Ask Slashdot: What Distros Have You Used, In What Order?

colinneagle writes "Linux dude Bryan Lunduke blogged here about the top three approaches he thinks are the easiest for new users to pick up Linux. Lunduke's, for example, went Ubuntu -> Arch -> openSUSE. It raises a question that Slashdot could answer well in the comments: what's your distro use order from beginning to now? Maybe we could spot some trends."

Comments

Slackware on floppies

[silas_moeckel]

Then Redhat then centos

Re:Slackware on floppies

[icebike]

Come on, is this really necessary or meaningful?

Who runs one distro at a time anyway? I have four or five installed in virtual machines. I've had as many as 3 running in production servers on physical hardware.

Does another post of untabulated me-too replys really provide any meaningful data?
Of course not.

I suggest this response:

Fill it out in painstaking detail, state your reasons and justification for each switch,
Thump chest vigorously at the end each rant section,
Get it all out of your system,
then click the Cancel button.

The world will be a better place.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Anonymous Coward]

Slackware on Floppies (Oh so many floppies)
Then Mandrake, and an assortment of "mini-distros" to run custom hardware like routers
Then Redhat
Then Debian
Then back to Redhat
Then Fedora
Briefly Ubuntu, then back to Fedora
Then CentOS
Then a combination of Fedora, CentOS and Debian, depending on which system. The Clusters I work with are all CentOS, some of the infrastructure systems (ie: DNS, database server, ...) are Debian, end user workstations and my home system are Fedora.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[IrquiM]

Slackware covers all your needs - you don't need any other distro.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[theshowmecanuck]

You need to buy a gun. Then you'll have a real gauge on how big your cock is.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[cayenne8]

Slackware on Floppies

Gentoo

RedHat

Dabbling in Debian now.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[tnk1]

Pretty much the same. 1995ish was Slackware, followed by Red Hat sometime after 1997, followed by CentOS in the later 2000's. Fiddled with Debian, but no company I have worked for has ever used it, so my interest has been light.

I generally don't use Linux for a desktop machine, so some of the more user friendly versions I haven't bothered much with, although I've installed many of them at one time or another to see what the fuss is all about.

Windows is a piece of crap, but still much better for a desktop workstation than any Linux (or UNIX) I have come across. I do have a CentOS VM that I run things like Eclipse on for some coding, but that's about it. I much prefer coding on and for Linux. I'm probably going to get around to using Ubuntu a lot more at some point, but I don't see a point to ditching Windows until they start making a lot more games for it (here's hoping Valve succeeds). The office suites could use some work too.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Midnight_Falcon]

+1 on this. I installed Slackware '96 back when the penguin was a platypus. Learning how to compile stuff from source is much better for a beginner (albeit more difficult) than learning to use a package management system like yum or dpkg.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[rwa2]

Oh, so many, many floppies... mostly from old Office installs, outdated games, and a few AOL / Compuserve floppies from before they started mailbombing CDs

Then RH4 ... until my server got owned by a remote samba exploit. Migrated to Debian that weekend. More or less skipped Ubuntu, but nowadays mostly go to Linux Mint. Somewhere in there I also installed a box off of a KNOPPIX LiveCD. And then I did a lot of stuff on RHEL/CentOS 5 & 6 for work.

I still seem to learn the most from reading through Debian install scripts and conf files, though.

Oh, at some point I installed a minimal Debian distro onto an old 486 laptop with no floppy/usb/cdrom... got it through the serial port onto a ~120MB hard disk that I repartitioned and resized and loaded the kernel through DOS. That was... interesting.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[mcgrew]

I gave Red Hat a try around 1997, it wasn't working for me too well, even though I'd read a 1000 page UNIX manual.

Around 2000 I tried again, this time with Debian and Suse. I had hardware issues with both.

About 2002 I tried Mandrake and loved it. Then they changed it to "Mandriva" so I thought I'd try a different distro just because I hated teh name "Mandriva". I don't remember what distro, but it used Gnome and I hated it, went back to Mandriva, and used it for years.

Then a few years ago rumors were Mandriva was dying, Ubuntu had come along but I never bothered because it used Gnome, and then discovered kubuntu.

So far, that's what I'm using. It's the most useable OS I've tried, head and shoulders above any flavor of Windows. As I haven't used an Apple computer since the IIe days, I can't compare them with Linux.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[ZahrGnosis]

I was a fan of the InfoMagic packages, which IIRC included Slackware's entire distro and a huge number of other files. Does anyone else remember Elfos fondly? I have a picture of the CD around here somewhere... I even had a T-shirt.

I was Slackware -> RedHat -> Ubuntu for my primary, but I tried CentOS, Fedora, and Knoppix in there for non-trivial amounts of time. Does Android count? ;-)

Also, I played with FreeBSD but that doesn't count for multiple reasons.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[interval1066]

Slackware covers all your needs...

Ran sw first in the mid 90's... ran away for quite a few years... then landed on Debian about 2006 or so... then Ubuntu, and now on Mint for the last 2 years. See, its not about increasing complexity, but less...

Re:Slackware on floppies

[jellomizer]

TI 99/4a Basic,
MS DOS,
Then I started my Linux kick.
Slackware on floppies,
Red Hat,
Then I went to Solaris (Yea it doesn't count, but I wanted to be a real Unix snob for a while),
I almost got Gentoo compiled on my Ultra Sparc,
Poked around Free and OpenBSD (Still on my Unix kick)
then Ubuntu
then Debian.
I had an OS X kick for a while,
Tried a Little Plan 9
VMS was spread around there somehow too.
Right now I am actually kinda liking living in a Windows World.
Who knows what next year brings me.

Over the years I have lost my passion towards my primary computers OS.

I found that Linux is really good for a server (Diebien, Slackware, Red Hat), and Workstation (Red Hat, Ubuntu).
For Home Desktop use. OS X and Windows does the job, but for home desktop I just need a good browser so any OS will tend to work.

I am not sure why you worring about the order saying One distribution is superior then the other. You pop un Ubuntu, they are using Linux, They may or may not like other Distributions better. Thats ok, it isn't that big of a deal.

It is a quesiton often askes to guatar players, what is the worlds hardest cord.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Anne Thwacks]

Very similar to you (with a few shortcuts) including dotclocks

Yggdrasil ( -> FreeBSD ) -> Slackware -> SuSE ( -> FreeBSD ) -> Ubuntu -> Mint -> Ubuntu.

Still use OpenBSD for servers though, and I have an old Thinkpad running NetBSD, installed from floppies, used as console for the servers.

And I hate Unity as much as anyone else.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[AliasMarlowe]

1. Tried a fairly early distro (possibly a freebie Ygdrassil, but don't actually recall) on floppies in the mid-90s, but it didn't work in my pathetic 386 - always died during install. Went back to OS/2 and Windows/DOS.
2. Success with a purchased Corel OpenLinux on a 486 around 1998. Sort-of OK, but internationalization (English language and numbers with Finnish keyboard and currency) was an annoyance requiring manual editing of /etc files.
3. Tried Ubuntu on a Pentium-M in 2004, switched permanently in 2005. That laptop is still going strong with Xubuntu 12.04 (made this post with it).
4. Tried SUSE around 2006 (when it was still spelled with capitals), and OpenSuse in a VM in 2009, but preferred Ubuntu each time. Dumped the VM.
5. Tried Mint with live CD and installed in a VM around 2010 and 2011, but preferred Ubuntu each time (MintMenu sucks balls). Dumped the VM.
6. Tried PCLinuxOS with live CD and installed in a VM around 2010 and 2011. This still resides in a VM on one of the Core2Quad desktops and it is regularly updated (currently KDE Full Monty 2012). For me, it's a toss-up between PCLinuxOS and Ubuntu, but we've kept to Ubuntu to avoid UI shock for other family members. 7. Very briefly tried live CDs or installations into VM of other distributions, including a few versions of Fedora, one of Bodhi, and one of Mandriva. None lasted long.
8. I keep a Knoppix live CD with my work PC for personal access to internet when travelling (usage approved by IT).

Re:Slackware on floppies

[sebt3]

I do run only one distro myself. What the hell are you doing with 4-5 different distro installed at the same time. it sound to be a pain to maintain all that.

For me it have been :
RedHat -> debian testing -> debian SID.

I havent checked a distro in a long while. My debian install is still working nicely as I expect it to run, why would I change ?

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Ramley]

Then Redhat then centos

Exactly the same there, with a short detour into BSD somewhere down the line.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[taiwanjohn]

Windows is a piece of crap, but still much better for a desktop workstation than any Linux (or UNIX) I have come across.

Wait, what? Windows is a piece of crap, but still better than Linux? I think at least one of these words does not mean what you think it means. ;-)

I started with Slackware in '95, and tried various other distros over the years, though I couldn't name them all or tell you the order. RedHat, Debian, Gentoo, CentOS, FreeBSD, SuSE... it's all a hazy blur now... I kept a dual-boot Windows partition around for a while, but used it less and less, and finally stopped using it in the early 2000's. (I still have WinXP in a VirtualBox, just for SlingBox, but hardly ever use it these days.)

At this point, it's hard for me to imagine ever going back to "non-free" software. I've been using FOSS almost exclusively for over 10 years already. In recent years I've settled on the various *buntu distros, depending on which desktop is less "sucky" at any given time.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[bobaferret]

(93/4? thx tommyd)Yggdrasil->(95?)Slackware->(96/97?)Caldera->Redhat->Fedora->CentOS->Scientific

The switch to caldera included an official copy of word perfect... Those were the days, I could actually do my home work on linux. When GIMP came out, I finally got to drop dual booting in to widows, which was in 98 I think, windows free since.

Slackware once cost me $300 dollars to download on a +800 dialup service. 30 hours was a long time to be online back in those days. ...seemed like a good idea at the time..

Re:Slackware on floppies

[mlts]

First distro was SLS. Then Slackware.

I moved to RedHat because the revising of the package manager (rpm) made life a lot easier, especially with GPG signing.

These days, I stick with either RedHat for production stuff with subscriptions or CentOS (with an occassional donation to their cause) for non-production.

I also keep a Knoppix CD around for recovering data, or when travelling.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[gripped]

Desktop: Redhat-> Suse-> Linux from Scratch-> Gentoo-> Kubuntu -> Linux Mint (kde).

Server: Debian >Centos & KVM hypervisor with Ubuntu or Debian images.

Linux from scratch used to be good for learning how Linux works. I have not checked it out for a long time so I don't know if this still holds.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[alta]

I think you must be me. I would have posted the same thing.

The bad thing about it, when I was downloading said 60+ floppies on a modem, I didn't quite have enough disks... so I had to create 1-40, then once I used #1 I recycled it to 41...

The sucky part was the setup didn't tell you that you wouldn't end up using all the disks depending on what you chose to install, so a lot of them were skipped.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[aztracker1]

That's pretty similar to my take... other than specialized distros of BSD or Linux for router/fw or nas solutions... Mint and Debian proper are probably my top 2 in the go to... for servers, I may go for an Ubuntu LTS release... I've been in the Debian based camp since about 2003 or so, prior to that had tried Mandrake, Redhat and SuSE.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[CodeheadUK]

I had a similar start;

Got introduced to Red Hat at college in the late 90s, I installed it at home, but had all manner of problems with getting my dial up modem working with it and gave up.

I switched to Mandrake for a while, but looked elsewhere after the Mandriva split.

I tried SuSE and Gentoo but didn't get on with them. After that I only really used Knoppix to recover stuff from dead Windows boxes until Ubuntu came along. I preferred Kubuntu and used that for quite a while.

Today my website VPS runs on Ubuntu server and I dabble with TurnKey stuff, CentOS and MEPIS for work projects.

I have a bunch of Microsoft qualifications and that's what brings in the cash day to day. However, I'm much happier tinkering with Linux.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[jenningsthecat]

I started with Ubuntu about 5 years ago, but there were some packages that weren't up-to-date enough for me. So I moved to Debian Testing, and have remained there ever since.

Windows is a piece of crap, but still much better for a desktop workstation than any Linux (or UNIX) I have come across.

I miss Windows Explorer - I still haven't found a decent full-featured file manager for Linux, and I've tried most of them. And GUI-based configuration is lacking in Linux. And the mimetypes mess still pisses me off. I'm long past the point where I want to spend time doing stuff TO my computer - I just want to do stuff WITH it

That said, I've recently had to use Windows 7 on my girlfriend's computer, and it makes me tear my hair out. Slow, bloated, prettified, and obtrusive. If Windows was free and Debian with XFCE cost money, I'd buy Debian with XFCE and toss Windows out the window.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Snotnose]

Slackware on floppies ('94), then Yggdrasil for a few releases, then the first release of Red Hat, which I've up until a few months ago when I installed Ubuntu.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Eunuchswear]

slackware, redhat, debian, ubuntu, debian.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[armanox]

Another Slackware start here.

Slackware -> Red Hat -> Debian -> Red Hat -> Slackware -> Ubuntu -> Gentoo -> Fedora/RHEL

Slackware is still in use on several systems mind you. Fedora on laptops, and RHEL at work.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[nurb432]

Most people only run one. Perhaps multiple installs, but why bother with futzing with multiple versions.

Tho i only run FreeBSD now, even before i switched back i only ran 1 Linux distribution at a time.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[fatphil]

Yours is most similar to mine, of those I've seen.

93-94 - slackware, as a user rather than sysadmin.
95-98 - transitioned towards redhat, but still played with slackware and others
98-99 - transitioned towards debian. Was my primary OS by this stage.
99-2000 - SuSE (better support for the O2 video card on my DEC Alpha)
00-12 - debian stable

Where's the ->ubuntu->debian bit, you may ask? Well there was an accidental 09-10 on Ubuntu on one machine which I regretted very very quickly, but it was up and running on my work machine, and didn't have time for a wipe and a reinstall of everything under debian, so whilst it counts as 2 years of Ubuntu, I wish it hadn't existed at all in my history.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Emetophobe]

I started with Slackware, moved on to Mandrake a few years later, then Ubuntu for a few years, now I use Debian.

My very first experience with linux was around 1995 or 1996. It was somewhat comical as I ended up getting hacked within minutes of installing Slackware for the first time. Back then Slackware had a boot disk and a root disk that were used to install it. I assumed that the root disk was related to the root account. I thought it was some type of security measure, like a hardware dongle, where you had to have the root disk inserted in the machine in order to login as root.

Back then Slackware had telnet enabled by default, and they didn't prompt you to enter a root password during or after installation. I made the mistake of logging on IRC thinking I was okay (I had the root disk inserted after all!). Next thing I know my console is getting flooded with hard drive errors. It turns out someone telneted into my password-less root account and did a "rm -rf".

I was 13 at the time but it was a good learning experience. After that initial mistake I learned to disable telnet and setup a root password.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[X10]

Slackware, Redhat, Debian, Ubuntu.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[danomac]

I'll limit my focus to desktop - I don't use Windows at home, unless I can't get a game to run under Wine (or just couldn't be bothered to try.)

Redhat -> Debian -> Redhat -> SuSE -> gentoo -> Redhat -> gentoo -> mandrake -> gentoo -> ubuntu -> gentoo -> kubuntu -> gentoo

I always return to gentoo for the package manager's flexibility. If I want to get a bleeding edge copy of something, I can install it from the package manager with certain supports built in, then remove it and build the bleeding copy from git or svn.

Yes, it's more work to maintain. But no matter how many times I've tried to switch away from gentoo, I always come back, usually because of the package manager I've attempted to switch to. It just seems there's no easy way to run git/svn software while maintaining dependencies. Hell, gentoo's package manager actually has git/svn copies in the repo that you can tell it to install; it'll grab the right dependencies, then connect to the bleeding edge repository, do a checkout/update, and build. I haven't seen any other package manager even attempt to do this. Whoever thought up the USE-flag system (used to trigger --configure options at build time) is a genius, and it's just so flexible it's not even describable. There are even ways to trigger global support for packages or just enable them for a single package, and it will drag in the dependencies as needed. Even if you need to patch something, it's built into the package manager, you create a directory that mimics the repo and place patches in it - the package manager will notice and automatically apply them before build time.

Every distro does have its own quirks and problems, though - gentoo is no exception to this.

I've been using gentoo since 2003, and every time I try to switch to something else, I always switch back for the flexibility of the package manager. Every. Single. Time.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Fallingcow]

- Redhat (briefly)
- Mandrake
- Debian (briefly)
- Gentoo
- Ubuntu
- Fuck Linux on the desktop, whatever's easiest to stick in VirtualBox on Windows in case I need to do real work there rather than just play games. OSX when actual money is involved. Linux on the server. I don't really give a damn which distro.

It's been a long journey, from confusion to love to eventual hate and resentment.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[causality]

Slackware covers all your needs...

Ran sw first in the mid 90's... ran away for quite a few years... then landed on Debian about 2006 or so... then Ubuntu, and now on Mint for the last 2 years. See, its not about increasing complexity, but less...

I've been using Gentoo on my desktop system for years now because I love to customize.

When I got a netbook, I put Mint on it. This replaced the Windows 7 Starter with which it came. For Windows, Win7 was pretty good and I didn't have too many complaints, but I'm not fond of Windows. I'm especially not fond of no central package manager, the constant threat of malware, and the general difficulty of scripting/automation when compared to *nix.

So I went with Mint. It was a more appropriate choice for a more modest computer, and it just seemed to be a very clean, solid distro. It doesn't have the strange quirks (usually audio-related) and hiccups that I've experienced more than once on vanilla Ubuntu/Kubuntu. The defaults were reasonable and many of them didn't need changing. The repositories have all the software I wanted, which is notable when you're used to the large number of ebuilds Gentoo provides. It was also most convenient that installing proprietary codecs was not the minor hassle it can be on most other Debian-derived distros.

Prior to Gentoo I have also tried Red Hat (years and years ago), Slackware, and Debian. I've also set up friends with Fedora and OpenSuse. Mint remains one of the best binary distros I have ever had the pleasure of using. I would recommend it to anyone who's after a nice desktop experience.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[camperdave]

You need to buy a gun. Then you'll have a real gauge on how big your cock is.

So... you measure how much space between the hammer and the percussion cap?

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Lodragandraoidh]

Mine looks very similar to yours - mostly the order:

Slackware on CD
Yellow Dog
Mandrake
Redhat
Debian
Slackware
Ubuntu
Slackware
Debian + Slackware

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Shadow Labs]

Personal use:
Mandrake 8.0 --> SuSE 9.1 --> Red Hat 8.0 --> Red Hat 9 --> Fedora Core 1 --> Slackware [multiple versions] --> Ubuntu [multiple versions]

Professional use:
Slackware --> OpenSUSE --> Ubuntu --> Red Hat Enterprise Linux --> CentOS

Re:Slackware on floppies

[michael_cain]

Slackware on Floppies (Oh so many floppies)

Manchester Computer Center Interim Linux, on remarkably few floppies.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Lodragandraoidh]

Is this a reverse troll? I'm not sure how to respond to this...

Re:Slackware on floppies

[sootman]

Everyone, LISTEN TO ICEBIKE!

DO NOT answer the OP's question.

DO NOT enjoy a nice communal stroll down memory lane.

Icebike has kindly taken a few minutes of his life to tell us all that we should not pleasantly waste a few minutes of our own. LISTEN TO HIM! He knows better than you do how you should spend your time, and he has been kind enough to expose our ignorance and show us the error of our ways.

THANK YOU, ICEBIKE!

(Note: at this time, properly calibrated sarcasm detectors should look like the first 10 minutes of a Michael Bay film.)

Re:Slackware on floppies

[icebike]

Its a preemptive troll I suppose, in an (apparently futile) attempt to head off the inevitable flood of "me-too" posts of useless information.
It was bound to fail of course, with over 580 postings already (as of this writing), each of them useless, self congradulatory, feel-good posts and the vast majority to be read by nobody. Ever.

I wager the thread hits a thousand posts, of which the only person reading most of them will have been the author.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[O'Nazareth]

"you don't need any other distro". In the case of Slackware, "other" is a word too many in your sentence.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[wytcld]

Slackware (floppies) > Redhat > Knoppix > Gentoo > Ubuntu & Debian & CentOS & a few specialty recovery/diagnostic/security distros

Re:Slackware on floppies

[rnturn]

"What the hell are you doing with 4-5 different distro installed at the same time. it sound to be a pain to maintain all that."

