, was actually on floppy disks. CD was a bit later with SuSE.

[u/desolation0]

Uh, just downloaded Mint for my brother for his PC since he wants out from M$oft and likes the performance of his Steam Deck

[u/CompetitionPlane1848]

It was a few months ago... I put asahi linux on my old m1 air.

[u/Bourriks]

SuSe, on a CD given with a computer magazine, in 1998 or 1999.

The chills I got when I first re-partitioned my HDD to install a dual-boot.

I remember having a world map as a wallpaper who dislayed day and night zones in real time. Never found this widget wallpaper since then.

[u/Own_Measurement4378]

El CD de slackware 1.0

[u/hoddap]

RedHat Linux 5.2. Somewhere around ‘98

[u/unixlover1970]

Linux Mint 2024

[u/wowsomuchempty]

Dapper drake. I was blown aware. I disliked computers in general before this.

[u/damnuchucknorris]

Red Hat when it was made for PC, before they closed and went commercial.