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A Trip Down Distro Memory Lane

Posted by timothy on from the early-nostalgia-is-the-best-kind dept.

M-Saunders writes "What did the Linux world look like back in 2000? TuxRadar has republished a distro roundup from Linux Format issue 1, May 2000. Many distros such as SUSE, Mandrake and Red Hat are still around in various incarnations, but a few such as Corel and Definite have fallen by the wayside."

8 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. SuSE Ruled... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...until Novell bought them out. When it became apparent that Novell wasn't going to uphold the SuSE quality, I switched over to Ubuntu. Haven't looked back since.

    1. Re:SuSE Ruled... by IANAAC · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Except that Novell has done some good things too. Yast is still pretty amazing. Oh and Novell opened it up and set it free.

      It's OK to not like a company, but give them credit where they actually deserve it.

    2. Re:SuSE Ruled... by Xoron101 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I've always thought that Debian was a great Distro. Stable, lots of packages that can be installed, and lots of resources on the web.

      Ubuntu (based on Debian) ties it all together with a nice, easy to use installer and GUI. Great choice for desktops, but I'd stick to Debian for servers.

    3. Re:SuSE Ruled... by Daimanta · · Score: 3, Insightful

      One shortcoming: YaST.

      It's dogslow and doesn't have the easy of aptitude.

      I was trying to install some pieces of software a couple of years ago on SUSE(which was my first *ux distro) and I was going down the lane of installing tens of packagedepencies for one piece of software. Eventually a friend convinced me to use Ubuntu. I was sold the minute I understood the apt-get command.

      Even if Ubuntu had it own shortcomings(still a lot of textfile configuration editing) it still worked decently. And with the leaps Ubuntu is making in the usability field, I can probably stay with it for a very long time.

      --
      Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
    4. Re:SuSE Ruled... by sortius_nod · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I use SuSE for my home server too, I see no issues with it... I've used many different distros (RH, Mandrake/Mandriva, Slacks, Ubuntu, Debian, the list goes on), but SuSE seems to do what it's meant to without a lot of headache - true, configuring from conf files can be a pain if you're not used to where it puts some.

      Either way, run what you feel comfortable with until it shits on you... I know there's a lot of anti-Novell sentiment here on slashdot, but it's like hating a red-headed child - you may not like them, but they are still part of the family.

  2. Re:It was a nightmare for regular users in 2000... by Rhabarber · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You say it, in 2000 I set up a Gentoo system on one of those early Pentium III Notebooks. Yes, sure, it took me a couple of hours. But guess what, I still use it every day, exclusively. Just copied it from box to box over the years. So I'd say that time was quite a good investment ;)

  3. Re:Slackware rules! by Peter+Simpson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I built a Slackware system and had it dual-booting on my 486-33 at my new job. I was using it (with X11 and Motif) as an Xterminal off our UNIX system to do schematic capture, after I got fed up with Win3.1 and QEMM (which was what I was supposed to be using).

    That the same hardware could perform so much better running Linux (versus Win3.1) was a real eye-opener .

    Have not thought a Microsoft OS was worth paying for since.

  4. Re:Slackware rules! by JK_the_Slacker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I beg your pardon. You're referring to dependency management. Slackware has had "real" package management for YEARS.

    For real people... stop the FUD!

    --
    I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.