Exactly. Though I do have two running on systems now. But since one of them is really old, I don't have any hassle with updates. (Until I get around to replacing that system. Then I'll be down to a single distribution.)

Anyway...

Slackware -> RedHat -> SuSE -> OpenSUSE

Prior to that is was Coherent -> Consensys SVR4.2

And prior to that it was... wait... I'm getting off-topic now.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[meam]

Server: Slackware on 15 floppies (kernel 0.99pl13) -> Still use Slackware right now after almost 20 years.
Notebook: Slackware 12.0 -> Ubuntu

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Tastecicles]

oh, Slack4DOS, forgot to add that to my list... Linux on a FAT12 filesystem. Clunky, but it worked(!)

Re:Slackware on floppies

[dokebi]

I agree.

I dabbled with Debian 2.1. I used Windows, mostly, but kept trying to learn unix with it.

Then I found a nice book on FreeBSD (Greg Lehey) which taught me a lot about unix. So I ran FreeBSD on a home server from 3 - 6 series. I dabbled with Debian, loved the packaging system, but still couldn't give up Windows.

Then I got tired of build-world-ing on FreeBSD, and tried Ubuntu around 5.x. It had everything I needed, so I used that until Ubuntu 10.x. Ran it everywhere.

Then Unutty came about. It was so awful I tried Windows. And it was pretty good! I missed apt-get, but it was fine for home use, and at work I used Ubuntu 10.04 (gnome 2) until mid 2012. I hated Ubuntu 11 and 12 with a passion, until I tried Kubuntu 12. Ah, finally, a sane desktop system that doesn't hide my scroll bars.

So now I use Kubuntu for work/coding, Windows for home stuff, and Debian for servers.

life is good.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[BobNET]

Slackware. That is all.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Eggplant62]

Slackware 2.1 on flops, then RedHat, then Mandrake, then Ubuntu, now mixing up Mint and Ubuntu for desktop/server.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Requiem18th]

I didn't make it to the floppy linux scene:
  * knoppix
  * slackware
  * ubuntu>

Then short trials of:
  * puppy linux
  * openSuse
  * dream linux
  * debian
  * mandriva
  * MEPIS

And finally settled down on Linux Mint for the past 3 years. This while running moblin now meego on a netbook.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[unixisc]

For me, an OS is the tool I use to manage my computer. So I typically don't deal w/ it via virtual machines. If I want an OS, I'll give it my computer, and hopefully, have no problems w/ it. But if I do, I wouldn't bother - there are several others that I can use. At any rate, a virtual machine wouldn't tell me whether the OS itself would work on my computer or not, since as a VM, it's using the drivers of the host OS, whereas in reality, it may not have all the drivers I need.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[FuegoFuerte]

Yup... tried many, many others back in the day, starting with some debian floppy, going to a couple they had at Costco, finally around 2000-2001 timeframe discovered Slack and haven't looked back. Pretty much all my home hardware runs on it (other than routers). Funny thing, several months back I had to do some maintenance on our NTP devices at work (due to hardware failures, one lost the CDMA radio and the other froze up, probably due to bad RAM or the old clunker 486 CPU it uses), and found out they were running Slack too.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[gruntkowski]

It is a quesiton often askes to guatar players, what is the worlds hardest cord.

That question has been long answered: the one where your pinky says 'snap'.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[mathew7]

Me too.
Slackware, Redhat 6.? to 9.0, debian, ubuntu 8.?? + .... , Now debian+xubuntu (as in many systems with one of them).
Also I have experimented with LFS+gentoo (the 1st versions...including cross-compiling fo my Pentium with MMX laptop).

Re:Slackware on floppies

[kuiken]

First there was slackware
Then I used SuSE for home useage and at work we used redhat.
I switched to freeBSD/openBSD for a while at home
then I used mainly LFS en aLFS but found it a bit to labour intensive so i switched to gentoo and centOs

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Eunuchswear]

You have better memory than me - can't put dates on my tries.

Everything before the current Debian usage was workstations (my servers were all Unix (Microport SVR3.0, ISC SVR3.2, SCO SVR3.2 (ugh), Novell UnixWare, SCO UnixWare).

The move from Debian to Ubuntu was because it seemed a better workstation system, more effort on prettiness.

The move from Ubuntu to Debian was to get a better server platform, but I also started using Debian on workstations, first stable, then testing and finaly the leap to Sid. Never regretted it, it's just so much less hassle.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Now did you order the CDROM like I did (I think I still have it some where I should find it show off my geek cred) or do the floppy download? I had tried to download the army of floppies but AOL would get disconnected all the time so it probably took less time to order the CDROM (I think it was like $5) and wait for it to arrive in the mail than to download. I was running on what was originally a 486dx 66 with 8mb of ram that eventually became a P133 (overdirve chip) with 32mb ram. Since then I have bounced from one distro to another usually going back to Slackware between other distros. I have run Slackware, Red Hat, Suse, CentOS, RHEL, Fedora, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Ubuntu but seem to always come back to Slackware. Right now at work I am working with RHEL (as well as AIX and Solaris), but at home am have been running Slackware consistently for several years now that Patrick finally decided that there really should be an official Slackware AMD64 bit version

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I think it is more of the right tool for the job granted there are some personal preferences involved. At home I do a lot of GIS/Cartography stuff and there I find that windows just isn't up to snuff and the Ubuntu is kind of a pain with simplistic ways. I know there are people on OS X doing what I am doing (so many tutorials show OS X screen shots) that I could probably get by with ease on OS X but haven't plunked down the extra money for a Mac.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[rockstarjames]

You need to buy a gun. Then you'll have a real gauge on how big your cock is.

You would think a ruler would be sufficient for this.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[celtic_hackr]

Slackware from a CD in a Book
Redhat
Mandrake
Mandrake, Official

At this point I built my first webserver.

Desktop: Server:
Redhat Redhat Ent.
Debian
LFS
Gentoo

To be continued, as I have too many junk characters?

Re:Slackware on floppies

[celtic_hackr]

Mandrake/Mandriva
SuSE
SuSE Ent.

Desktop: Server:
Knoppix Debian (stable)
Mepis

At this point I helped form a company
Corel This distro had a lot of potential
Mandrake
Mint
Mepis

to be continued... ditto

Re:Slackware on floppies

[celtic_hackr]

Mepis/Ubuntu [ One for me and one for my wife]
Mepis/Mint

to be continued...

Re:Slackware on floppies

[celtic_hackr]

Today the makeup is:
Desktop: Server:
Mint Debian

and also

Home Automation: RasPi: Consumer Devices:
LinuxMCE Raspbian/Android Android

My main issue now is KDE + Nepomuk. I don't want Nepomuk, but it's not removable. Hence I'll be migrating at some point to LXDE+Compiz, which might mean
a shift to Arch or some other distro. My main desktop has dual boot, with the "stable" desktop [Mint], and the currently evaluating "beta" desktop [currently still has the Mepis, "old stable", installed]. This is a required setup, as the main desktop also runs my business.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[celtic_hackr]

So, I guess, trying to make a five column display is where my junk characters came from. Would have been nice to have a f***ing link somewhere to figure it out. I originally thought it was indicating some of my distros were retail version. But nooooo. Stupid /. interface. Go ahead mod this down to -1 flamebait. Y'all know the interface sucks. try switching from html to text while doing a post. Why the f**k do you include an options button in the edit screen if you're just going to wipe the edit box? Where the hell's my cluestick, someone need to be hit with it?

Re:Slackware on floppies

[TemporalBeing]

Well, I got introduced to Linux via Slackware on several LS-120's; but never installed it as it was too daunting at the time; but I quickly purchased SuSe 6 (back in 1999) and later installed that. Not being quite the fan of SuSe (even then) I later tried RedHat and Mandrake. Dual booting never really worked too well for me, so I didn't truely commit to Linux until I got another computer to use for a server - initially a Sun IPC (circa 1991) that I got NetBSD on and switched to Red Hat (the only distro to still support it); and later got an Intel P90 that I loaded up with Slackware - only, I did Slackware for the initial install and then upgraded everything bit by bit using vanilla sources. My desktop eventually converted to Slackware as well. I had a laptop for a while running Debian. I've since moved to Gentoo as it manages the sources for me; and my work computers are all Kubuntu. I usually try to keep servers to Debian, and I've lately tried out Arch under a VM (I like rolling distros). My home server will likely move to Debian, and my personal laptops might switch to Kubuntu - mostly due to lack of time to keep running Gentoo (which I really do prefer).

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Slashdot Parent]

Slackware (yes, on floppies) -> Debian & Gentoo -> Ubuntu

Switch from Slackware to Debian was for APT. Slackware did not, to my knowledge, have any decent way to handle package upgrades.

Gentoo entered the mix when I made a MythTV setup.

Since then, I've used Ubuntu because they support Amazon EC2 so well (published images, cloud-init, etc.), and all of my Linux machines are now EC2 instances.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[tommasorepetti]

Mine has gone Fedora... then more Fedora... then more Fedora. I am young enough for this to have been possible. I tried Ubuntu from the Live CD at first to see what all the noise was about, but they put the close window button on the wrong side... if I wanted a Mac, I would have just stuck with it. Never looked back.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[nobaloney]

Same for me for servers.

For desktops/laptops: early versions of Mandrake, Mandriva, Kubuntu, OpenSuse, Kubuntu, all in that order. Still looking though for a decent desktop experience.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[TWX]

I started with Slackware on CD... 2.0.0 kernel, distributed in '96.

Then Redhat 5.1 and 5.2, then SuSE, then Debian, where I've been for many, many years since.

I still have a soft spot for slack though...

Re:Slackware on floppies

[WillDraven]

Same here. I went Slackware -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Midnight_Falcon]

I must confess that I also, ordered the CDs -- I believe it was from linuxiso and waited a few days -- but that was faster than downloading it which was uber-unreliable on dialup and would have required a solid connection for a week.

I also must've wiped the hard drive at least a few times and lost a bunch of data learning how to partition manually via fdisk etc to be able to install it.

I must also confess that I was 11 years old at the time, and my parents didn't allow me to keep the computer on overnight..how embarrassing but true...

I think it was running on a 486DX as well. Nice, you had the DX too -- with the floating point co processor!

These days I'm a systems architect (read: glorified sysadmin), and I prefer Mac OS X as a desktop environment in all honesty to Ubuntu, Fedora etc because it runs everything I need it to, and allows me native UNIX tools and command line shell for me to do real work in.

For my servers, I largely use CentOS. Main reason being because it is well documented, supported and packages maintained to be extremely stable. I am definitely a fan of yum package management -- but for a beginner, knowing the structure of a Makefile, what gcc is, what compiling is, how it works, how libraries are referenced, yadda yadda, really adds to your total understanding of the platform and allows you to troubleshoot things better rather than relying on google (or being able to add/modify what you read on google to suit your needs).

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Bob the Super Hamste]

The 486DX @ 66mhz with 8MB of ram, a 28.8 modem, a Sound Blaster 16, 4x CDROM, and Windows 3.1/DOS 6.2 or 6.22 and you were at the top of the pile for computing power back then (just before the first Pentiums came out, man do I feel old now). I mean you could run Syndicate Wars at the highest settings, as well as X-Wing and Tie Fighter, Doom and all the other games that were out. I was 17 at the time and bought that box so I would have something to do my school work on and to take off to college.

In a professional setting I would agree that something like RHEL, or CentOS would be better as there is good documentation and support, but Slackware is rock solid and for what I do at home and seems to be far easier to accomplish what I want. It isn't remotely bleeding edge but then it doesn't make me feel like punching my monitor when trying to compile or install GIS tools like Ubuntu did. Toss in that there are a few libraries that I will do a targeted compile on for my machine so that things run faster and something like Slackware (possibly Gentoo) is a better choice. I was surprised by the speed up of the GIS programs when recompiling the libraries they used as it was noticeable. From what I have seen a number of the GIS tools I use run quite well on Macs but I have never plunked down the extra money to get one.

Re:Slackware on floppies

[Chris Hodges]

I miss Windows Explorer - I still haven't found a decent full-featured file manager for Linux, and I've tried most of them.

Opposite here - I miss a tabbed view when I use windows explorer (as a mainly GUI user on both) In answer to the original question (in the unlikely event that anyone cares). OpenSUSE (dual boot with win98) -> Ubuntu (dua boot with XP) -> XUbuntu (thanks to unity) + Ubuntu Natty (Classic Mode, netbook)

Re:Slackware on floppies

[crutchy]

debian covers all your needs - you don't need any other distro

ftfy

Re:Slackware on floppies

[crutchy]

that's descriminatory and ruler-ist

show a little more respect for rulers of the smaller variety, including those manufactured with the aid of an electron tunneling microscope

Re:Slackware on floppies

[crutchy]

you're game mentioning osx

Re:Slackware on floppies

[crutchy]

mine is something like "debian stable"... oh crap stupid nvidia... "debian testing"... (some time passes)... "debian stable"... (upgrades pyewta)... (nvidia, fuck you!)... "debian testing"... (why the fuck do i keep buying nvidia cards?)... (it's that damn eye guddammit... sooo prrrrty)

Re:Slackware on floppies

[crutchy]

you forgot "DO as I say, NOT as I do"

Re:Slackware on floppies

[DanFluidMind]

Also started with Slackware on floppies, then RedHat, then Debian, then FreeBSD for many years, then SuSE, then finally Ubuntu, which is where I've stayed for several years now.

Here's mine

[Anonymous Coward]

DOS
windows 3.1
windows 3.11
windows 95
slackware linux
windows 98
other linuxes
windows xp

stilll on xp...

75 floppy disks

[yagu]

Was it slackware? Can't remember for sure.

Anyway, I remember downloading the dist, in "sections" (e.g., X11), each spanning a number of floppy disks with a grand total of 70+ floppies. Then from there I installed linux. If all went well, it usually took about a day to get it up and running, start (download) to finish (first full boot). (Keep in mind, this was in the day of ADSL.) Horrible.

These days, I grab random different ones I've seen recent reviews for and download and boot just for fun. Typically I just download the iso's and point a virtual CD drive from vmware or some virtual pc and boot and install. Much nicer, usually less than an hour.

Faves: Suse, Mandrake->Mandriva, Knoppixware (to save friends and family lost corrupted Windows data), Ubuntu (3 years ago, not today). Mint.

Re:75 floppy disks

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounded like slackware right up to the point where you said back in the days of ADSL.

I was installing slackware on floppies downloaded via 14.4k modems in the very early 90s.

ADSL didn't come out until the very late 90s, and floppies were a damn near dead medium by that point.

Re:75 floppy disks

[yagu]

my memory on when I first got adsl may be fuzzy. It well could have been dialup... even worse! :-)

Re:75 floppy disks

[Pinkfud]

My first was Slackware on a CD that came in a manual called "Using Linux". Then I tried Mandrake, Ubuntu and various "light" distros like Puppy Linux. Then I spent a while switching between FreeBSD and OpenBSD, then went to Debian, and now I'm back to FreeBSD. And I hereby declare FreeBSD the winner for my needs.

Re:75 floppy disks

[jellomizer]

The trick was to down load the following groups.
Core, Networking.

Install those 2 groups from floppy.

Then run Slackware and use networking to dial in and then download the Games

Then the rest.

While they are downling and installing. You play lastroids.

Re:75 floppy disks

[Pinkfud]

I should clarify that I use my *NIX boxes as network file servers, not workstations. FreeBSD offers me the best performance and easiest setup in a mixed environment, plus they run reliably unattended for months on end and have good security that is not a pain to manage.

Re:75 floppy disks

[Chris Mattern]

The trick was to down load the following groups.
Core, Networking.

Install those 2 groups from floppy.

Then run Slackware and use networking to dial in and then download the Games

That worked great--if you had a connection to the Internet. In Slackware's heyday, not a lot of people did.

Re:75 floppy disks

[vlm]

Was it slackware? Can't remember for sure. ...
Anyway, I remember downloading the dist, in "sections" (e.g., X11), each spanning a number of floppy disks with a grand total of 70+ floppies. ...
If all went well, it usually took about a day to get it up and running, start (download) to finish (first full boot) ....
(Keep in mind, this was in the day of ADSL.) Horrible.

Well before ADSL (well, at least around here, although we had ISDN), we had 28.8 modems and BBSes like ExecPC and non-commercial BBSes too.

The distro I think you're talking about is SLS Softlanding Linux solutions or something like that?

The sets were, as I recall:
Set A booted and did not a heck of a lot more. You downloaded this to see if your mitsumi non-ide cdrom would even work, hardware compat check.
Set B gave you a basic CLI install
Set C gave you the compilers. GCC in the first version and G++ and G77 and all that in later versions.
Set K was the kernel source. 4 megs on a 386dx40 meant about 4 hours compile time. Very non-linear decrease, I put in 4 256 K simms to get 5 megs and suddenly a compile took less than one episode of Star Trek TNG
Set X was x windows as you list

This was all circa summer of 1993. I felt like a noob because there were rich kids who had 386s who had been fooling around with Linus's kernel since 1991 or 92 (don't remember) so I was "late to the party".

It did NOT take all day to get working. It took more than all day to download at 28.8k but once downloaded and rawrite.exe images written to the floppies, install was as fast as you could shovel the floppies into the drive and read them. I would be surprised if it took more than an hour of floppy feeding to install all the disks.

It was not 75 disks, the very first SLS was like one box of 10 3.5 inch floppies and the SLS that I used most of the time was about about 20 disks. Rapidly I started buying cdroms, much more convenient to have it all on one cd.

Eventually around Debian 1.2 or so I switched to Debian. Back when ALL of debian fit on a cd, or two, or four, I would stick the cdroms into PCs under my control and NFS export them to all the machines under my control, almost as convenient as apt-get over the internet is now.

Re:75 floppy disks

[aztracker1]

I remember a friend of mine rotating about 3 floppies out of one machine, while downloading the rest, and installing on the final destination... this was arount 1996-97 or so.

Re:75 floppy disks

[Holi]

Dial up, I monopolized our phone for a week getting my x-server up and running with gnome.

Re:75 floppy disks

[akgooseman]

The trick was to down load the following groups. Core, Networking.

Install those 2 groups from floppy.

Then run Slackware and use networking to dial in and then download the Games

That worked great--if you had a connection to the Internet. In Slackware's heyday, not a lot of people did.

Waddya mean by that? Slackware is still in its heyday!

Re:75 floppy disks

[mikael_j]

I don't know the current state of Slackware but I know that in the past Slackware had various sets of floppies that could be downloaded. I mainly remember because I once downloaded and installed the base system plus networking bits over modem. This was for Slackware 3.x (don't remember the minor version but they all came out around 1996 - 1998.

It's amazing how much easier it is to install your average Linux distro these days, a few seconds to download a 100+ MB install ISO, throw it on a single USB stick (or make it available for PXE booting) and install. Back in those days formatting your disks tended to take less time than the actual install (a lot less if you installed from floppies)...

O Hai

[binarylarry]

Gentoo->Debian->Ubuntu->Arch->Ubuntu FTW

Re:O Hai

[dirtypoole]

started out with Gentoo?! Hardcore bro. HARDcore.

Re:O Hai

[binarylarry]

I was funrollooping the fuck out of that shit, bro.

Re:O Hai

[Gripp]

When I decided to learn linux I knew no better; and started with gentoo. Mind you, they lacked an installer at the time, and I decided to start from boot strap. Again, I knew no better. But jesus did I learn about linux and computers in general. Gentoo has (had?) one of the most amazing communities I've ever encountered. Later on I switched to ubuntu, and played around with various flavors like knoppix and mint. But these days I pretty much stick with centos - and prefer OSX merely for bash.

Re:O Hai

[Skraut]

Same here. Took me nearly a month to get it up and running the first time, and learned so much in that month. The Gentoo community was awesome to noob's

Re:O Hai

[TheCarp]

I never played with it.... but I shared an office with a guy who did. He was the new guy, brought in to build a big cluster for high performance computing, his specialty....and he insisted on gentoo.

