The year is about right. I didn’t lose my DOS partition, but I was already familiar with partitioning. Someone gave me a Slackware CD set. Had a lot of difficulty getting a higher res than 640x480 with my VLB video card.
Started a BBS at the time, switched to OS/2 Warp, which worked awesome until Windows apps moved to the new Win95 requirements. Started using RHEL for a while, but eventually Debian, then Ubuntu, and now PopOS.It’s been a long journey, but now Windows 11 is the weird OS that needs hours of troubleshooting and tweaking and adjustments. It’s just not worth the effort, so I keep an Windows 10 VM around with Office for the odd occasion when I need it.
I downloaded slackware from a BBS. It took forever. It booted from two floppies, a boot and a root disk. It did not even have X. I still loved it, because I recently got into programming, and all I had ever programmed on was DOS. In Linux, you could actually malloc() with any amount, even a full megabyte! It was marvellous! Later, I installed it on my HD on a separate partition. The installation process was really fascinating, so much choice, so many new programs! At least the first time.
make menu; make menu config
I did it so much: Slackware from Source that it seemed almost trivial once I got my first Plextor 3x and ordered the CD by mail lol.
Edit: I shivered when I thought about it. I had a 486 SX with 1GB RAM, a 64k VLB Tulip Video card and a Connor 340MB HDD. It was slow as snot even then, but Linux was cool for being free.
Redhat 1997. Slackware, Storm Linux, then Debian 2001 to present. A brief year on the OSS Solaris release.
I was born in 94 so not really. For me it was Ubuntu and nvidia drivers in 2010 or smth around that.
Still using Slackware to this day.
So… Yeah.
What do you like about Slackware? Just curious.
Once you understand Slackware, you realize it is really simple and stable. It comes with an excellent selection of software in the base install, and does not contain any “surprises”. I have had uptime in the 200-300+ days range on my home server, updates and security patches are quick and painless, etc.
In other words, it is a Linux optimized for usability and Unix compatibility, not necessarily user friendliness. It assumes you know what you are doing and gets out of your way.
First was Puppy on an old Dell back in middle school. Just wanted something other than the shit ass windows box my mom insisted on and the macs my school insisted on.
/me raises hand.
Ubuntu 2006 (I think), they mailed me a literal cd with it, how to resist to that.
Slackware around 96. I downloaded it from a local BBS over a 28.8 modem. It took forever. I don’t recall how many floppies it took, but it was a good stack. I got it installed, then realized it was in Portuguese. I did not know Portuguese at the time. So I got a crash course in Linux and Portuguese at the same time learning how to reconfigure the language settings. It was a fun time.
I also lost partitions (ESP and C:) during my move to a Linux-only setup, except it was because of Windows Update. On ya, Microsoft!
Redhat, back in 1999. Then Mandrake 2002. Then Suse 2003. Then Ubuntu 2006. Then Debian 2012-present.
Fvwm95? I used that for a bit way back in the day…
Redhat. Back in the early 90’s.
Fuck RHEL, though. And let’s be honest, why pick just one flavor? (Currently using arch.)
I started with SuSE 5 and it came with a book. I think it started with something like: “Don’t panic! You can do this!”
It was rough at first, but once I got into it I was hooked.
YaST and the fucking AVM Fritz ISDN ISA Card…
A part of me is still crying when opening YaST killed my hand written configuration…
Curious if you’re still rocking suse today?
Nah I went over to camp Debian for a long time, switched when Debian Potato was released. Then when Debian kinda stalled I was lured into Ubuntu because they had the latest and greatest. I know it isn’t the cool choice these days, but I have stuck with Ubuntu ever since.
Recently tired Ubuntu on my work laptop and it was a surprisingly pleasant experience compared to all the negative things I’ve heard about Ubuntu. Especially the installer was next level simple.
Mint is basically Ubuntu without the controversial bits.
Yeah I love Ubuntu, it’s really fine. But I think because it’s easy and for a lot of people their first Linux, it’s seen as like the baby version of Linux. So people bitch about it a lot, as if it’s somehow inferior to other distros. Like if you don’t compile everything from scratch you are somehow not worthy?
Hard “Real programmer” vibes. https://xkcd.com/378/
And yes, I use
picoas a text editor, it’s fine really.
Hello fellow started-with-suse-but-switched-to-Debian-potato 🤝
Wow! That’s really cool, Debian Potato was so hype back then. And every new release was amazing, I had Sarge running for so long. And I had a little home made router with Debian Sarge and an uptime of like 3 years. I had to replace the NIC on it, from a 10mbit coax only to a coax and UTP model because I was switching over to UTP. I didn’t want to shutdown the server, so I live swapped the ISA cards, and it actually worked!
Those were the days.
I dug around in old boxes and found the book!
Can I get this kind of book but for Mint?
I recall telling this story here on Lemmy not long ago - (and got downvoted some weeks ago for saying that it can happen on any distro… kids don’t know the real struggle I guess) - back in the day I swiped my HDD trying to install ubuntu 5.10 and lost all my data from uni and stuff. Still I can’t remember how I managed to install it after some attempts like a year after that or so.
I’d be upset about losing my data but truth is that somehow I was used to it - third world problems made it frequently due to not having a cd burner to burn my data and crappy IDE HDDs that got corrupted after a while just because. I still have some of them stored somewhere in hopes I could try to recover something from them someday, like some sort of cryogenic stuff.
I definitely dont miss the days of no uuid’s + ribbon cables and master/slave jumpers
I will never forget when I accidentaly wiped my external hard drive messing around snd distro hopping, I lost 6000 songs that day…
