Mine was Knoppix because back in the day Libraries used to let you borrow all sorts of computer software and games and that’s what they had and I was stuck on dialup lol
I think it was actually DBAN I dabbled with firstly, and then like you Knoppix. I played too much later with microkernel distros like DSL / Tinycore, then Debian / Ubuntu’s etc.
Red hat (in '99). I chose it because it was included on the disc that came with an IT magazine I bought at the time
I moved to Linux From Scratch a few years later, then to Debian. I have been on Debian based OSes since then, I like Mint at the moment
Knoppix was my favourite recovery and rescue live CD
Soft Landing Systems (SLS). So many disks!
Suse 5 or 6. I think. Throw some Debian in there around that same time frame.
Debian. They mailed me the install media.
BeOS ;)
I know, not Linux. But it was my first OS other than the one that came pre-installed.
Can’t remember exactly which was my very first Linux distro but probably Knoppix or another early live one.
My first “wipe Windows and install on bare metal” was PC-BSD. I know, again, not Linux.
And again, can’t remember exactly the very first “wipe Windows and install on bare metal” Linux, probably Puppy or Ubuntu.
Early Mandriva with KDE 3.4 or 3.5 I think, but I can barely remember anything with clarity. It couldn’t have been bad though, since I haven’t used Windows on my own devices since 😉.
From my foggy memory, I think it was good for my then nocoder self, easy to use, stable, relatively lite, and had good looks.
I missed the Mandrake and pre-Fedora Red Hat era, but not by much.
Forgot to mention that I wasn’t exactly young at the time. We just didn’t have reliable broadband internet back then in my neck of the woods. So I had to download ISOs and save them in a USB thumb drive in a uni computer lab.
Raspbian Bullseye ARM32 -> Ubuntu 18.04/22.04 LTS -> Kubtuntu 22.04/24.04/25.04 (
--minimal-installto avoidsnap)Slackware on a whole lot of lettered floppy disks.
Slackware was my first linux distro, but would Solaris or SunOS count?
No, but bonus credit. I went Vax VMS, DEC Alpha Dux, Slackware, slowaris (x86 Solaris), Redhat, then LFS, Gentoo, RHEl Solaris 9, and then eventually a little of everything else.
I had a machine with multiple OSes chosen at startup with OS/2 Boot Manager, including OS/2 Warp, Windows NT Workstation 4, and Redhat 5.0 which came on a CDROM labeled Pink Tie 5.0. (It was late '90s I guess. I used MSDOS before that. And a Commodore 64 before that) I believe I put a mail server on it (the Redhat partition) while I was still on dial-up (128K ISDN). The mails waited somewhere until I got online and signalled to send them to me. But then upgraded it to DSL. I was still running Redhat 7.3 with my mail server until 2006, even though Redhat 9 and Fedora were out by then. In 2006, I shut it down and bought a Windows 98 laptop to travel around Central America for a year. The Guatemalans laughed at my Windows 98 laptop–they were running Vista. When I got back to the US in 2007, and broke the laptop screen, oops, I bought a $300 desktop PC that had Lindows installed.
Mandrake 9.2 (before the Mandriva rebranding)
Same with Mandrake, though I can’t remember what version number.
Red hat 2.0
RedHat 6.
It came on a CD on the cover of a massive tome titled RedHat Linux 6 Unleashed.
RedHat6.
It came on a CD on the cover of a massive tome titled RedHat Linux 6 Unleashed.
SuSE 1992 (1995?) (don’t remember the exact number, but the year was on the accompanying paper manual), on some 1.3.xx Kernel, I think. Good times.