He came in, and I watched him build his system...and build his system, I swear it was 3 days before he had X running! and...not due to problems or incompetence, or anything, he was a strong unix admin, it just....took that fucking long to compile everything... ... of course... all the while I was poking jabs at his need to turn on all the optomistation flags and compile everything to eek out that last bit of performance from ls :)

Re:O Hai

[DMUTPeregrine]

As primary:
Mandrake -> Slackware -> Gentoo -> Kubuntu -> LMDE (Minty Debian)
OpenBSD on the firewall/router box the whole time.
Secondary, generally just to try, no particular order:
LFS
Ubuntu
Red Hat
CentOS
Fedora
Knoppix, various live CDs
SUSE

I definitely like Debian package management the best..

Re:O Hai

[causality]

I was funrollooping the fuck out of that shit, bro.

Haha. Ricer!

Re:O Hai

[Shinobi]

3 days to get X? Nah. Even on a P3 550MHz with 192MiB RAM you would have that within a day.... Now, if you wanted KDE+OpenOffice, THEN your machine would spend days....

Of course, during a Unix admin course I took, we were two people running Gentoo, and a debhead kept teasing us for our recompiling..

Then he tried to upgrade his Debian system to the brand spanking new 2.6 kernel that had just been released, and found that his system didn't quite work, so he had to compile a lot of crap, without portage/emerge to help him with it.... Ooooh the merciless revenge teasing from us Gentoo users was sooo sweet.... followed up by his "shut up" "shut the fuck up" "It's not funny you dicks" "piss off!"

Re:O Hai

[causality]

When I decided to learn linux I knew no better; and started with gentoo. Mind you, they lacked an installer at the time, and I decided to start from boot strap. Again, I knew no better. But jesus did I learn about linux and computers in general. Gentoo has (had?) one of the most amazing communities I've ever encountered. Later on I switched to ubuntu, and played around with various flavors like knoppix and mint. But these days I pretty much stick with centos - and prefer OSX merely for bash.

I sometimes search and read through the Gentoo forums even when the system in question is another distro. If you find your answer there, you will actually understand the issue and be able to adapt it to whatever other distro you're using.

When I discovered Gentoo some years ago, I knew I wanted to keep it.

With your installation experience, you may agree that what they once said about Slackware is true of Gentoo. "If you use another distro, you will learn that distro. If you use Gentoo, you will learn Linux."

Re:O Hai

[loonycyborg]

But jesus did I learn about linux and computers in general.

I've started with gentoo for this reason exactly. And then stuck with it. For some reason building everything from source seems to be a killer feature to me :P

Re:O Hai

[binarylarry]

I imagine these days it's better due to the uber multicore processors in every machine you come across.

Re:O Hai

[Bob the Super Hamste]

You will still learn Linux with Slackware but won't learn the ins and outs of compiling the thing. I have thought about trying Gentoo to delve even further but playing with the OS at that level doesn't do it for me. Maybe with my next computer I will give it a try.

Re:O Hai

[Gripp]

well, AFAIK they no longer provide support for installing from boot strap. They have an installer and pretty much insist that you use it. I would imagine you could probably find the old docs and files, but getting people to help you (and you WILL need help) may be challenging.

Began with Ubuntu

[rbprbp]

Ubuntu (5.04 to 6.06 - when Ubuntu 6.06 came out I got rid of Windows) -> openSUSE (2006 - 2008) -> Arch (2008 - now). Also had brief attempts with Fedora/openSUSE/Slackware, but always would return to Arch after a while.

Journey from Slackware to Kubunto

[jlathrop]

Slackware (floppies) -> RedHat -> Gentoo -> Kubuntu

Re:Journey from Slackware to Kubunto

[mpicker0]

Almost the same: Slackware (floppies) -> RedHat -> Gentoo -> Xubuntu

And my reasons for moving:

• Slackware -> RedHat: RedHat worked out-of-the-box at the time I needed it; no manual Modeline configurations needed to get X running.
• RedHat -> Gentoo: I needed the flexibility of Gentoo to run on multiple architectures (SPARC, PowerPC)
• Gentoo -> Xubuntu: Eventually, I got tired of having to manage every detail of the software configuration, not to mention waiting for compiles to complete. I just wanted to get stuff done.

My order

[Max Threshold]

Red Hat -> Mandrake -> Linux From Scratch -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Mint.

I left Linux for OS X...

[drcagn]

Mandrake -> Red Hat -> Xandros -> Gentoo -> OS X...

I love Linux and all, but the mainstream support of OS X combined with UNIX under the hood made the Mac the best platform for me. Sure, it's much more expensive, but I don't mind the additional money... after all, I am on my computer all the time anyway. I might as well spend the cash for the one I like best.

Re:I left Linux for OS X...

[MikeDataLink]

I wish I had mod points to Mod you up.

+1 So true

I too went from Windows to Linux to OSX. Windows just sucked (Vista). Linux had little to mainstream support. OSX was the solid choice. Been on Mac OSX since Tiger.

Re:I left Linux for OS X...

[Anonymous Coward]

avoiding OS X is not about money, its about morality. apparently you have no scruples.

Re:I left Linux for OS X...

[marcello_dl]

> Scorta futuere amo!
Mihi quoque placet mater tua.

Re:I left Linux for OS X...

[retchdog]

or maybe he has things to get done and doesn't want to fret about losing sound or wifi or even a functional desktop, with every software update.

i don't see how simply using free software is morally superior. i can see a moral argument for only developing free software, but that can be done on mac os x as well.

Re:I left Linux for OS X...

[GNious]

Win98 -> RedHat -> Debian -> OSX -> Kubuntu -> OSX

Re:I left Linux for OS X...

[MeNeXT]

Left? Never left, just added on.... Servers FreeBSD, OpenBSD used to install from one floppy with FTP/DSL. Desktop is mostly OS X but I also have Ubuntu (drag and drop straight from the file manager onto a server halfway around the world with ssh/sftp. The cloud made easy.) Legacy equipment support amazing 12year old scanner runs as new.

No need to leave. The freedom cannot be matched.

Learning order that I would recommend Linux > Windows > OS X > FreeBSD one after the other and keep them ALL.

Linux before windows because some thing windows does it seems like magic to a new user due to the fact that it is hidden deep under many layers once you understand these basics they are the same on all platforms. OS X when used with standards is amazing. When you lock your stuff up in a garden I feel it's hard to move you off. Get rid of iTunes, iCloud, iPhoto or any iXXXX it's a selfish way to enjoy your files and it limits how you share your stuff. It gets in the way.

I Love computers, just saying...

Re:I left Linux for OS X...

[retchdog]

fair enough. although i use a macbook pro, that is one of the reasons i will never buy an iphone, and probably not an ipad. i'll also never buy apple hardware again, if they ever move to something iOS-like on their computers.

maybe it's a moral compromise (though i can't see exactly how), but anyway the utilitarian gain for myself is substantial enough to warrant it.

Re:I left Linux for OS X...

[thetoadwarrior]

How cute, someone who thinks one corporation is worse than the others.

Re:I left Linux for OS X...

[nazsco]

That's the most dumb argument i've ever heard:

case A: guys get his 5yr old notebook, install linux, wants everything to work

case B: guys spends $9,000 on the base mode of a new mac book, osx just works.

give me a break! how about this experiement:

case C: guys get his 5yr old notebook, install osx... can't even start installer.

case D: guys spends $2,000 on the latest thinkpad T series, install linux, linux just works. and does the same as the 9k macbook

Re:I left Linux for OS X...

[Lodragandraoidh]

What is the moral imperative here?

If you are too scrupulous there won't be any technology that you'll touch...or are you selective about what you consider moral and immoral in a corporate context to justify your technology selections?

Re:I left Linux for OS X...

[retchdog]

i barely have any idea what the fuck you're saying.

the point is that linux doesn't always "just work," even on new hardware, although it comes very close in some cases. i know; i ran ubuntu on an x61s for years. it worked great, except for when it didn't.

like i said, if apple ever screws up OS X by turning it into iOS, i will, sadly, have to go back to that configuration.

Re:I left Linux for OS X...

[sootman]

I started using Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 7.5.5 in 1995. First saw, heard of, and used Linux in 96/97. Got my first Linux system in early 1998. I never got into it heavily for full-time desktop use, but I checked it out repeatedly over the years, starting with

- RedHat 5.1 or 5.2, because RH had the reputation of being the easiest to install and use at the time. Came in a phonebook-sized tome from Que that also included Slackware and a third distro (I forget which)

- Around 1999/2000, Caldera was the new hotness. 2.2 and 2.3, I think. Installed nicely on a Compaq 5280, with color, sound, and networking with PCMCIA cards. (And before they got bought by SCO.) But it wasn't enough to pull me away from Windows 2000 on the desktop, which ran like a Swiss watch and had all the apps I actually used for work from MS and Adobe.

- Then back to Red Hat for 7.x

- Next up on the easy-to-use list was Knoppix.

- Then I didn't do much for a while but I played with Ubuntu versions 5-9.

And then XP started getting worse and worse and OS X started getting better and better and now it's all I use. (Other than for testing and servers.)

Re:I left Linux for OS X...

[oursland]

Many distributions of Linux do not have a corporation backing them. With that in mind, Apple is far less ethical than, say, Debian.

Re:I left Linux for OS X...

[drcagn]

I loved Gentoo, and in fact, I used it for longer than any of the other distros. But I didn't switch to OS X because I couldn't figure it out. Once I had everything configured to my liking, which, of course, takes quite a while on Gentoo, I didn't have a problem with the OS or how it performed on my system.

The problem was that I couldn't go to a store and buy anything. Hardware would only work if it's an extremely common type of hardware with standard drivers.

Buy a new wireless headset? The software to make it work (beyond just playing audio) is Win/Mac only.
I bought an iPhone before Android even existed. Software is Win/Mac only.
I don't like GIMP. I much prefer PhotoShop. Win/Mac only.
I like watching Netflix on my laptop. Win/Mac only.
I bought a Jawbone bluetooth for my phone. I can only configure it and change settings with Win/Mac software.
Something new, like Spotify comes out? Win/Mac only (although they have an unsupported Linux client nowadays)

It's random things like that that turned me off from Linux over time.

(And before anyone says it, using Windows in a VM would defeat the purpose, IMHO. And WINE, while nice, isn't foolproof either).

Re:I left Linux for OS X...

[madboson]

Less morality and more ethics, and a pretty unimportant ethic in the grand scheme of things.

Re:I left Linux for OS X...

[thoth]

Mandrake -> Red Hat -> Xandros -> Gentoo -> OS X...

I went Slackware -> (gap of many years) -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu -> Debian -> Fedora

I'm not counting Mint or Arch or many other ones I dabbled in (i.e. didn't run for a few months).

I love Linux and all, but the mainstream support of OS X combined with UNIX under the hood made the Mac the best platform for me.

Similar thing here... I like Linux and all, but maintaining my home IT infrastructure isn't my hobby (any more). I want to do stuff (i.e. software development) with my home computers and not tweak and fiddle with them all the time. And I got tired of dealing with graphics card issues, wireless networking issues, etc. These days my linux is all inside VMs.

Re:I left Linux for OS X...

[unixisc]

This is pretty much correct. Except for the FSF and the 'Libre-Linux' crowd, OS-X gives one everything that FBSD does, most of the things that Linux does, and so in terms of functionality, there is little that one can't do on OS-X that one can do under Linux or BSD. So money is pretty much the only reason not to go for it. Those talking about Apple's scruples - Apple is by no means the only company in the world whose business practices ain't hated by some people.

Re:I left Linux for OS X...

[Archenoth]

Interesting, I wonder the correlation between Gentoo and OS X is? They are polar opposites.

I went
OS X -> Gentoo -> Arch -> Ubuntu -> Mint

Gentoo was just fun though since it was installed on an iBook (Old-style Macbook) with an INCREDIBLY FAST 500MHz PPC processor of raw power! (Because OS X broke)

debian

[blop]

slackware -> redhat -> debian -> ubuntu -> back to debian

IMO debian is the benchmark, especially to build servers from scratch quickly.

Yggdrasil

[Anonymous Coward]

Yggdrasil -> Slackware -> RedHat -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu

Re:Yggdrasil

[joejor]

Yggdrasil -> Slackware -> Debian -> LFS -> Ubuntu

Re:Yggdrasil

[cat5]

Yggdrasil -> Slackware -> RedHat/Mandrake (can't remember order..) -> Gentoo -> LFS -> Slackware -> Ubuntu/Debian + CentOS @ Work

Re:Yggdrasil

[Lodragandraoidh]

Was Yggdrasil an actual distribution? I thought it was just a delivery mechanism for Slackware...?

Re:Yggdrasil

[Lodragandraoidh]

Found the answer myself:

From the 1996 distro readme:

"Yggdrasil is a company that wholesales and retails Linux distributions
on CD-ROM."

I recall sending off for a distro for $10 --- from Yggdrasil computing - was Slackware with ELF beta. I still have the CD somewhere...just not in front of me.

too easy

[pengc99]

Red Hat -> Debian - I found after installing Red Hat, wanting to learn Linux, all I learned was Red Hat, not Linux. This became more evident after I migrated everything to Debian.

Re:too easy

[nschubach]

My experience was similar. I tried Redhat some years ago (10?) and never quite "got it" and gave up. I tried Linux again more recently (8 years ago?) I installed Debian and was never happier with a distro.

Old School: Mandrake!

[alphax45]

Mandrake -> Ubuntu and some others around 1998 - 2000 that I can't remember.

Re:Old School: Mandrake!

[na1led]

Yea Mandrake was my favorite back in the day, Much easier to adopt than Red Hat.

Re:Old School: Mandrake!

[ThatsMyNick]

Me too. Mandrake -> Debian Stable -> Ubuntu -> Linux Mint LXDE (always dual booted with the latest Windows version for gaming and IE).

Re:Old School: Mandrake!

[Nimey]

I tried Mandrake in '01 or '02 (whatever the newest version was then). Was immediately turned off because after installation I ran the package manager and it promptly crashed, trashing the installation.

Never had that problem with apt-get and dpkg. Debian wasn't as pretty or easy, mind.

Re:Old School: Mandrake!

[Ken_g6]

I actually bought some Linux CDs once. They were called "Linux for Windows". They were actually pretty much standard Mandrake though.

Actually, if you include all POSIX OSes, I went...

BSD/OS (startx to start X; xexit to "sitzung beenden") -> Mandrake -> Red Hat -> Cygwin -> Ubuntu 9.04 -> Linux Mint Debian Edition XFCE.

I didn't really enjoy using any Linux outside Windows until Ubuntu. Then they went nuts with Unity.

slackware

[Mr_DW]

slackware -> red hat -> gentoo -> ubuntu -> suse -> ubuntu -> windows (desktop)/CentOS(servers)

Back in 2002.

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

RedHat, Knoppix, then back to XP because I was tired of editing .CONF files to do simple things like set up dual displays. Windows got better, so I haven't tried Linux since the early 2000's.

Re:Back in 2002.

[DerPflanz]

Windows got better, so I haven't tried Linux since the early 2000's.

Linux has gotten better as well. I switched on the desktop late 2000 from Windows NT 4 to Slackware 7 (version number bumping is nothing new...). From there I have used Debian, Gentoo, LFS and now mainly Ubuntu on desktops and CentOS on servers.

Before 2000, I used Slackware, but just for servers.

Re:Back in 2002.

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I don't even know what regedit looks like in Windows 7. Even back in the Windows 2000 days where I did frequently mess with it, I wasn't using it for configuration, I was usually nuking stuff I didn't want anymore. I cannot think of a time where I used it for configuration purposes.

However, you do have a point. I did have a habit of doing a fresh reinstall every 6 months due to the registry. That habit died with Windows 7, but I have endured two major hard-drive failures due to not trusting my machine. (I only mean that as a silver lining, not as a 'feature'.)

Re:Back in 2002.

[Urza9814]

FWIW, Linux is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was in the early 2000's. I haven't edited a text configuration file in years. Dual displays are as easy now on *nix as they are on Windows -- plug it in, your desktop mirrors. Pop open the KDE control center and go into display properties and you can set it up to clone or span; change the sizes, change the relative positions, whatever you want. And of course I'd assume Gnome has something similar as well. Haven't found a wifi card that doesn't work out of the box either in a few years -- those were always a major PITA back then.

If you've got the time and want to give it a shot I personally HIGHLY recommend Arch with KDE. Installer is still pretty basic, and it's a pretty minimal distro, but once you get it set up it's fantastic. And no, screwing with ndiswrapper or figuring out why your sound doesn't work or editing your xorg.conf is _NOT_ part of 'getting it set up'. 95% of that is calling the package manager. You can have a fully functional system in an hour usually.

Re:Back in 2002.

[Burning1]

Linux has improved significantly in this department as well. I have a tendency to use Ubuntu at work, and Windows XP on my home systems.

I haven't had to edit a .conf file on ubuntu in a long while.

Me too!

[konohitowa]

Surprising number of slackware users here. I went Slackware (floppies with 0.9.16 kernel?) -> Red Hat -> Debian -> Ubuntu.

Re:Me too!

[dmbasso]

Yep, surprised me too. My case: Slackware (1997, dual boot) -> Debian (2000, linux only from then on) -> Ubuntu (2005 - now, let's see what comes in the next version though...)

Re:Me too!

[mikael_j]

I think a lot of us who started using Linux in the 90's wound up trying Slackware fairly early because it was a bit of the enthusiast distro back then.

Personally I started with Red Hat (not RHEL, just plain Red Hat Linux), next up was Slackware and then a whole slew of other distros (Debian, Mandrake, a bunch of lightweight distros, SUSE and others) before settling on FreeBSD for several years. In 2006 I wound up buying an iMac for my main desktop and I'm still using OS X for my main desktop OS, all the good *nix bits under the hood but with a better selection of commercial/proprietary software and a polished UI (not to mention I've never had OS X uninstall core parts of the system when updating it, something which Ubuntu pulled on me not too long ago, more specifically it happily uninstalled the X server while telling me it wouldn't update the X server since it was already up-to-date).

Since 1995..

[Xzzy]

slackware -> redhat -> gentoo -> arch

First kernel was 1.2.13!

Arch has become my favorite because of the rolling release system. And it manages to claim it's a minimalist while remaining usable.

Re:Since 1995..

[Randall311]

slackware -> redhat -> fedora -> ubuntu -> arch Pretty close to my path there (around the same timeframe too, didn't start until 1996)

Re:Since 1995..

[AchilleTalon]

1. SoftLanding Linux kernel 0.92
2. Slackware
3. RedHat
4. Fedora testing
5. Linux from Scratch
6. Gentoo

redhat...

[gagol]

redhat -> slackware -> debian -> ubuntu -> mint (with a salt of BSD and OpenSolaris from time to time)

Re:redhat...

[gagol]

I left a few out, but this spans over 15 years... and lots of coming back to windows up until 4 years ago.

99 until now

[zanophol]

Mandrake, Redhat, Mandrake, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian, Aptosid

Many

[__aardcx5948]

Started with Slackware in the early days, then moved to Debian. Stayed with Debian until Archlinux showed up, been with it since. However, been trying out Ubuntu for a few years every now and then just to check it out.

I lost my virginity with Slackware...

[bobthesungeek76036]

In the beginning I ran Slackware.

Then I picked up a SPARCStation 10 on eBay and ran Solaris 2.5.1

Then I picked up a Sun Ultra 5 on eBay and ran Solaris 8

Then I scrapped SPARC and went back to Intel running OpenSolaris

After the Big-O bought out Sun I switched to Ubuntu and still going strong.

SLS

[xming]

SLS -> Slackware -> Yggdrassil -> Suse/Debian/Redhat -> Mandrack -> LFS -> Gentoo

Slackware then Ubuntu

[kbdd]

I started with Slackware up to about kernel 2.2.6, which I used for a while (console only), then I went all hog with the GUI and Ubuntu for the machines I manage about 4 or 5 years ago.

I think my ISP uses Debian.

I also use Debian for ARM on a small ARM SBC for some fun projects.

Debian for the long haul...

[tech10171968]

Ubuntu (Just as a server) --> PcLinuxOS --> Damn Small Linux --> Debian (Stable) --> Debian (Sid)

Been there for 10 years but now thinking of either going with *BSD or LFS, just for a change of pace.

tried several of them

[instinct71]

I started with Red Hat because I was forced to use that at a start up. Then I tried Mandrake and SUSE for a while before being stuck with the Gentoo bug. The excitement soon vanished and I switched to Ubuntu. Have been there since. There was a tiny blip with that, when I switched to Mint for a while.

Went hard to soft

[TheGavster]

Slackware (9.something) -> Gentoo (2003.0) -> Ubuntu (08.04) -> Mint (12)

Slack and Gentoo lasted for a couple years each, Ubuntu was a dual-boot with Win XP, and Mint I only ran for a short time before going to Win 7. The progression was basically towards what would mean less time used sustaining vs using the computer.

It all started with Slackware

[nxcho]

Slackware Red Hat Gentoo Debian Ubuntu Debian I would say that using Gentoo and doing a stage 1 installation has taught me more about operating systems than anything else.

Started with Slack

[HellKnite]

Slackware was the first disto I used in the mid-late 90s. Then:

RedHat for work
Experimenting at home, Gentoo, Debian
RHEL/CentOS for work
Ubuntu/Lubuntu/Fedora at home.

Wow

[chill]

Slackware
Yggsdrasil
Red Hat
SuSE
Mandrake
Red Hat
Debian Testing
Linux From Scratch
Blue-White
Fedora
Rolled My Own
Slackware
Slax
Kubuntu
Fedora
Kubuntu
Debian Stable (in progress of migrating to this now)

Also use BackTrack on a regular basis.

Re:Wow

[chill]

Meh. Forgot a brief run with Gentoo right before LFS.

Distros

[g0bshiTe]

SuSe, SCO, Debian, Ubuntu.

I'm still using Debian primarily but I use Ubuntu on dual boot for a few tasks.

Meh ordeh

[orodos]

ubuntu -> fedora -> gentoo -> ubuntu -> openbsd -> ubuntu.

Redhat - Mandrake - Mandravia - Gentoo

[cwills]

Redhat -> Mandrake -> Mandravia -> Gentoo

If I add in my phone... stock android -> Cyanogenmod

Re:Redhat - Mandrake - Mandravia - Gentoo

[dr_leviathan]

Personal computers (since 1997): Redhat -> Debian -> Knoppix -> Ubuntu -> Kubuntu -> Xubuntu -> Debian -> LinuxMint

Work servers (since 2000): Debian

Re:Slackware

[melikamp]

Slackware, Ubuntu, and now Slackware & Debian.

Linuxes (Linuxii?)

[broggyr]

• Red Hat (6.0)
• Corel Linux
• Xandros
• Mandrake
• Mandriva
• Lindows
• SuSE
• Fedora
• Ubuntu

Oh lord

[dirtypoole]

Redhat -> Fedora -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu

I am an odd sort

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo --> Ubuntu (couple of different version) --> Gentoo

Get off my lawn.

[CrAlt]

Slackware 3.0 -> 3.5 -> then some how we jumped to 7.0 -> 10 -> 12 -> etc...

Over the years there are some OpenBSD and NetBSD machines mixed in there for misc things. And even a run with Solaris 10 6/06 on 64bit x86.. That was a waste of time.

Re:Get off my lawn.

[crypticedge]

Slackware 5 and 6 didn't exist. It was a marketing ploy effectively by jumping from 4 to 7 to keep up with the numberings of other newer distros that people were thinking were "more developed" by using other marketing ploys to do numberings.

You mean used regularly?

[steveg]

I first tried out RedHat 4.0, but didn't use it much.

Then RedHat5.2 upgraded to RedHat6.0. I think I tried Caldera in there for a while, but didn't use it much, also Mandrake, but again, only to try it out. I pretty much stayed with RedHat until I discovered Gentoo. Even after I started using Gentoo as a desktop I mainly used RedHat on servers until I discovered Debian.

Gentoo is still my favored distro for my main personal workstation. My servers are mainly Debian, although I use CentOS and Scientific Linux when I have to do something ugly (like Oracle.)

I used Ubuntu for a while for secondary personal workstations (like my media center at home) and for the workstations in the labs at work, but abandoned it when Unity came along, in favor of LinuxMint. I put LinuxMint Debian Edition on my work laptop, since I didn't want to beat the SSD to death with compiles.

I've tried some others, but never stuck with them.

Ancient history

[DeadBeef]

Since about '93:
Slackware
Redhat
Suse
Ubuntu
Mint

Started with RedHat, now mostly FreeBSD

[kthreadd]

1. RedHat Linux 8.0
2. Debian 3.0, 3.1, 4.0
3. Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10
4. Debian 5.0, 6.0
5. FreeBSD 7.0, 8.0, 9.0

Debian

[SJHillman]

In order I began using them. I still use most of them depending on the task. Not including distros that I only use as LiveCD recovery environments

Ubuntu -> Debian -> CentOS -> Debian -> Mint -> Debian -> ClarkConnect/ClearOS -> Debian -> Fedora -> Debian -> TurnKey -> Debian

Re:Gateway drug?

[orodos]

Troll. A case of the Mondays on Wednesday? Chill out. It's interesting to see other peoples' progression.

Various

[dargaud]

Red Hat (2000, at work), Gentoo (2003, at home), Kubuntu (since 2007 at home and work), BuildRoot (is that even a distro ? since 2007 at work)

Oldies but goodies

[BladeRider]

Yggsdrasil->Slackware->Mandrake->SUSE->Ubuntu

Order

[bwsf93]

Ubuntu -> Debian -> Fedora -> Xbuntu -> Mint

Started late in 2009

[MurukeshM]

Ubuntu 9.10, then the subsequent versions before some annoyance made me move to Linux Mint, while dabbling at Arch quite recently. I still think Ubuntu (I am back to using Ubuntu, except for trying Mint for a while when a new version is out) is better in the long run compared to Mint (upgrading being the chief problem), but Mint with VLC and stuff preinstalled is better for new users. At least then they won't be disappointed that not even simple mp3/avi files will play. But installing with an internet connection, something which I couldn't do until a month or so back, removes a lot of issues like drivers and Flash, etc.

Redhat - XP - Ubuntu

[Compaqt]

Used Redhat back in the day. Everybody did. Remember the ads in the Linux Journal with the guy in the red hat handing off an attache case to someone else in a trenchcoat?

It was quirky, but worked. KDE had everything you needed: KMail, KOffice, Konqueror. nedit for editing files.

Later I got a desktop that had XP already installed. And it was "good enough". So I used it, and continued to use it. I had a a lot of open source software installed: Firefox, putty, Cygwin, Gimp, OpenOffice, etc.

After that I fell victim to some really hard to remove viruses, and decided that it was time to move on.

By that time, Redhat had abandoned the desktop, so I checked out what everybody was talking about: the new distro with the funny name, Ubuntu.

I installed 10.04, and stuck with it. I had read about Unity/Gnome3 and didn't like what I had heard. I thought that I would have to find another distro, which would probably be a pain since Ubuntu had enough momentum that you can usually always find a specific answer to a problem you might be having.

Also, Ubuntu is highly useful on the server. You can't use RHell unless you shell out $$. And Centos doesn't have any back--it's so messed up that a guy left the project, and the rest of the guys had to beg him for the domain and donation account. Their versions come out much later than RedHat releases, and RHell generally is many versions behind Ubuntu in software releases, many of which have features that are sorely needed. Also, RHell repositories barely have any packages compared to Ubuntu. (True, there's a community effort called RPMForge, but if you want to go with that, why are you going with the "conservative" distro? Dissonance.)

After Precise 12.04 came out, I decided to give it a try. By that time Unity had actually become a useful environment, making most power users/devs more productive. And so here I'll probably stay, both on the desktop and the server.

Re:Redhat - XP - Ubuntu

[H0p313ss]

Used Redhat back in the day. Everybody did.

Nope. Only the noobs. ;)

Rest of us were running Slack or Debian.

Slack and Debian was for hobbiests. Lack of "support" pushed most organizations to Red Hat and SUSE.

In a corporate environment in North America if you were using Linux it was likely Red Hat for most of the 90s.

I do concur about RH packaging being a nightmare. One of the more recent releases shipped a milestone build of Firefox where the ABI for xulrunner was incompatible with both previous releases and the actual final release; as a result any application that integrated with Firefox had a fairly high chance of failure. For example Eclipse actually failed to run on that release until you upgraded xulrunner to something sane.

Re:Redhat - XP - Ubuntu

[Dadoo]

Also, RHell repositories barely have any packages compared to Ubuntu.

Not if you add EPEL:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL

Re:Redhat - XP - Ubuntu

[mikael_j]

Red Hat's packages have always been a pain in the ass, not sure how good/bad it is these days but back in the 5.x days it often felt like they were just messing with people.

Still have horrible memories of trying to install software packages compiled by Red Hat themselves only to realize that there weren't any packages for the right version of some required libs.

The "solution" to these problems was to either build your own packages for the libs in question or use rpmfind.net to find a compatible package, in either case you were sure to get bitten by this "meddling" on your part down the road when some other package refused to install because of the "rogue" packages you'd installed...

Re:Redhat - XP - Ubuntu

[aliquis]

Sine you're not sure how it is today maybe you shouldn't say always =p

I used Debian back in the days and wouldn't had wanted to use Redhat to but I currently use openSUSE and Redhat seem to be one of the better options today. Both zypper and yum should work well.

Yum got things like history so you can undo something you've done, zypper has that to as long as you use btrfs (it snapshops the last 100 actions you've done.)

Yum supports plugins and by default download and uses delta packages which imho suck because my flash drive and processor is much slower than my Internet connection. Well, relatively. But you can turn it off.

Haven't used openSUSE for long and did try Fedora even shorter so I can't really say much (installed Fedora from a disc and assumed I would get to pick any packages but I didn't, it just copied the content of the disk to the HDD. There's a net install disc which you can find but their webpage is a mess and don't list it in a convenient way, you have to Google it or something such.)

I don't like how openSUSE have a lot of user repositories and would feel safer with packages from official ones, I don't know how Redhat do there but I assume that possibly Debian and Ubuntu got more packages from the distributors. Something like ports/pkgsrc/portage/emerge would also work since chances are someone would had looked at the patches used.

Zypper and Yast provide you with details about what doesn't work for the packages in question and list you all possible solution of which you get to choose one and then continue and see whatever that leads to any new problems. Like if I tried to install an older version of libqt it would either suggest that I installed that but downgraded KDE or that I didn't installed it and kept the old version.

Chances are likely higher that you run into dependency problems with a whole bunch of different repositories. PC-BSD has done away with that completely and the packages contain all they need to run (except what's in the OS itself I suppose), you could put a lot of links to a library of the same version that way, with ZFS they even got de-dup which make the file system keep a hash for the content of all blocks on the HDD and not store the same data twice which would be one way of solving it. De-dup supposedly use a lot of RAM though so I don't see that as a viable alternative atm.

To think in advance and keep old API and ABIs would be another way of course.. Can't remember ever having a problem on my Amiga from installing a newer version of a library. Sun wasn't all that likely to break your software with an upgrade either.

I don't understand

[Antipater]

I don't use Linux, so I've always been baffled by this: why do you need to swap distros? What's up with this OS that everyone feels the need to jump around all the time? It's like a geek rite of passage to find the most obscure distro you can, it seems. I don't get it.

(Not trolling, genuinely puzzled)

Re:I don't understand

[Jae686]

I don't use Linux, so I've always been baffled by this: why do you need to swap distros? What's up with this OS that everyone feels the need to jump around all the time? It's like a geek rite of passage to find the most obscure distro you can, it seems. I don't get it.

(Not trolling, genuinely puzzled)

we dont need to, we want to. :)

Re:I don't understand

[idontgno]

The same reason that not everyone gets married to the same person for their entire life. Variety. Curiousity. Fashion. (Yeah, let's be honest. There's an element of that. Or its "I was using <distro> before (it was mainstream|they sold out)" opposite.

I think the better question is why people put up with being effectively shackled or walled in by their choice of operating system and applications.

Re:I don't understand

[corychristison]

When you first start out everything is so new and exciting. You first just want to try anything and everything. You try a few things, learn some new tricks with every distro. Eventually you find one you love, and stick with it. After a few years you see all these hott young distros and get curious and give them a good fsck under a VM or an old box. Every single time you think to yourself "never again", but they always lure you back in because the old ball and chain isn't quite as flexible.
As you get older you realize you prefer the comfort of one distro but like to spice things up with one or two on the side.

Re:I don't understand

[tuffy]

I swap things around because different distros have different maintenance windows and different degrees of "cutting edge" software versions. Machines I don't want to touch very often get slow-updating server-style distros. Machines I want to experiment with might get the shiniest desktop-oriented distro.

I wouldn't want to swap out OSes every week, but it's nice to try out new stuff every few months and enjoy that new OS smell.

Re:I don't understand

[mattpalmer1086]

I'm not sure most people do swap distros much after they've found something that works for them.

When I was switching away from Windows about 10 years ago, I tried out a few: Mandriva, Suse, and Gentoo for a while. They all had good points and bad points. Gentoo was fun seeing the system built all around me to my specification, but all that compiling and fiddling became irritating after a while, and I just wanted something that got out of my way. I found Ubuntu, and I've basically stuck with it ever since. I almost switched away from Ubuntu when they started the whole Unity thing, so I delayed upgraded to later versions - but Unity in 12.04 is actually pretty good. Not perfect, but quite usable.

The thing about switching distros is it's like switching to a new version of Windows. It's still basically the same system underneath, so you're not relearning everything, but there's a bunch of different tools and things have moved around. It takes time and energy, so you don't really do it unless you're really curious, or you become uncomfortable with your current environment.

Re:I don't understand

[mattpalmer1086]

I meant to reply to the parent, obviously :)

Re:I don't understand

[vlm]

Back in ye olden days, before /. even, the running joke was distro reviews in linux journal and sysadmin and other mags ONLY discussed installation, never use or maintenance or upgrading. Just a funny observation. So if all the noobs ever did was install over and over, the odds of trying other distros greatly increases.

Also some people make a game out of using dodgy semi-compatible hardware, or even being hardware driver devs, which often enough fried your install... so if you're going to re-install anyway, then you might try something new.

Most of the people reinstalling over and over were not kernel devs trying to debug DMA mode instead of PIO mode IDE hard drives... posers trying to look like that more likely.

Re:I don't understand

[geekymachoman]

Many reasons. I'm using Ubuntu. Lately some changes they did or plan to do, don't agree with me, so I'm just gonna say bye-bye and try some other desktop friendly distribution. Fortunately you have a freedom of choice, as opposed to let's say Windows.. where nobody gives a f what you want or what you like. If they decide to display ads on your desktop, you gonna have to adapt to it.

Same goes for desktop environments.. Like this Gnome 3 BS. You have 10 more to choose from, so if you personally.. subjectively, don't like something.. you just take 5 minutes to google a bit and you'll find alternative. Not all people like the same thing. Imagine if only outlook express existed.. or Thunderbird .. as a Email client. Or only Internet Explorer as a browser. Having possibility to choose is a good thing.

Some people do it for fun/experimentation... that's alright too.

Re:I don't understand

[Urza9814]

Different distros have different strengths.

Personally I've only really switched distros three times -- and three distros (went back once -- Mandrake/Mandriva > Slack > Mandriva > Arch).

Mandriva was nice because it had a really nice, easy, graphical installer. Easy newbie distro, didn't have to spend much time configuring things, didn't have to know anything about Linux to get it set up. BUT, that also means it installs a bunch of crap you probably don't need, and they have their own 'control panel' type system -- and so does the DM -- so you end up with 'do I configure this in MCC or KDECC or Catalyst?' (Kinda like how on Windows some hardware will have its own special configuration programs in addition to the generic ones in control panel).

So then I switched to Slackware -- it was really minimalist, it didn't do a damn thing for you, you got exactly the system you wanted. It was stable, it was fast...but it took a lot of time configuring it, and it was just more difficult to make changes.

Now I'm on Arch -- the installation isn't the easiest thing (not graphical at all; and once you're done the fresh install has no GUI) but once you know a bit about Linux you can knock the whole thing out in an hour, and once it's set up it's rock stable, it's configured exactly how you want it, with exactly the software you want, and you never have to reinstall (there's no 'versions' with Arch -- the entire system updates over the web. Picture going from Windows XP to Vista to 7 without ever needing to format your drive or put in a Windows CD). But they don't put ANY effort into making it easy for newbies, so it's not a great place to be until you have some idea what you're doing. Also helps that hardware support has gotten a LOT better in the past couple years, so there's a lot less configuration necessary than there used to be.

But yes, there's also some people drawn to distros for the 'hipster cred' of 'you've probably never even heard of this distro' or the geek cred of 'I compile my own kernel!' (not that there aren't legitimate reasons to do that as well)

Re:I don't understand

[camperdave]

For me (and I suspect many people) it is motivated by hardware upgrades combined with ease of installation of additional software. I started off with Slackware, back when you needed a couple of boxes of floppies to install it. It was fine, but after a while I decided to get a new computer. The new computer had a CD-ROM, so I got a copy of RedHat (the book came with it) and installed that instead. Hey more software! And instead of downloading and compiling source code, and finding out that I was missing libraries (because it was on a supplementary floppy that I wasn't required to install first time around), I could download the RPM. RPM loaded the compiled program and libraries all by itself (most of the time). Then the hard drive failed. So, new hard drive, new opportunity to try another distro: I've been hearing a lot about Fedora. It's supposed to be like RedHat. Oh look, something called yum. Yum worked like RPM except that if you didn't have the right libraries, or other dependencies, it would download them as well. Oh, the office is throwing out computers... Yoink! New distro time... Ubuntu you say? The installer is apt. I've heard of that. Apt has a gui, so all I have to do is check a box on whatever software I want, and click on install! Well sign me up! New laptop... well, I've heard good things, so let me try Mint.

So... new hardware = Opportunity to try a new distro.

The thing to keep in mind is that a distro is more than just a copy of linux. There is all sorts of additional software bundled into the distro: office productivity, games, educational software, drivers for this and that. Some distros choose software related to security, others for "LAMP" servers (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) - a perfect platform for running your own blog. It's like picking a cable channel package. Some are sports oriented, some are movie oriented, etc. You pick the bundle that best suits your needs.

Re:I don't understand

[John Hasler]

> What's up with this OS that everyone feels the need to jump
> around all the time?

Everyone doesn't.

Re:I don't understand

[drrilll]

Haven't you ever been using Windows or OSX and thought "This is so frustrating, if only I could change X!"? Well with Linux, you can. Windows or OSX is like leasing your computer through Apple or Microsoft. Sure, you can do stuff, but only with their permission. With Linux you finally own your computer and can do anything you like with it or to it.

Re:I don't understand

[spauldo]

There's a lot of reasons to switch distros. Everyone usually finds one that fits their way of thinking after two or three. People also find that the different distros work better at different tasks - you don't (generally) use Ubuntu for servers, for instance.

As far as what I run on "my" computer, it hasn't changed much: Slackware -> Debian unstable. I knew Slackware inside and out (back in the 3.x days) and now I know Debian very well (you have to, if you run unstable). I've hit a comfort zone, and I'm unlikely to change.

I switched from Slackware to Debian because Slackware was very, very far behind on switching from the libc5 C library to glibc (the second major change in Linux, the first being the switch to ELF executable format). A lot of software was being written that didn't work with the old libc5, and Pat (the maintainer of Slackware) was being stubborn on the point. He had his reasons, but I wanted new software, so I switched.

I tried Corel Linux back when it came out. That lasted about two days. It didn't live up to its promises, and when I found myself replacing the Corel repositories with Debian repositories, I knew it was in vain (BTW, doing apt-get update && apt-get upgrade from Corel to Debian is... interesting. It worked, after a lot of fixing, but I finally wiped and reinstalled Debian). It's just as well - there was only the one version of Corel Linux.

I've had to use Red Hat (not Enterprise, but old school Red Hat Linux) on a few occasions for work-related reasons. This was back in the RPM dependency hell days, and it turned me off of any distro that doesn't maintain a decently large package repository. I used Fedora Core 4 and found it to be just as bad. Same goes for Mandrake (before they became Mandriva - I had friends who ran that because it was "user friendly" - I did not find it so. It might be better now, of course.

I've used Gentoo for shits and giggles on a server I run. I was just curious about it. I've since replaced it with OpenBSD because a) I didn't have the time to learn to admin it properly and b) compiling every package in the system on an Intel Atom chip is painful. (I already knew how to admin OpenBSD.) I liked Gentoo and if I ever replaced Debian as my main distro, it would be to go to Gentoo. I just don't have the time to learn a new system anymore.

I've done LFS. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the underpinnings of Linux. It reminded me a lot of my Slackware days, back when you had to compile everything.

Ubuntu works, and I've run it on a few machines, but doesn't fit into my way of doing things. I like to customize my system a lot, and I like to log in as root when I'm doing admin stuff. You can do that with Ubuntu, but it's just easier with Debian.

Of course, there's the BSDs and Solaris as well, and these days I mostly do server stuff on OpenBSD (or FreeBSD if it's a fileserver). The BSDs make excellent servers and don't feel as "hacked together" as Linux does. I wouldn't use one as my main system, but if I had a technical job again I wouldn't mind a FreeBSD desktop.

So the rite of passage isn't to find the most obscure distro, but to find the distro that suits both you and your use case best. Experimentation never hurts, and you can learn a lot from running different distros.

Re:I don't understand

[f16c]

While the kernel is technically the "Linux" part each distribution is packaged with different components, utilities and capabilities. While most, RHEL, openSuse, Linux Mint and Gentoo are general usage by design there are others specifically targeted at different uses. Even general use distributions very in setup, personality and in a lot of cases the stability of the chosen software used for different tasks. Some are intentionally bleeding edge with some intended to extreme stability at the cost of newer features. Some distributions are pretty bare-bones affairs intended for specific use profiles.

I gravitated to openSuse from the Suse commercial distribution ages ago after Redhat became unstable and awkward to use around 1999 or so. I bought a Suse package at a CompUSA and have used a derivative ever since. The last setup of this on this system took all of an hour and a half to become completely useful. It used to take weeks of fixing broken bits. Once you become used to how a distribution does things it becomes easier to use productively and they all differ in setup and convenience features in how things are done. These days the results end up pretty much the same as they are all pretty easy to install and configure.

It takes a while to find one that does things in a way that is easy to understand, has the right mix of components and is totally useful for whatever you are using the systems for. Some of us just like to experiment.

Re:I don't understand

[Pinhedd]

Several reasons really, Free software has a few silly side-effects. Since anyone is able to take a piece of free software, make a derivative of it, repackage it, and redistribute it, a lot of people will do just that. There are a lot of Distributions which are basically just other distributions with a slightly different wallpaper. Similarly, anyone is able to start a project, get everyone worked up with a bunch of ideas, get distracted by a shiny object or irritating bug, and abandon said project. Internal fallouts in the FOSS community have occasionally led to threats of lawsuits over trademarks and domain ownership. I'm sure that there has to be at least one criminal charge related to a dispute over philosophical differences. Second, there's a reason that people are still using Windows XP. Windows XP still works, it still does what most people need it to do. Microsoft is trying very hard to kill it, but it just wont die. There are only 5 versions of the Windows codebase still in common use and each one has fairly strong forward and backward compatibility. Since application developers write programs that run on Windows NT 5.1, 5.2, 6.0, 6.1, and now 6.2 and package them all in one nice little .exe file that installs and [ideally] runs the same on each and every version of Windows there's really no need to upgrade without a compelling reason.Different versions of Linux not only have very weak forward and backward compatibility, they often have horrible compatibility with other versions of Linux. Software installed from Canonical's apt repository will behave differently than that same piece of software installed from the maintainer's debian package, and naturally redhat packaged software can't be installed on debian style systems or vice versa. Building from source is a good way to avoid some of this nastiness but it's not at all uncommon to find out that an old piece of software won't compile against a version of a library that's currently installed on your system. Replacing that library with the older version would break whatever is installed now, and patching the old code to use the new library is a royal pain in the ass. Sometimes you just have to use the Distro that an application has the best native support for. Third, there are functional differences between different distributions. Redhat, CentOS, and Fedora are better suited to multi-user environments than Ubuntu is. Ubuntu is more suited to giving system administrators glaring migraines than Redhat is. Redhat has a bunch of really well tested, really stable software that will rarely ever fail but is dated and lacking newer features. Ubuntu has experimental packages which are maintained with the latest code but will occasionally break and render your entire system unusable while you find out what the maintainer screwed up. Even the process of rebooting the computer is different between the two! I do most of my web development and admin work in xUbuntu because it has good support in VMWare Workstation and all the software I have to use compiles and runs very nicely (including running VirtualBox under VMWare Workstation, which is pretty bomb). I do my Quartus II work in CentOS because that's most stable and I don't like having an hour long compilation crash right in the middle.

Re:I don't understand

[unixisc]

I would have stopped @ the distro that worked perfectly for me, but so far, none has. I really wanted to support a few, like Caldera, but since I could never get internet on such things, due to the poor support at the time for networking, I switched. Things are much better now, but w/ Linux, there is still the issue of breakage of both drivers and software b/w versions. A problem that BSD seems to be on top of.

Next time I switch OSs, I'm trying out PC-BSD. For good, hopefully.

Re:I don't understand

[Will.Woodhull]

Factors that have influenced my jumping from one distro to another:

1. Most important: good support of software I needed to use at this time or that.

2. Almost as important: good support for peripherals I wanted to use. Basically graphics cards and digitizing tablets, but a time or two the printer drivers were important (using a 9 cartridge inkjet printer that could do photorealistic poster size images was a challenge at one point) .

3. Very important: what others around me were doing at the time. Especially those I sucked up to since I wanted them to be my unpaid tech support staff.

None of these factors are as important now as they used to be. I am currently using Ubuntu which meets all the above quite well, and will continue to do so for as far as I can see into the future.

That said, I have been spending a lot of time lately checking out different desktop environments. I expect to stay with some flavor of Ubuntu, but there has to be something better out there than the recent trainwreck that is Gnome 3, the continuing trainwreck in slow motion that has been KDE, Unity which would probably be a trainwreck if they ever figure out how to hook the engine up to the rail cars, etc. I have not yet looked at Mate or the one I confuse with xkcd, mostly because I would like to find a Real Life support person on hand before I jump into those unknowns.

There is not a Windows or Apple equivalent to the agonizing decisions that Linux users face wrt desktop environments. That's a weakness of the proprietary OSs and a strength of Linux.

Why limit this to Linux?

[Sir_Kurt]

To get the full story, and to put your Linux distro of choice in context, it might be weel and good to list the full progession.

For me it was:
Mainframe, PLC
Trash 80
IBM PC running DOS 2 through 6
OS/2 V. 1.2 through Warp 4
Redhat 4.2 though 9
Fedora 1 through 14/Gnome
Fedora 17/XFCE

Also run various flavors of Ubunto and Centos concurrent with the Fedora loop.

Kurt

Re:Why limit this to Linux?

[jmitchel!jmitchel.co]

Yes, but what OS on the TRS 80? For that matter what TRS 80? 'Cause you got TRS DOS (IIRC), CP/M, Xenix, and maybe a couple other OSish options, on hardware that at times was barely related.

Re:Why limit this to Linux?

[vlm]

Trash 80

TRSDOS or OS-9 on the coco?

I used OS-9 and I always thought everything from the mid 80s when I stopped doing OS-9 work until the mid 90s when linux started getting good was pretty much a downgrade... Didn't catch up to what I was doing in 1984 on OS-9 until something like 1995 or so. I often had the gut level feeling many ultra-early linux admins were trying to catch PCs up to the level of what they were doing on OS-9.

TRSDOS not quite the same aura of elegance, no. But it played Zork, what more do you want.

Old School

[damm0]

Slackware -> RedHat -> Mandrake -> RedHat -> Mandrake -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Mint

All the while dabbling in FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris, and briefly the Solaris/Debian combo.

I bought a retail copy of Redhat 5.0

[pecosdave]

and I dual booted.

I considered Linux something to play with on my spare time.

Then I bought a Magazine with a copy of SuSE 7.0 on it. I stuck with SuSE until 9 something, about the Novel buyout. I felt bad fleeing about the time Novel got them because I was a big fan of Netware.

A friend had been singing the praises of Debian to me for quite a while, so I jumped on board during etch. I fought tooth and nail to stay on Debian but after Ubuntu took off the Debian developers seemed to be okay with being the "parent" OS and starting breaking hardware support rampantly, the amount of work it took to keep my laptop working on it became more than I wanted to deal with so I went over to Kubunut. (I've been using KDE since 1.something). I've been Kubuntu every since. I did put Mint on my netbook for a while when Ubuntu announced they were going to defund KDE. I made noise about it here and actually got an on-Slashdot response. I'm still on Kubuntu now.

I have experimented with OpenBSD and some other specialty distros, but I gave up Windows shortly after 2000 came out. A friend talked me into going Apple for a while, but I still had my Linux stuff running. Apple is nothing but a bad memory to me now. (the company, the OS is actually great, but the company sucks rocks)

RedHat - Mandrake - Peanut - Gentoo - Debian

[G3ckoG33k]

RedHat -> Mandrake -> Peanut -> Gentoo -> Debian

Not looking anywhere else since many years.

I guess I'm a masochist

[bleedingsamurai]

Fedora->Ubuntu->Linux Mint->Fedora->Debian->CentOS->CrunchBang->Debian->Arch->Sabayon->Gentoo

there is a lot going on there but I've been using Gentoo for the longest period of time and I see myself sticking with it for a very long time to come.

Archlinux

[Lord Lode]

Archlinux. In that order. I'm now on my third Arch box already.

Ubuntu too at other locations though.

Simple

[Sparticus789]

Solaris 5 (work) > Red Hat 5 (work) / Fedora 12 (home) > Ubuntu 12.04 (work/home), openSUSE 12.1 (work), CentOS 6.2 (work)

Red Hat then Debian

[abell]

In my very first attempt in '96, I tried Debian but some process in crontab would trash my disk (the locate update, IIRC), so not knowing any better I moved at once to Red Hat. After using it for a while (a couple of years) I gave Debian another try, fell in love with it and to this day it's my distro of choice.

Red Hat first, Gentoo most recent

[Deathspawner]

Red Hat (1999) > Caldera (2000) > openSUSE (2001) > Gentoo (2005)

SLS-Yggdrasil-Slackware-Red Hat-Fedora-Ubuntu

[pthisis]

The hardest thing mixed in there was the a.out->ELF migration, for which I rebuilt everything on the system by hand sort of like a primitive LFS. It was worth doing once--you learn a fair bit in the process--but made it so I have little interest in LFS or similar distros going forward.

Re:SLS-Yggdrasil-Slackware-Red Hat-Fedora-Ubuntu

[vlm]

The hardest thing mixed in there was the a.out->ELF migration

Yeah thanks for that, I had completely blocked the pain out of my memory, and like a band aid ripped off exquisitely slowly...

(For the noobs, there was a time when linux didn't use ELF as a binary file format...)

Re:SLS-Yggdrasil-Slackware-Red Hat-Fedora-Ubuntu

[nurb432]

That was about the same time i jumped ship and went to BSD ( 386BSD first, then Net.. Then Free.. now PC ( which is basically Free + a pretty installer and some cool utilities )

Or was it 4.3, then net.. its been a while and i honestly don't remember, beyond that i moved to the other camp, mainly due to the coming fracturing of the community, and the general degradation of the people in it. Didn't want the confusion or attitude, plus it was tons more mature.

Re:SLS-Yggdrasil-Slackware-Red Hat-Fedora-Ubuntu

[DNAgent]

Come on! You know it was fun! I'm just glad that my friend and I were doing the same process at the same time, just slightly out of sync so that neither of our machines was broken in quite the same way at the same time so we could use each other's box to get to the files we needed to fix ours. It all worked in the end and was amazing training for Gentoo later on.

My Distro use

[aembleton]

Mandrake -> Suse -> Mandrake -> Ubuntu -> Mint

Slackware - Gentoo - OpenSUSE

[TheNinjaroach]

Started with Slackware in 2002. Learned how to make menuconfig on the kernel, and generally how to compile and install apps & libraries from source. Then I moved around, trying Redhat, Fedora and Mandrake before settling on Gentoo for awhile.

After twiddling with Gentoo for several months I kind of got over the fun of waiting for everything to compile.

I found OpenSUSE somewhere along version 9, fell in love with it and haven't looked back. I'm firmly in the OpenSUSE camp and would like to stay here as long as possible.

Other than toy one-disk distros

[dosius]

Red Hat 8, Fedora 1, Debian 3.1, Ubuntu 5/10, Debian 4, Debian 5, Debian 6. I got a VPS with Debian 7.

-uso.

Answer a question with a question

[concealment]

User: How do I get started with Linux?

Linux Community: What distro do you want to use to get started with Linux?

Redhat

[symbolic]

Redhat was the first, then I dipped into Gentoo for a bit, I think there was a short period where I used freebsd (for routing/firewall), and my last was Ubuntu - which I'm not particularly fond of. At work, it's pretty much redhat.

my order

[AvitarX]

Redhat* -> mandrake (when it was basically just rebranded redhat) -> suse (when the 7cd version was still $60, they had the delayed source release x server that worked for my card)* -> debian -> mandrake (when it was now more or less It's own thing, I left when they blocked access to 64bit versions even though $60/year subscription was more than windows )* -> long break with windows pretty exclusively -> ububtu (feisty fawn, it may of been perfect) *

I really liked feisty fawn, it was the first time I used gnome 2, and it just felt right, the top panel, and then taskbar on the full bottom, both fairly thin. The gentle rounded corners, I am one of the few that loved the human theme too. It was before the complete lock-ups on heavy disk load that plagued ubuntu (and allegedly it was a kernel issue, so perhaps others) for years. I don't know what's really improved since then.

The stars mark distros that were my primary os for an extended time.

my story

[tantrum]

redhat -> mandrake -> debian -> kubuntu -> sabayon -> arch

Mandrake was the first distro I used as a full-time desktop OS. Have been using debian on my servers "for ever"

Still trying out new distros in vm's fairly regulary, but I'm getting to old to dedicate hours every day just to play with it.

Started with Debian

[BabaChazz]

Debian would run on the Alpha machine I was playing with at the time. Shortly after that I got a Fedora distro running on a second machine. That combination stayed with me until the Alpha died, and the next install, one I actually had to do real work with, was Ubuntu. I did a number of Ubuntu installs but got fed up, and now new installs are Mint. I have three Fedora, one Ubuntu, and one Mint under my direct control right now, and I am about to bring up a second Mint box for gaming -- thank you Humble Bundle.

Distro path

[MrSenile]

Slackware ('93) -> Yggdrasil ('93) -> Slackware ('94) -> Trustix -> YellowDog -> Debian -> SuSE -> CentOS -> Knoppix -> Red Hat/Fedora -> Slackware/Red Hat

Today I currently use Slackware at home, and Red Hat at work.

I use Knoppix for a quick and dirty recovery CD when I need it, otherwise I have my own system rescue USB pen I use (slackware based).

Are there more of them?

[IrquiM]

Slackware (some time in '97) - briefly tried Red Hat, Suse and Turbo Linux, but went back to Slackware in '98, and have been stuck there since.

Trends and Timing

[cervesaebraciator]

Maybe we could spot some trends.

I suspect that if there are any trends to be spotted, they'll have to do when people began to use Linux more than what they began with. The distros available to anyone with broadband today are far more numerous than those once available to us. My first exposure to Linux, e.g., was an early iteration of S.u.s.e. included with a magazine. I could not at that time (90s) have hoped to download a full distro on my ~28k dial-up.

Here, however, is a trend I think we'll certainly find. Many seem to go through a stage where trying different distros for a couple months at a time is fun. Then they get sick of backing data up, tinkering with settings, and explaining to significant others why the computer isn't working at the moment. Whereupon they settle on whatever distro they feel like they'll have to fool with the least.

Incidentally (IIRC): S.u.s.e. --> Redhat --> Mandrake --> Mandriva --> Arch --> Gentoo --> Ubuntu --> OpenSuse --> Ubuntu --> Mint --> Ubuntu

Re:Trends and Timing

[Hatta]

Mandrake in the late 1990s, to Debian by the turn of the century, and probably for the rest of my life. I've played with Ubuntu and Gentoo and Arch on some secondary PCs, but Debian has always worked better and more reliably for me.

Re:Trends and Timing

[sasha328]

I started using Linux in the late 90s. It was the buzz back then and I needed a differentiator when going for IT positions. I did download a lot of distros at the time because I worked at a telco at the time, so had the speed. But most of my installs came from CDs with magazines or books. At one stage I even ordered CDs from both redhat and mandrake. I still have them as souvenirs.
Anyway, my timeline looks like this (gets fuzzy the more I got into Linux):
Redhat-> mandrake->Caldera-> suse-> lfs->slackware->debian->redhat. Stayed on redhat for quite a few years (with XFCE) then moved on to OSX. Later on I used Ubuntu but only sparingly. Haven't used Linux for a couple of years now!

Starting in 1998...

[Dracos]

1. RedHat 6: got tired of dependency hell after a couple years.
2. Gentoo from 2004: because peer pressure. It's impossible to maintain if you don't keep up with it.
3. Mint since 2010: the KDE variant has been my primary desktop since then. A breeze to maintain.

Re:Starting in 1998...

[NardoPolo88]

About the same time I started. Even bought the boxed version of Red Hat to have some extra docs to get me moving.....

Red Hat -> Fedora -> Suse -> ubuntu -> mint -> xubuntu.

Currently I have OS-X, Xubuntu, and Windows 7 up and running and did a Mint with Cinnamon on an old machine yesterday to take another look at where they are going with that.

Slackware

[Noryungi]

Let's see, it went something like this:

Slackware (1995!) -> Caldera -> Red Hat -> Mandrake -> FreeBSD -> Slackware -> OpenBSD -> Slackware -> Slackware -> Ubuntu -> Slackware.

These days, home machines are either Slackware (Slackware 14 coming up! Yay!) or OpenBSD (pre-ordered OpenBSD 5.2 already), except for two machines running Windows XP and Mac OS X.

Work is a mix of FreeBSD, Centos, Red Hat, SuSE and OpenSuSE. I have also worked on AIX, Sun Solaris, HPUX, Tru64, NetBSD and others.

I like the stability, flexibility and simplicity of Slackware, and the security and stability of OpenBSD. Both of these are, in my opinion, the open-source projects that have stayed the closest to their roots and offer the best experience overall across platforms and applications.

My Distro's

[Wolfraider]

FreeBSD -> Redhat -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu -> Solaris -> FreeBSD with a few others mixed in

Slackware - RedHat - CentOS/Fedora/Ubuntu

[crankyspice]

Started off in '95 with Slackware 2.2.0 (kernel 1.2.13), though I also dabbled with a retail version of RedHat 5 and I think Mandrake "Secure" Linux 6.x ('secure' in that it came with SSL tech, back when it was still encumbered by the RSA patent and cost money to deploy).

When I started working in the 'real world' (circa 2000) RedHat 6.2 - 7.3. These days, anything not running OS X is running either Ubuntu (laptops and workstations), Fedora (LXDE spin for older hardware), or CentOS (servers).

Many from 1997 to date . . .

[Phreakiture]

• Slackware, somwere around v. 3 or so
• Mandrake 5
• Redhat 6 (which, I might add, got pwned due to a boneheaded default config)
• Slackware, around version 8
• Ubuntu 5.04
• Ubuntu 6.10
• Slackware, around version 11
• SLAMD64, around version 11
• Ubuntu 8.04 (Currently on one VM)
• Ubuntu 10.04
• Ubuntu Server 10.04 (Currently on one machine)
• Xubuntu 10.10
• Ubuntu Studio 11.10 (Currently on one machine)
• Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Currently on one machine and several VMs)
• Ubuntu 12.04 (Currently on one machine and one VM)

Re:Gateway drug?

[broggyr]

I also think it's interesting. But just because someone thinks it's interesting doesn't mean they have to be your dedicated points counter. If you want that so dearly, no one is stopping you.

Good thing everyone doesn't like the same thing; the world would be very boring otherwise.

RedHat, Ubuntu, Debian

[rjha94]

I started off with RedHat (5.2) days and stuck with it for a long time. I guess part of the reason was that my work also required working on Linux machines and office was using RedHat and later CentOs. I stopped using Linux for a while and then I wanted to try it again on a laptop, a 2004 model iBook.

I think I tried Ubuntu because I had heard it could support my wireless driver without doing any compilation chores on my part. The first Ubuntu CD I got was in probably 2007 (Ubuntu 7) and then I stuck with Ubuntu till 2011. It was more like a side affair. However since last year my work machine has again been a Linux machine. I was happy with Ubuntu but I wanted to try Debian just for curiosity's sake. No big reasons or plans.

I guess after using things daily and getting back in groove I was no longer in need of "polish" and "out-of-box". I tried Debian Testing with Gnome3/XFCE and then moved to crunch-bang12. Partly it was my search to make my desktop my way since I spend almost all my time on Linux now. I do not think I will try anything new sooner. I like the feel of an icon less desktop and arbitrary control. My desktop, my way.

To summarize RedHat -> Ubuntu -> Debian

My list

[Ralphus Maximus]

OS/360 was my first (yes, I'm an old greybeard Dino-pen guy)
Then TRS-DOS, CP/M, DOS, RedHat (couldn't get it to boot), Mandrake, Gentoo (actually taught me Linux)

Now I'm running 2 Centos servers, a Gentoo server, a Debian server, an Arch workstation, 2 Debian workstations (one's a lappy), and a Win7 Gaming box.

Cheers,
RM

Here goes ...

[lennier1]

SUSE (still on 3.5" floppies)
Debian
Red Hat
Ubuntu
CentOS
SUSE, again (then under Novell rule),
Xubuntu
Debian
Mint

Nowadays I've come to prefer Debian for my servers and Mint for everyday desktops.

distros

[heracross]

I use mostly opensuse now, tried Mint and hated it, Fedora was bland (several versions ago). I am going to try Mageia soon, it seems to be rising in popularity fast

From the early years

[Old-Claimjumper]

SLS on Floppies
Slackware
RedHat
Fedora

Slackware-FreeBSD-Ubuntu

[Nexion]

I started out with slackware and it took about a week to build my workstation how I wanted it (much ./configure&&make&&make install). Then I moved to FreeBSD for some time... I know, not Linux... took a day or two to build (much /usr/ports happiness). Then more recently ubuntu and its several hours of install and config to get it "right". I kinda did it all backwards from how a new user might want to go about things.

me too me too!!

[godrik]

Suse -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Debian -> DragonflyBSD -> Debian -> CentOS -> Debian

(I think there is a pattern)

The SW analogy was some insulting geek pandering

[partyguerrilla]

Corel Linux back in the late 90's -early 00's, trying out my first OS other than DOS/Windows. Then I didn't bother with Linux until some 5 years ago, when drivers were stable and easily attainable, continued with a knoppix live CD, UBANTO and Mint. I Have been using fedora for the last couple of years. I really don't see a point to compulsory distro-hopping, specially for home users. It seems to be a trend among Linux fans.

Approximately...

[starwiz]

Slackware -> Red Hat -> RedHat w/Ximian -> FreeBSD -> Debian and/or Ubuntu

Not many.

[corychristison]

Attempted Redhat (version 6, I think). Didn't like it. Tried Mandrake, didn't like it. SUSE 9 Personal, used it about 8 months. Upgraded to Gentoo, haven't looked back.

I've fiddled with other distros under VMs... like CentOS, Ubuntu, Slackware, etc. but I just feel at home on Gentoo.

From Slackware as starter to after dinner Mint

[niks42]

Slackware, RedHat, Mandrake, Mandriva, brief parallel running of yellowdog on PowerPC, Fedora, Ubuntu, and last but not least Mint. Not to mention AIX, which as I used to tell my customers is IBMs version of Linux. Oh, how my colleagues from Austin, TX used to laugh.

My Linucies

[certain death]

It all started with Redhat... Desktop - Redhat - Mandrake - Ubuntu Servers - Redhat - SuSE - Debina - Ubuntu Routers - Freesco - M0n0wall - PFsense - Endian - PFSense - IPCop - IPFire - Endian - PFsense. My routers seem to need the OS changed more than my servers and desktops!

My Linux Distros Over the Years

[hodet]

Desktop: Slackware (billion floppy set), Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora (my current desktop distro)

Server: Redhat, Centos

My distro timeline

[Erikderzweite]

RedHat
SuSE
Ubuntu (briefly)
Gentoo (long time)
Kubuntu
Fedora (briefly)
Mint + OpenSuse
OpenSuse

Debian this, Debian that

[ashshy]

1. Debian Rex (cover disk on some computer magazine looong ago -- it was a single floppy)
2. Other early Debian releases, downloaded to Zip disks at college computer lab
3. More Debian, Slink onwards, from burned ISO images
4. Knoppix for a while, then back to
5. Debian Sarge, Etch, Lenny. Still use Squeeze on one virtual Rackspace server. But main squeeze now is,
6. Ubuntu, "current" release since Feisty Fawn.

Yeah, they're all flavors of Debian at heart. I don't really do .rpm packages or Portage compiling.

Red Hat - Slackware - DSL - Ubuntu

[Derleth]

My first was Red Hat 7.x out of the back of a book I bought at Barnes and Noble. I got a number of later Red Hat distros the same way, largely because downloading ISOs isn’t an option when you’re on dial-up.

The first set of ISOs I did download was for Slackware. Can’t remember the version, but I ran it until a hard drive died. Kinda lost the ability to run a full-size distro without a hard drive.

(At some point prior to Slackware I fooled around with OpenBSD. Not entirely relevant, but true.)

Damn Small Linux (DSL) was next. That worked extremely well and got me hooked on package management as a concept.

After I got a new hard drive I looked at Debian but the install process was too much of a pain in the ass. Remember that I’m coming from Slackware and OpenBSD at this point, with MS-DOS in my more distant history. So, no, I refuse to see this as my fault. Back then, Canonical was still giving away free Ubuntu DVDs so I ordered one. I got it in the mail and I've been using Ubuntu ever since. I think it was either Dapper or Edgy.

Also: I’ve been using the same window manager since Slackware. Window Maker just fits me.

My uniqueness

[Bigbutt]

Slackware -> Red Hat -> Mandrake. From there I spread out to Ubuntu, OpenBSD (not Linux, I know), more Red Hat, CentOS. I've poked around at others but that's the list of ones I've installed and used for any length of time. I did order the most recent Slackware distro but it must have gotten lost in the e-mail as I never received it :(

For other systems, Irix, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, and Tru64. Oh and OS X.

[John]

Distro History

[rel48]

Slackware, RedHat, Mandrake, Gentoo

1996-2012

[Knuckles]

Slackware on floppies, and had to immediately procure help from a linux user in the local BB (thanks A.T.!) to install a development kernel to support a piece of hardware I had. 1.3.78 from March 25, 1996.
SuSE (since then Linux distros have been the only desktop OS used in my house)
RedHat (a few months)
Debian
Gentoo (for a week or two)
Debian
Ubuntu (since nearly from the start and liking Unity more and more)

Re:1996-2012

[Lashat]

At the risk of taking some of the fire from the flames you are going to receive I am going to agree with you that Ubuntu Unity is not bad now that the initial bugs are ironed out.

Re:1996-2012

[Zamphatta]

I really like Ubuntu/Unity. It's simple, efficient, and not bad looking. I can get all my GUI stuff done just as easy as on Windows, while having the power of the commandline that Windows doesn't have. Unity is a large part of the reason I got back to Linux as a desktop.

Debian Testing, In The End

[Bob9113]

RedHat > Mandrake > Debian > Ubuntu > Linux Mint > Debian

Lots of other experiments along the way, of course, but those are the ones that have spent more than a month on my main workstation. Debian has had the lions share by far -- probably 70 - 80%.

My Linux Order

[spac]

Slackware -> RedHat -> Gentoo -> Suse -> Ubuntu

The order doesn't really make sense, I really like Ubuntu now for its simplicity, but that might also be because I love Macs.

Missing option

[Provocateur]

Where is the Cowboy Neal option?

Re:Missing option

[unixisc]

Actually, Stallman has abandoned it and preferred to stay w/ crippled distros of Linux, such as gNewSense and so on. The only 2 organizations actively working on HURD are Arch & Debian.

My evolution

[morgandelra]

slack 2.7, redhat 4.2, debian, ubuntu, xubuntu

VM every distro you want.

[Lashat]

end of message

From the top...

[shakezula]

I'm only counting distros I actually used for more than a day or two, and yes I'm counting all *nix's, not just Linux...

In order since 1999 (when I discovered Linux):

Redhat 5.x, Redhat 6.x, CalderaLinux (loved the Novell Client built in), Various Fedora/FedoraCore's, Solaris 10, Solaris Express, OpenSolaris, Ubuntu 9.04, Ubuntu 10.04, Debian Etch, Ubuntu 11.10, Ubuntu 12.04, Debian Squeeze.

There were a few years (2004-2009) that I really liked and used Solaris quite a bit, but it lost me when the whole Oracle purchase went through. Fedora lost me when Ubuntu came along, and likewise, Ubuntu has recently started losing me to Debian. I like to think Debian's got the right mix of what I'm looking for (I'm posting this using Squeeze) and don't plan to leave anytime soon! Slow is fine with me, I want it to WORK and Debian does a good job of that!

List

[ShieldW0lf]

Workstation:
Mandrake - Red Hat - Turbolinux - Debian - Gentoo - Debian - Ubuntu - Ubuntu Studio

Server:
Debian - CentOS - Ubuntu LAMP

Media Center: Ubuntu - Mythbuntu - XBMCbuntu

Other: Smoothwall, Knoppix, Yellow Dog

Gentoo-Debian-Ubuntu-Xubuntu-Mint-NetRunner

[gshegosh]

I went Debian->Ubuntu Server on my servers.

Only one you need

[sunking2]

MCC on 3 floppies.

Re:Only one you need

[jmitchel!jmitchel.co]

Getting pretty close to the root there. I think I started on SLS, but went to MCC because I wanted something that wasn't so bloaty.

try, try, again...

[Will.Woodhull]

Tried RedHat and Mandrake a couple of times, 10+ years ago. Had to go back to Windows, I needed more support than was available to get proper drivers, etc, working.

Free Geek version of Debian around 2004.Mostly worked, except lacking good image editing. That was partly hardware limitations, not the OS.

Ubuntu since about 2008. Finished migration from Windows in 2011, with Gimp v2.5+ and Bamboo graphics tablet being the last changes. I think I have Win7 on a laptop that gathers dust in a closet, but working computers run Ubuntu v10.4 (netbook) or v12.04 (graphics work station).

Still have not settled on a DE. Liked Gnome v2.x, but v3.x not so much. But I think Unity sucks and KDE is not much better. Will stay with Gnome 3 in "classic" mode for now but thinking about alternatives.

At 28.8k (if I was lucky) I started with RedHat

[dclozier]

Which I was able to purchase from Best Buy. (1999-2000ish) They also had SuSe which I went to next. Later on I went to Debian but that was via mail order. I forget what the price was but it was cheap. I gave Mandrake a try there after but went back to Debian. I'm currently using Kubuntu but have decided to go back to Debian again. (or possibly Arch)

My main reason for Ubuntu/Kubuntu was that it just works, mostly, and I have work to do which is more important than trying to get my desktop going to do the work. To me that's the most important part of any distro these days - how much effort will be needed for me to keep working without interruptions.

Progression

[Murdoch5]

I started with OpenSuse, Moved to Ubuntu, Moved to Arch and Now I use Gentoo. Basically I kept stepping up the control I had from a user prospective. Right now I'm where I want to be, I have the ideal balance of control / power and ease.

Hmmmm..... something like this.

[used2win32]

SUSE -> Corel -> Red Hat ->Mandrake -> SUSE -> Slackware -> Ubuntu (while using it, I tried Debian and Mint) -> OSX (with Ubuntu in a VM)

I think I got tired of working on my computer and just wanted it to work. (Which is why Windows is not listed here)

Slackware - Ubuntu - Debian - Ubuntu - Mint

[kenrro]

Slackware was the distro my school used on their servers, so, after the experiencie I tried that first. Changed to Ubuntu because my family had problems using kde -_- Changed to Debian becaues I was getting tired of reinstalling every 6 months... Changed to Ubuntu again because, my rolling desktop on Debian refused to run X after an update... Changed to Mint, because I started the hate Ubuntu after forcing me to use Unity... I thinking on returning to Debian again, Mint its... kinda heavy on my netbook...

Red Hat - Mint

[Zedrick]

Red Hat (around 95 or 96, installed it on my girlfriends parents computer since I was on Amiga at that time)
Slackware (1998-2000, stopped using Linux for a while after that - not slackwares fault)
... ... (Windows/FreeBSD)
Debian (2002-2004, discovered the wonders of apt)
Debian on the server (2002-)
Ubuntu/Xubuntu (2004-2010. 2004 was the year of the Linux Desktop when stuff just worked out of the box for the first time)
Mint (2012-. Cinnamon edition)

Also tried Mandrake, Suse, Gentoo and something else but didn't really like them. Might try Arch some day soon.

Conectiva-Mandrake-RH-Ubuntu-Mint

[thoriumbr]

I started with Conectiva, a Brazilian distro. The installation killed my entire disk, and my Windows partition was killed along with my backups. And it was a good thing, because I was forced to use Linux. And without internet connectivity, restarting my Windows life would take a lot of time and floppy disks.
From there, a Mandrake. It was the first distro with drivers for my alien extraterrestrial ultra powerful soundcard. Even on Windows I had never ever heard anything from it. Until that rainy day, 3am, alone home, in the dark, and after booting Mandrake for the first time. I had two big speakers on a nice setup, plugged to the computer, and mute. But when the KDE login sound blasted through them, I almost fell of the chair.
Things changed, I migrated to RedHat. And I was happy. Until the day the them-CIO of RH told everybody that end users should use Windows, Linux was intended for servers. And I found RH9 clumsy and crippled. And I migrated to Ubuntu Warthog.
I was happy with Ubuntu, until I saw the speed of a Gentoo box. And I tried Gentoo. And for some time I was happy. Until a friend asked me "why Gentoo?" and I realized I was shaving milliseconds of time to run the programs, and spending hours to download and build them. Back to Ubuntu.
Then a friend shows me SuSE. It was full of whistles and bells, a very nice setup, and I tried. For a month... And back to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu forever! Ubuntu is the best! Ubuntu will rule the entire world! What the heck is Unity? Is a joke? Time to change again...
My totally non-technical inclined wife asked me to replace that crappy OS running on her computer, and asked me for a Linux. And I installed Mint for her. And she was very pleased. I was too. And I installed Mint. And liked.
Mint forever! Mint is the best! Mint will rule the entire world!

But I maintain servers too, not only my desktop.
My servers started with Conectiva, migrated to RedHat, migrated to OpenBSD for a long time, and some stays OpenBSD.
My clients today uses RedHat Enterprise, SuSE Enterprise, and Debian.

Re:Conectiva-Mandrake-RH-Ubuntu-Mint

[Plekto]

The Devs of Mint have their own version, Cinnamon, that they use and work on. I highly recommend it, since it's basically a front-end replacement for KDE. Very fast and slick. All of the newest fixes and apps and so on are being developed there first from what I can tell. It's a simple install, as it's really a re-worked shell and not a full distro.

Cinnamon is just awesome. A different interface look to be sure, but it isn't Unity BS or Gnome bloat.

FreeBSD

[na1led]

I used to do tech support for a local ISP, and everything was BSD. I purchased a book on FreeBSD along with the CD's and starting learning the basics. After that, Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, and Ubuntu.

From hardcore to softcore

[Rob Kaper]

Around 12 years of Slackware. Then moved to Ubuntu LTS for VPSes and Mint for the laptop about 3 years ago.

Debian.

[MetricT]

Slackware -> Debian -> RHEL -> Debian -> Fedora -> Debian -> FreeBSD -> Linux -> Ubuntu -> Debian -> Mint Debian -> Debian.

While most distros have their strength, it's *really* hard to beat Debian.

Debian

[smallmj]

I first installed Debian on my main desktop somewhere around 1997. I don't remember why, but I wiped and re-installed Debian in early 1998. Since then, I have upgraded hardware and software many, many times, but I have never wiped and re-installed again. Show my any other distro that you can do that with. There are different kinds of easy.

My distros date me a little...

[pngwen]

Yggdrasil -> Slackware -> Redhat (for an hour)->
Debian -> Slackware -> Gentoo -> Knoppix -> Ubuntu ->
Gentoo (Forever!)

UNIX wise, I've owned HP-UX machines, 1 AIX server,
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, then NetBSD

Prior to Yggdrasil, I had a cross compiled linux from scratch sort of setup. Ah, those were good days!

Just Linux?

[splict]

Okay, my browser crashed the first time I posted this - no I won't say which one!

Would be interesting to see where people started on *nix before Linux. I started on IRIX (computer animator.) Whatever....

• Suse,
• Debian (such a pleasure after Yum or whatever it was back then,)
• Ubuntu,
• Arch. Full Stop.

I like to try other distros out but I doubt I'll ever change. So easy, and always just like I want it.

Get off my lawn

[Sheik Yerbouti]

Something on floppies don't remember but probably Redhat, Yggdrasil Linux (that's a real thing look it up), Redhat, OpenBSD, Mandrake now called Mandriva, Xandros, Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu and now Xubuntu and CentOS, RHEL and SLES at work.

Order

[Imagix]

Slackware Redhat Debian Ubuntu Debian Plus dabble in a few others along the way.

Red Hat - Fedora - Debian - Ubuntu - Debian

[Pirulo]

ditto

Long list

[ender-]

Yggdrasil [couldn't get it working]
Slackware
Mandrake 5.1 beta - best, most functional desktop I ever had
Redhat
Slackware
Sorcerer
SourceMage
Slackware
Debian
Ubuntu
Debian [today]

Of course there were many test installs of other distros but that's the list of what desktops [and servers] I've run as my main environment

Mine

[pavon]

I played around with several, so I may have some details wrong but IIRC it was:
RedHat 4 -> Slackware -> Debian Woody -> RedHat 7 -> Mandrake -> Ubuntu -> Debian Squeeze

Of these, the two Debian install were the ones that stayed on my computer the longest, and I've pretty much settled on it now. It is rock solid, doesn't randomly break stuff with updates and has a great package manager and repository.

The RPM hell related to the early libc changes put me off of RedHat for a long time. I decided that if I was going to futz with that sort of stuff I might as well use a simpler distro that exposed you to it, hence Slackware, which was a nice learning experience. I'd really like to do a Linux From Scratch install one of these days to update my understanding of modern Linux ecosystem internals.

I wasn't thrilled with Mandrake. I chose it because it was supposed to have nice hardware setup wizards, but when I ran them they silently failed, leaving me with no clue of what happened, and leaving the system config files in an inconsistent half configured state. I had to read through the scripts line by line to figure out what they had done and undo the damage (or wipe and reinstall).

Then I got tired of building my own machines and decided to support Dell's step into the Desktop Linux world. Hence Ubuntu. Out of the box it worked great. But every single upgrade after that broke something. Usually the Intel graphics, sometimes the audio. I eventually got fed up with it and went back to Debian.

at home or at work?

[GungaDan]

At home I went from Mandrake to Libranet (wish that one had stayed around - it was made of pure awesome) to Debian to Ubuntu server with the Xubuntu desktop, then Ubuntu server with the Ubuntu (gnome2) desktop, then Ubuntu server with MATE when Unity was foisted on us. I use the server version for software RAID support on install, since /home lives on a software RAID1 array. It's easy enough to throw a GUI on top. Once I discovered "ubuntu-restricted-extras" there was no more fiddling in Debian for me to make multimedia "just work."

At work I started using Ubuntu server with the LAMP install option around 2008ish. This made for quick and dirty webservers. Joining them to the AD was simple with Likewise-open, and not too difficult with plain old winbind. Somewhere between Hoary and Lucid, support for a particular RAID controller was lost, so we gave CentOS a try and we haven't looked back. And since we're stuck with Hyper-V for VM hosting (yeah - great, a host we have to reboot at least monthly), CentOS has become a natural fit for us. Yum seems to have matured nicely. It's no apt, but it's alright.

But still... my kingdom (such as it is) for a return to Libranet. That Adminpanel they had was the shit. Total shame that the distro followed one of its developers to the grave. I still have fond memories of recompiling the kernel just for shits and giggles 'cuz it was so easy.

Debian

[CoolHnd30]

RedHat->Caldera->Mandrake->RedHat->Mandrake->Debian->(personal branch) Mandrake->Debian Testing->Debian Sid->Sidux->AptoSid->Siduction *with some gentoo, arch, Ubuntu, Mint and various others thrown in there somewhere for short periods Also - for work there has been RHEL, CentOS and Debian Stable

Started with Yggdrasil in '94

[CQDX]

Yggsdrasil -> Slackware -> RedHat 2.0 through RedHat 9 -> Fedora 1 through 4 -> Kubuntu 7.04 until KDE4 -> Xubuntu (currently 11.04). If I was starting out now I'd start with Xubuntu. If was experienced and just wanted something that works for the desktop without alot of crapware, I'd run Xubuntu (which is what I'm doing now).

RedHat - Fedora - Ubuntu

[knahrvorn]

My order was:

1. RedHat Linux, back when you logged into a text based console by default and had to type the command startx for anything graphical to happen. If anyone knows where to download old Redhat 5 ISOs or thereabouts, please tell me ;-)

2. Fedora Core, when RedHat became RHEL.

3. Ubuntu, when I was adviced enough times that it was just worked. Still had some issues, at the time, though, especially on laptops - ndiswrapper, anyone?

And then, of course, I've had short-time affairs with other distros from time to time.

Going way back...

[JamesTKirk]

Yggdrasil SUSE Mandrake Debian Mepis Gentoo Centos Debian Ubuntu Kubuntu OpenSUSE

my order

[Bramlet Abercrombie]

Pops gave me a computer while in college around 2003 with knoppix, went on to Ubuntu, then Linux mint, now just Windows 7 though.

cut my teeth on Red Hat

[elsegundo]

Red Hat -> Fedora -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu

Depends on which machine

[Tepar]

My desktop/laptop:
Slackware -> RedHat -> Mandrake -> Mandriva -> Kubuntu -> OpenSUSE -> Ubuntu -> Kubuntu

My server:
Mandrake -> Mandriva -> OpenSUSE

Family Machine (limited, with 1GB RAM):
Mandrake -> Kubuntu -> Ubuntu -> Debian Stable with Trinity Desktop

from S.U.S.E to Debian

[cobbaut]

First S.U.S.E
--> Red Hat 3.x and 4.x (before the Red Hat/Fedora split)
--> Fedora (Core 1) up to core 6-7 or so
--> Ubuntu 4.10 up to 11.4
--> Debian

Today Debian and some CentOS.

(and some LFS, Mandrake and Gentoo testing in the early years)

Single purpose -> masochist -> power user

[Alwin Henseler]

SuSE 6.x - long ago, wtf is Linux?

FreeSCO - single floppy router distro. Knew what Linux was good for by then, picked that, served its purpose well for a year or so.

Gentoo - powerful, source based, interesting concept. But after a while decided it was too much work for my CPU.

Linux-from-scratch (or more exactly: built my own) - used gained knowledge to get down & dirty and learn a lot about low level details, compiling programs manually, config files, etc, etc, etc. Got it to a stage where I'd start with ~10 MB worth of binaries, and re-compile everything from source & a few patches only. Enough for a very basic 'multimedia' system (X11 + window manager, web browser, picture viewer, a Doom clone, play MP3's etc). And all development tools needed to re-build the entire system using only stuff previously compiled from source. Something like Tiny Core Linux these days. Of course the work in maintaining this was too much, so I moved on after this exercise.

Ubuntu - easy to use & maintain. I felt like it automated / got in the way sometimes just a little too much. But biggest reason for moving on: too much focus on upgrading / looks / features as opposed to actually fixing bugs. So the natural successor after that:

Debian - the mother of all Linux distro's IMHO. Focus on stability, mostly non-commercial community behind it, cross platform, well put together & with a huge package selection. Have been back & forth between stable and testing a couple of times.

...and probably some other distro's I checked out once & forget about. Puppy Linux and other specialized mini distro's used on the side regularly.

Any Puppy users here?

[Goodyob]

Damn Small Linux -> Puppy -> OpenSUSE -> Fedora -> Mint -> Ubuntu I had to start with lightweights as I was working with a really ancient computer (11 years old at the time!)

Re:Gateway drug?

[HappyHead]

If it's so uninteresting, why are you still posting? Wouldn't it make more sense for you to just read a different article that you felt actually was interesting? I think it's kind of sad that you've spent more energy typing in your insistence that nobody should post responses to this thread than the vast majority of people posting responses to this thread have.
Seriously, follow your own advice, if it makes you so angry to see people doing things that you don't want to do - type out your rage filled rant, and then hit cancel.

Amazing what stupid questions get accepted!

[Theovon]

Wow. It would be one thing to ask about something relevant to choosing to install a new distro. But a totally idle question about people's history of distro usage. Who gives a crap that I once used Red Hat 9? This is the sort of question that gets accepted here?

Slashdotters will notice that whenever an article appears on biology or evolution, commenters complain up and down about "those stupid creationists." So I put up an askslashdot, requesting suggestions for a really good textbook on detailed evidence used to construct theories in evolutionary biology. In other words, the evidence that creationists say that doesn't exist, in a form that's easy to read. I thought it would be a good educational opportunity for me and plenty of other people. But that's the sort of question that gets rejected.

I think that slashdot editors are closet creationists who would rather faff on about what Linux distro they used in 1995 than, god forbid, think pedagogically about science. Slashdot isn't news for nerds.

Re:Amazing what stupid questions get accepted!

[Tastecicles]

mod up. Slashdot has turned into the tech-head's Fox News.

Re:Amazing what stupid questions get accepted!

[spauldo]

Considering that (at the time I'm posting this) there's 640 comments, I'd wager to guess that nerds like this kind of question. I find it interesting to see what other Linux users have used in the past, and I would probably qualify as a nerd (although after you hit 20 or 25 the label doesn't fit well).

Your question sounds like an invitation for a massive flame fest. Perhaps that's why it wasn't selected.

Linux Distros on my Primary PC

[Katyrnyn]

I'll avoid discussing what I use at work and on my personal servers, and go over what I have used as my primary OS on my primary desktop/notebook/PC.

1) Redhat - 1997ish - Wasn't my style, so it didn't last long.
2) SuSE - 1998-2001 - Nicely polished; I only stopped using because of new hardware.
3) - dark ages - 2001-2002 - I toyed with lots of distros, but none of them really did what I needed for my hardware. Windows was primary during this timeframe.
4) Gentoo - 2002-present* - Gentoo has been my go-to since '02. There was a period between 2006-2007 where it was seemingly in "meltdown," but those days are past.
*5) KUbuntu - 2006-2007 - I needed a working OS, and Gentoo was it during this timeframe.
*6) Fedora - 2011 - I tested Fedora on my desktop last year for a few months before I abandoned land-locked PCs and went full time to a laptop/netbook.
*7) Arch - 2011 - I also tested Arch on my netbook, but it didn't like the poor little thing for a multitude of reasons.

*Also, as of June of 2012, my primary home PC is a Mac.... So my primary home OS is not, and probably will never again be, a Linux distro. But this isn't the place to discuss that....

It's been a ride

[TheSpoom]

Red Hat (college told us to install a distro in a VM, basically to get us used to working in a shell and to train us on vim)
-> SUSE (college again)
-> Gentoo (this was when I started using Linux myself and wanted to set up a server from scratch on an old box of mine, it taught me a lot)
-> Ubuntu (when I got tired of Vista fucking with me and wanted a desktop system)
-> Linux Mint (when I got tired of Ubuntu fucking with me...)

MMC-SLS-Slackware-RedHat-OpenSUSE-Ubuntu

[kroyd]

MMC was one of the first distributions - I distinctly remember writing the floppies using DOS, it took something like 15 minutes per floppy, as they were written byte-by-byte, not fancy block-by-block as the young folks are using these days :P

After MMC I switched to SLS, then Slackware, RedHat (bought on those really cheap CDs you could order online), OpenSUSE, finaly Ubuntu.

The biggest change is probably that for the last couple of years all my networking equipment runs some version of Linux, my phone (Android), hell, even my DSLR runs Linux (http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/DI/SLT-A55.html). This has not been a conscious choice by me btw, but it seems Linux really is everywhere these days.

Magic smoke

[onyxruby]

I've played with a number of distros off an on over the years, but the one I distinctly recall the most clearly was Red Hat 5.2 around 98 or so. I installed it and got to playing with it and the first thing I did was to increase the refresh rate on my monitor. I of course set it as high as it could go and it worked just fine.

About 2 minutes later the magic smoke was let out. Cost me a $300 monitor and was quite the object lesson on a new operating system. Thankfully you can't do this any more, however I would imagine that I'm far from the only person to have this happen to them back in the day.

memory lane

[killmenow]

Slackware floppies
Redhat 4.x
Redhat 5.x
Redhat 6.x
Redhat 7.x
Mandrake/Mandriva
CentOS
cAos
LFS
Debian
ubuntu/xubuntu
Mint
Android, Debian & Fedora (simultaneously and yes I count Android as a distro)

Also used some of the more specific purpose distros like systemrescuecd, geexbox, mythdora, damn small linux, puppy, smoothwall, INSERT, Trinity Rescue Kit, gparted live, maemo, DD-WRT, IPCop, and OpenWRT.

I swear there's another old custom distro I was working with some guys on (I was testing for them) and I can't remember the name of it. It died before it ever got to wide use so I guess it hardly matters.

slackware - redhat - ubuntu, with more

[MattW]

slackware -> redhat -> centos/ubuntu, with more thrown in (debian and (ugh) suse)

I now typically install CentOS on servers and Ubuntu as a development VM/desktop environment. (But in ~08 I switched from using a Linux Desktop after 15 years of Solaris and Linux desktops, to using a Mac.)

75 floppies and you aren't one

[scorp1us]

Slackware (75 floppies), RedHat (Colgate 4.2), RedHat ~7.3, Ubuntu, Mint.

can I get RHEL on floppies?

[dpiven]

SLS -> Redhat -> Fedora -> Ubuntu -> Kubuntu desktops and Debian servers with forays into CentOS, UbuntuStudio, Gentoo and DamnSmall.

mine...

[MetalliQaZ]

Slackware->NetBSD->(NetBSD+Debian)

Yggsdrasil

[xpurple]

Yggsdrasil
Slackware
Redhat
SuSE
Debian
Ubuntu
Kubuntu

Re:Yggsdrasil

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

Ahhhh Yggdrasil...... I loaded it up briefly in the mid-90s but went back to OS/2. I stayed off Linux until 2001 or so, playing with Mandrake, Red Hat, & Caldera. In 2004 I started using SUSE. Last year I used Mint for about 6 months; now back to OpenSUSE.

Re:Yggsdrasil

[xpurple]

I loved OS/2 back in the day!

whew.....

[TheCarp]

Personal Systems:
Redhat (4.1) -> Debian (bo) -> Ubuntu (5-6ish?) -> Recent Ubuntu with future plans to switch back to Debian.

Desktop and server split at Debian/Ubuntu... keeping Debian on server systems, and ubuntu on

Professionally my choices have been more dictated by job, usually being some RHEL flavor, most recently OEL. Generally this only applied to servers, but, my most recent employer has an approved desktop linux build so, rather than continue to go off the reservation, I broke down and just installed it.

I started with Speaker Doom

[Nimey]

it was an old hack of the Linux version of Doom, with a barebones 2.0.32-based Linux distro, set up to make relative nice-sounding sound effects through the PC Speaker, bundled up as a .zip that you extracted over a FAT filesystem and from DOS ran a loader that switched to Linux. It's here: http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=9704

After that I went to Debian and then to Ubuntu[1], and at the moment I'm using Ubuntu Server as a building-block distro. Considering a switch to Mint. I've used other distros in VMs, and at one time my work PC had Slackware 10 until I needed a version of Samba that could talk to Active Directory.

[1] it was Ubuntu's general polish around 5.10 that made me switch, and especially the graphical sudo, which was far better than anything Microsoft had.

slackware.....

[jmd]

14 floppies for the basic install. a friend and i bought cdroms (1x i think)... unfortunately we chose the panasonic interface. once slackware was running with a browser, windows 3.1 was history. then on to anything i could find that would run on a 275mhz Alpha board that i bought really cheap. although i always had an intel box as the main desktop which was red hat. red hat had strong support for Alpha in the 90s. anything but beige.

when red hat went commercial i went to libranet. then i bought an ibook g4. boredom set in ... so i switched to ubuntu.

just bought a raspberry pi

A confusing evolution

[Captain Spam]

For me, it went something like:

Red Hat* -> Slackware -> FreeBSD** -> Gentoo + Kubuntu

*: Before RHEL existed.
**: Okay, fine, that's not Linux, but that's still what replaced Slack on that particular box.

My current server and desktop are both Gentoo, while my laptop is Kubuntu (hence the +). No, there's no particular logical progression, really. Each just looked neat as I came across them.

Started With Red Hat 5.4

[organgtool]

Those were the days - an install process that went on forever by asking questions such as the horizontal and vertical sync ranges of the monitor and the baud rate of the serial mouse. After Red Hat I moved on to Mandrake for a while, then OpenSuse, Knoppix, Damn Small Linux, Ubuntu, and thanks to Gnome 3 I'm about to try Xubuntu or Mint.

I initially started using Linux because I wanted to play with all of the different Window Managers such as KDE, AfterStep, and Enlightenment. I grew to love not only the ability to customize the interface, but also the stability, especially during the times of Windows 98 and NT. At the same time, I grew to hate the package management since many common software packages were released via RPMs that could only be downloaded via web sites and required you to satisfy all of the dependencies on your own (and you'd better make sure that each dependent library you used had the exact version number).

Fast forward 14 years and now three of my four home computers run Linux, all of my workstations and servers at work run Linux, and many of my friends have used it at some point. I don't care if it never takes over the desktop, it always has a place on my machines.

Burroughs AOSP-RSX-11M-VAX/VMS-Sun O/S-Slackwa

[hax4bux]

Do I win a prize?

Re:Burroughs AOSP-RSX-11M-VAX/VMS-Sun O/S-Slackwa

[Rufty]

One free white blazer with very long arms and extra buckles for you, sir!

RedHat-Mandrake-Ubuntu

[Beat The Odds]

RedHat->Mandrake->Ubuntu

I got a kick out of my young daughter who used to call Mandrake "Blue Hat"....

12 years of linux

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

In order from oldest to current: Mandrake (Now Mandriva?), Suse Linux, Gentoo (briefly), Kubuntu, Ubuntu

Re:12 years of linux

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

I guess I should also count Android.

Started with Slack

[neurojab]

Here they are (as best I can remember, and excluding any non-linux operating systems):

Slackware
RedHat
Mandrake
Debian
Kubuntu
Ubuntu with unity (got rid of it immediately after installing)
Mint LXDE edition (still using)
Raspbian (still using)

My primary motivation for switching early on was the package manager. I thought RPM would be better than Slackware's lack of a package manager (at the time), but I still ended up in dependency hell. Debian package management is a few steps up from this (love apt-get) , but I wanted more recent software (and libraries) than are in debian stable, so I switched to Kubuntu . I tried Unity, hated it, so moved to Linux Mint, which is basically the same as Ubuntu without Unity.

IIRC

[rickb928]

Server installs:
Slackware 0.9 on CD in 1994
More Slackware on CD
Debian, something old on CD
Red Hat, via FTP, then CDs, then back to FTP, from about 1996 to 2003
Fedora until 2008
Debian until now

Workstation installs:
Slackware 0.9 in 1994
Debian in 1994
Red Hat in 1995
Suse from 1996 to 2004
Ubuntu since then

My first install was Slackware from The Internet CD book, what a challenge. First server was up in 1995, Red Hat, running proxies, VPNs, and DNS for a client. In 1996 I inherited the ISP business we bought, and that got me another server and hax0rs galore for two years. Fun times.

I installed Slackware on a spare machine two days after a fiasco with a SCO client, trying to get a printer working. The app developer wrote their own print handling, and charged about $600/hr to add a new printer or change one, which we wanted to do to improve speed. The client wanted to know why we couldn't just plug it in, cause Windows let you do that. I was happy to see them find another servicer, who promptly asked ME for the root password. We were under NDA with the dev to not disclose it even to the client. Arg.

Ashes to Ashes, Slack to Slack

[DirePickle]

Slackware, mid-late-90s (just to play around with)
Debian, late 90s (mostly to play around with, also small webserver)
Xubuntu, ~2005 (on an old laptop)
Ubuntu, ~2007 (on a new laptop)
Slackware, ~2009 (same laptop, after Ubuntu broke my graphics/sound/wifi for the twentieth time)

Pretty happy with Slack. But been considering a move.

Parallel use of the following:

[Animixer]

Rescue CDs are left off the list.

Desktop

RedHat (x86) --> Fedora (x86) ----> Gentoo (x86) --> Debian (x86) --> xubuntu (x86) -->
             |                  |
             \-> Knoppix (x86)  \-> Gentoo (sun4u) -->

Servers

  /----RHEL (IA64/x86_64/x86) --->
  |                            |
  |                            \-> CentOS (x86_64)
  |
  |----SLES (IA64/x86_64/x86) ---> OpenSuSE (x86_64)
  |
  |----Gentoo (x86/sun4u/sun4d; experimental!)
  |
  \----Debian (x86/x86_64)

Small Beginnings....and still so

[bman49er]

Started with Knoppix (only from the live disk) - 2005 Mandrake/Mandriva for about a year - 2006 Knoppix again through most of 2007 Ubuntu - 2007 - 2011 Xubuntu and Ubuntu Server - 2012 In between all of them I've tried several others. I work with Redhat servers in my job now, but prefer Debian-based distro at home:) Only from mid 2008 to mid 2009 did I go Linux only. All other times I did a dual boot or separate disk altogether. I'm no guru by any means, but I do continue to learn.

RedHat, Debian

[mrflash818]

RedHat, Debian.

Apt

[Bo'Bob'O]

It's pretty much the quality of repositories that have guided which distro I've used. As a casual user (that is, I mostly use it on secondary computers for servers or MythTV,rather then my main desktop, nor am I a developer) compiling myself and dealing with dependencies is a huge pain. So to me, the quality of a distro is how easily I can add software without breaking things or finding it broken with a distro upgrade. So far, Apt seems to be best at that, and Canonical seems to best maintain their repository.

Redhat (starting 5.2) > SuSE > Open SuSE > Debian > Ubuntu

The good old days

[bigwheel]

Non-Linux:
TRSDOS - in 1978 on RS Model 1
MSDOS

Linux:
SLS - in 1992, Kernel 0.99 pl 9 on my i486. - 35 floppies
Slackware
RedHat
CentOs
Fedora
RHEL - Still using it at home and work

DLD - Suse - Debian - Ubuntu

[drolli]

DLD = Deutsche Linux-Distribution

Slackware - Corel Linux - Debian GNU/Linux

[canadiangoose]

Been using Debian since 2.1, quickly moved to Sid on my main system and have never looked back. Only reinstalled once, to make the leap to 64-bit. RedHat sucks.

Re:My order

[PartyBoy!911]

Red Hat -> SuSe > Ubuntu > Mint > Fedora+Cinnamon

On my main box:-

[Rufty]

SLS->Yggdrasil->Slackware->Redhat->SuSE->YellowDog->Debian->Debian->...->Debian->Debian->Ubuntu Next up, Mint.

Old School order

[cheetah]

This is going to date me but...

sls --> Slackware --> Gentoo --> Centos

I started with sls in mid 92(I think it was the only distro at the time). After that I used Slackware until about three years ago. I started using Gentoo just because I liked the idea of having a system truly compiled for my current hardware. I recently switched to Centos on my server(not the desktop) because of stuff breaking when I did an update.

Here's mine

[Chris Mattern]

Slackware --> Debian --> Ubuntu (sometimes)

199x

[EkriirkE]

Slackware, RedHat, FreeBSD, Fedora

So long ago

[SuperTechnoNerd]

Umm lets see.. Slackware, Mandriva, Fedora.. Ubuntu than back to Fedora.

Ah, the random access memories

[TeknoHog]

Red Hat 6.0 (1999)
Mandrake (2000 or 2001)
Gentoo (2003)

However, in some ways I feel that software like the window manager and "word processors" reflect a deeper direction. In roughly the same timeframe, I've gone with Gnome -> Enlightenment -> Fluxbox and LyX -> LaTeX/emacs. Towards simplicity and focus, but I feel I've reached the point I like, and I have no urge to get into tiling WMs or such.

Wait, was there an actual technically relevant question, or is this just an excuse to reminisce? I think the great thing about Linux is that you could start with a toy like Gnome, but it allows you to dig deeper into the OS. Open a gnome-terminal and there you have a programming environment in the form of bash, no need to install specialist tools like you'd have to in Windows.

Beginner - Progressively Harder - Lazy

[Xyverz]

I started with RedHat 5.1 (no, not RHEL) and then moved to Mandrake (which was essentially RH + patches and UI upgrades). Next came Debian (slink, potato, woody), followed by Gentoo. After 2+ years of rebuilding my entire OS every time I wanted to update the installed system, I got lazy and switched to Ubuntu. I've tried other distros since, but I've always come back to Ubuntu. I haven't been a big fan of Unity, and with Mate Desktop, I'm back in lazy-arsed end-user heaven.

I must note though, that I switched to OSX full-time for a while there, and eventually Windows (7, not Vista) actually got usable - and became my full-time OS (games, games, games!), but now I'm back using Linux mostly.

Started with Red Hat 4, now Debian LXDE

[theforest]

Red Hat > Fedora > PCLinuxOS > Mint > Kubuntu Netbook > Mint LXDE, Mint XFCE > Debian LXDE

Left Red Hat/Fedora after many years due to updates breaking the system. Left Mint and Kubuntu after disliking the direction of Gnome and KDE. The Kubuntu was to tryout a netbook edition. Finally settled with Debian LXDE due to its the most lightweight, stripped down, simple version I can find.

I'm seeing a lot of Gentoo-Ubuntu

[Culture20]

Is it just the timing of when gentoo and ubuntu were first released (flavor of the month), or were people getting sick of gentoo's peculiarities and just wanting a Linux that worked immediately after install?

Re:I'm seeing a lot of Gentoo-Ubuntu

[Provocateur]

I noticed that as well, but Ubuntu seems to be the diametric opposite of Gentoo, when other mainstream distros could have fit the bill. These are hardly n00bies. Was it more like a show of support?

Since about 1993:

[MistabewM]

Slackware -> Red Hat -> Debian -> Gentoo -> Debian -> Arch and I am stuck on Arch...

What a long, strange trip it's been...

[Larry_Dillon]

Slackware (from floppy!) -> Redhat Linux 5.x - 6.2 -> Mandrake -> Redhat Linux 8 - 9 -> Suse -> Fedora Core -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu -> Fedora

AIX included

[sprior]

I believe this in in order: AIX/PS2 (yeah that was floppies back in 1988), AIX/370, AIX/6000, Slackware, Red Hat, linuxfromscratch.org, Gentoo (not for long), CentOS, pfSense, Ubuntu Server (GUIs are for wimps).

Is OpenSuse actually harder to use than Ubuntu?

[apcullen]

I mean... really? My impression is that all modern distos are pretty much a snap to install and maintain.

I went

[Kryptonut]

Redhat > Debian > Slackware > Gentoo > Debian > Ubuntu + various other *buntu's

With a bit of FreeBSD scattered all the way through, I've always had a soft spot for it.

I ended up with Ubuntu in the end because it was less hassle to maintain (I want a system that's quick to build and I can spend more time using it than configuring or maintaining it) and had relatively up to date packages in the standard repo's. I no longer have as much free time or am as enthusiastic as I once was, performing stage 1 installs of Gentoo in the earlier days.

Not Much Variety

[kd5zex]

Slackware -> Ubuntu (about 10 minutes) -> Slackware

Two Completely Different Distros

[scruffy]

Redhat, then Fedora

What was Linus's own?

[KC1P]

It didn't have a name -- kernel 0.13 plus a wad of basic utils, around 1991. Booting from floppy only (LILO came later) and you had to patch the boot disk with DEBUG.COM to set the root. No networking (Taylor UUCP came soon, TCP/IP later). I was actually pretty offended when distributions came along and started charging $$$ for balling up stuff they got for free from Linus and GNU, but it quickly became the most reasonable way to get Linux as it became enormous. I forget whether I tried SLS briefly before switching to Slackware which is what I've used up until now. Even when it was N floppies you didn't really use N floppies -- for most of them you could rewrite the disk with the next image as soon as the installer spat it out since it wouldn't ask for it back. Very long evening, each time.

Re:What was Linus's own?

[LVSlushdat]

Wow! I sure remember those days.. I didn't start *quite* as early as you, but in 1993'ish, I started playing with Slackware and Yggdrasil, and loved (NOT) the endless floppy disk installs.. At the time I started, I think the kernel was like 1.13 or something like that.. The company I was working for at the time wanted to get on the fledgling Internet, so since I was the one IT guy at the company who knew something about this "Internet", I got tasked to put together a package to get us there.. Since we were a Novell 3.11 shop at the time, the other IT guy wanted to buy the Netware Loadable Module (NLM) based webserver to run on one of our Novell servers. I prevailed and we wound up doing a Slackware install with httpd and ftpd to a brand new system, one of the first Pentiums in our shop, everything else at the time being 486DX systems. We brought in a T1, which as I recall cost like about a grand/month.. Ah memories....

Solaris - Debian

[Kookus]

Solaris - > Debian -> Once you go Debian, you never go back!
Debian FTW!

Don't miss the floppy disk days...

[spagthorpe]

Yggsdrasil -> Slackware -> Mandrake -> Redhat -> Ubuntu -> Mint

Those first couple involved FTPing a huge (huge!) pile of floppy images, then formatting, rawwrite to every floppy, then of course, installing... I don't miss those days at all.

Mandrake was fine at the time, but went to Redhat because of work. Ubuntu seemed fine at home, but I switched to Mint a while ago, and it's been great. Maybe Gentoo next, who knows.

I'm a bit weird, based on these comments

[freeweed]

Well like most people, I messed around with a ton of distros at first. Slack, Gentoo (ugh), Debian, Suse, Mandrake, probably more that I don't remember.

Once I went "full on Linux" on my desktop in 2003: Red hat -> Knoppix -> Ubuntu -> Kubuntu (within a few days). And I've been there ever since. I've always kept a laptop running Windows handy (XP, Vista (yes, Vista) and now 7) for those one-offs that just have problems in Linux. Which are extremely few and far between these past few years.

I'm weird in that I know virtually no one who used Knoppix (3.0/4.0 days) as a primary desktop distro for any length of time. Personally, I found that at the time it had one of the best h/w detection routines, it installed fairly cleanly, and it was just overall a nice distro to work with. I used it exclusively for several years. I really only moved off once *ubuntu took off as a valid alternative.

RedHat 5.2 opened my eyes and I never looked back

[ubersoldat2k7]

I remember each distro I installed on my PC:
Red Hat 5.2 (felt in love with Linux, vim, remote X's, Apache and PHP [I was young])
Mandrake (cute tuxies, magic stars and KDE)
Debian ("apt-get install kde" over a 56K modem is slooooow)
Gentoo (Wow, that "stage 1" thing took long enough)
Ubuntu (Wait, my WiFi, X and Sound card work already? But it's all brown)
Xubuntu (I loath you Unity!)

Over roughly 12 years.

[djtriv]

Redhat Linux -> Debian -> Slackware -> Gentoo -> Arch -> OpenSUSE. This is purely on the desktop. My server path probably went to CentOS and then Debian after Gentoo.

Desktop,Laptop,Router,Phone, and LiveCDs

[Digicrat]

Desktop: Fedora (FC3 for a few months) -> Gentoo (~8 years until the MoBo died) => Ubuntu (due to lack of time) -> Debian (you know why) -> TBD
Laptop: Ubuntu -> Netbuntu -> Debian
LiveCDs: Knoppix (universal repair kit), Backtrack (cyber security training), and Networking Security Toolkit (network troubleshooting)
Router: OpenWRT

Android would also count - particularly if I ever take advantage of the Webtop mode on my Atrix to act as a full Linux environment.

1995 to present

[dohnut]

Past:
1) Slackware (yes, on floppies)
2) RedHat (for quite a while) -- this was also the only time (until recently) I ran Linux as a desktop OS
3) Gentoo (for quite a while)
4) Debian

Present:
5) Debian (headless server/nas), Ubuntu (laptop) & Amazon Linux (in the "cloud" :P)

I've played with most of the available distros at one time or another. I also ran FreeBSD for a while (alongside Linux).

My current setup has my Windows 7 64-bit PC (main workstation) with an Ubuntu laptop (embedded development) and a Mac OSX laptop (general purpose use & music recording). My headless Debian server/firewall and my headless Debian 16 TB NAS. I used to host DNS, HTTP/S, etc. locally but have since moved those to Amazon's EC2 service and am running Amazon's Linux AMI there on my virtual server.

Several

[mce]

Manual-no-distro (ref my signature) => SLS => Slackware => Manual (OK, some Slackware files &structures were left, but I compiled literally everything from the original sources (i.e. bypassing slack to get whatever version I wanted) and reconfigured just about everything) => Suse (very briefly) => OpenSuse.

In parallel also RedHat for many years, once I managed to have Linux accepted at the office. These days also some UI-less Ubuntu.

Started with DSLinux

[LeRaldo]

My main OS was Windows XP. I started messing around with Damn Small Linux on a bootable CD-R. I didn't do it for any other reason other than curiosity. It was really intriguing to me that I could boot into a functional operating system with a bunch of decent tools, without having to install anything. I think I also messed around with Puppy Linux, I can't recall. From there, my interest in Linux increased and I went on to try a full distro, Ubuntu (I think it was version 6). Again, it was all about curiosity, and I was just playing around with it instead of using it as a replacement for Windows.

Sometime in 2009 I received an old IBM Thinkpad T30 for free from a friend, and decided I would only install Linux on it, instead of any flavor of Windows. I decided to go with Xubuntu, because after shortly messing around with Gnome, KDE, and XFCE, I decided XFCE was best suited to my preferences. I used Xubuntu for a couple years, and greatly enjoyed the experience.

In 2011 I decided to try some different distros, just to see what else was out there. I shortly tried Fedora and OpenSUSE, and decided I didn't really like them. Then I tried Mint, and fell in love. Mint, on the surface at least, seems to have much better driver support than any distro I had used previously. Maybe it's because they use some "non-free" / "closed" software or whatever, but honestly, the philosophy doesn't really matter to me as a user. Everything just seems to work, and the update manager works great as well. It comes packaged with an awesome selection of software from the get go, and configuration of any type was really minimal. I still use Mint 10 on my laptop to this day. It hasn't replaced Windows 7 on my desktop, but it honestly would, if I could play all of my games.

Survey says...

[Captain Sarcastic]

For me, I started with RedHat 6.2, dual-booting it with a Windows 98 machine... then tried other distros (including one called Caldera) before going with Mandrake. After a while, I got side-tracked... and then started to work on trying to set up an older home machine as a server, and worked with DSL and Zenwalk before getting side-tracked again... then when I got an older laptop from my father-in-law, started using Ubuntu, especially when it just worked without getting too bogged down with eye candy. That was followed up with Linux Mint, which now shares space on my laptop with Windows 7, while another laptop has version 1 of Peppermint Linux (it works, so what the hey?) and serves as a file server and alarm clock. I have different distros burned onto flash drives, and hope to have more soon. This is probably an indication that I am all over the map - so if you can find a pattern out of all of this, congratulations!

Redhat, Mandrake, Debian, Slack, Windows, OS X

[hism]

Started around 2002 with Redhat 5.2 and then some version of Mandrake. I had a 56.6k WinModem back then, which I couldn't use on either Linux distro. I found an old 28.8k hardware modem and hooked it up to that, but it wasn't very practical. About a year later I got broadband, so I went back to experimenting with Linux; can't remember which ones I experimented with but I ended up with Debian potato or woody for a few years, before I switched to Slackware for fun. I think the big motivation for my choice of OS back then was experimentation and learning about Linux.

Around 2006 I got a laptop which just was a nightmare to work with any Slackware so I mainly used Windows. It had become too painful to try to make Linux work on it, but I had access to Ubuntu and Solaris at my university's machines so it was not all bad. In 2009 I got a Macbook, and OS X does everything that I had once wanted from Linux so I've been sticking with that since then. And it is pretty, graphically. So in this 'era' of my OS choices, I was mainly driven by picking something that works for my needs, without being a pain to set up.

For work at an enterprise and as a research assistant I've also been using RHEL9 and Ubuntu, but that is not really by choice. If I threw away my Macbook and got a PC laptop today, I might go with Archlinux, since its orientation towards a simple design seems appealing to me.

Pretty simple, considering...

[Gordonjcp]

Lasermoon Linux-FT to begin with, then some experiments with Monkey Linux (which used umsdos and meant I didn't need to mess around with weird partitioning, which was more difficult back then). Then Slackware, then Debian for a bit, then Ubuntu, then Arch, then Ubuntu for the past couple of years when it became clear it was difficult to actually get real work done on source-based distros like Arch.

I've also used NetBSD pretty much from its early days.

Distros I use/have used

[jmanforever]

(OLD) Slackware, Red Hat 8, Mandrake 8,
(CURRENTLY) Ubuntu on desktops, MontaVista on my embedded systems.

Yes... MontaVista. NO, not Windows Vista, which was a turd. MontaVista really should have sued Microsoft for soiling their good name. http://www.mvista.com/

In the beginning was Walnut Creek...

[timkb4cq]

Where i got a 1998 CD set with Slackware, TurboLinux, Debian & RedHat. None of which I could get working well on my anemic hardware.
The drivers for my CDRom had to be compiled into the kernel, so I had to make floppies from Windows 95 to install a barebones system that could compile the CD drivers before I could get X installed...

In 2000 when I first got DSL I re-purposed an old 386 to be my first router with Coyote Linux.

Mandrake from 2001 to 2004 -> Ubuntu in 2005 -> SimplyMEPIS 2006 - present. With my music server running running Slackware, then Vector, then MEPIS With trials along the way of Antix, Debian, Puppy, Damn Small, Feather, Knoppix, Zenwalk, Gentoo & probably some I've forgotten.

Me, myself and I

[VAElynx]

I started on SuSE in 2004, then went to Slackware in October 2005 and despite a few brushes with Debian, Gentoo and OpenBSD, I never looked back.

Slackware - Gentoo - OSX - Arch

[Lord_Alex]

This was 1999. My highschool friend got me interested in Linux. Gave me a RH install CD. X didn't play well with my monitor (GUI installer); so that didn't work.

Then he gave me Mandrake; similar problem with RH obviously...
Then Debian. That installer was text based and a giant nightmare. Couldn't figure it out.

So he gave me Slackware. Brilliant. It installed and worked and I started learning. Didn't know how to use it. So I would ask my buddy how to do this or that. He'd give me a yellow post-it after class with "man pppd" or "man xorg.conf" and disappear.

Then in college I got masochistic and went Gentoo all out. I had some Debian machines and CentOS too; but Gentoo was my main platform.

Then I left college; got a job and picked up a macbook; run OSX and Arch on my other systems.

Give a teenage boy slackware and a dialup connection. Nothing can stop the teenage quest for dirty pictures.

Eating dirt with slackware for 4 years was probably the best learning curve possible; for me anyways. Everybody is different.

Started with slackware

[hendrikboom]

Slackware
Suse
Redhat
a distro from France I forget the name of, but it was distributed using bittorrent
Debian (started with Sarge and just upgraded one release at at time. Currently on wheezy/testing, but server on squeeze/stable)

Sometime during Debian I installed an Ubuntu on one machine for a few months until Debian's display drivers caught up to my hardware. Went back to Debian first chance I got. Ubuntu just didn't give me enough control over what was going on.

--- hendrik

Mine

[lintmint]

I've probably loaded everything at one time or another but for my main installation best as I can recall I've got:
1996 - 1998 Slackware
1998 - 2002 Mandrake
2002 - 2012 Ubuntu
Currently Mint I'm glad Ubuntu went with Unity or I never would have discovered how nice Mint was.

I'm a (relative) newbie

[MMC Monster]

I'm fairly new to the Linux game.

Ubuntu 5.04 -> 5.10 -> 6.04 (06?) -> 6.10 -> 7.04 -> 7.10 -> 8.04 -> 8.10 -> 9.04 -> 10.04 ->
Linux Mint Cinnamon 13

(See the trend?)

I actually don't like the Linux Mint community pages (too add-laden), but if I have problems I'm able to use the Ubuntu forums without too much issue.

Re:I'm a (relative) newbie

[Plekto]

I'm running Mint with Cinnamon added. I also added a dock and a couple of monitoring apps. It basically runs like a much faster, more streamlined version of Apple's OS. Cinnamon is the Mint developer team's personal customized setup/project and represents a departure as it operates a lot more like Linux 12 interface-wise (though the core is up to date, naturally). A lot of people like myself are upset at the move towards making everything look and feel like a tablet or iPhone.

Mint 13 takes care of the drivers and other issues - it simply works out of the box (as it were). Cinnamon fixes the whole interface and makes it work in a fairly intelligent and seamless manner. The apps make sense and it looks great. Speed is very good, even on older machines, as it appears to be KDE based.

The community site is largely worthless for tech fixes, but at least they see the wisdom of using proprietary codecs and apps when required to instead of having this insane "100% free or nothing at all for you" attitude that is causing most of the other distros to stagnate. ie - you can't have seamless integration and cross-platform compatibility with hardware and software without allowing commercial code to also run side-by-side with your OS. Unless you really want to live in 1999 again.

I also installed the OEM NVidia drivers. I even managed to get Portal 2 (yes, and Steam of course) running under Wine.

Note - the release of NVidia's drivers happened less than a year ago. Most people still don't know about it.

Starting with Mandrake...

[logicassasin]

Actually, I bought the Macmillan Publishing Mandrake 6.1 in 2000 (which they decided to renumber as 6.5), but starting there, if memory serves me:

Mandrake 7.0, 7.1,
Red Hat 6.2
Mandrake 7.2 (my favorite of all time)
Some version of Caldera
Decided to give Debian a try and grabbed 2.2/Potato
Mandrake 8.0, 8.1
Red Hat 7.0, 7.1
Mandrake 8.2,
Progeny Linux
Slackware 8, IIRC
Mandrake 9.0, 9.1,
Red Hat 9
Mandrake 9.2, 10, 10.1, 10.2
Red Hat Enterprise 2.1
some version of DSL
Fedora Core 4
Red Hat Enterprise 3
Mandriva 2006, 2007
Red Hat Enterprise 4.x
Mandriva 2008 ... and there's more, but it's getting fuzzier. At this point, I had also used more DSL versions, White Box Enterprise Linux 4, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Suse.

I finally like Linux.

[jdharm]

Mandrake > SUSE > Knoppix > DSL > CentOS > Ubuntu I'd try it, get dicouraged & quit for 6 months, try again, get discouraged & quit for 6 months...been doing this for just over a decade. Guess I'm one of those people waiting for the desktop to mature. I finally like Linux enough that I feel like if you took away Win & Mac I'd be fine with that.

What about end dates, and computers used?

[yotto]

This would be far more useful as a timeline infographic type thing, listing the computers and OSes used by when started and ended, but I'm too lazy to do that for a Slashdot post.

Best use for a netbook

[synapse7]

Download a distro during the day, load it up in bed before you go to sleep. I've loaded most of the distros listed on distrowatch.com in this fashion.

Mandrake, Suse, Ubuntu

[JoeCommodore]

Mandrake - first one I got that would work with my crappy $200 Cyrix system of the day, learned a bit about X11 problems with that one. Also the easiest to install at the time.

Suse 9.3 retail - the thing just worked - video, sound, etc. though finding on-line assistance in discussions was difficult, and then you would have to fork out more $ to upgrade.

Ubuntu - no forking out $$ for an update, on-line support discussions were abundant, the packages were up to date, and deb packaging (thank goodness!). Though there have been glitches with Ubuntu's new package choices (dropping KDE3 and Gnome 3/Unity) I can use the installer and such to get even the latest version back to a usable state pretty readily.

A chain due to hardware issues actually

[chmod a x mojo]

Started with RedHat 5something

Went to Gentoo for a few years

Briefly went to SuSe 10 when it was the only distro that worked well with my Trident card in a very old laptop. Ditched it when 10.1 come alone and was slower than a rotting dead mule.

By that time Debian Sarge just went stable and I installed Etch( testing ) and have run Debian Testing ever since.

Wouldn't subject anybody else to this order

[feetofclay]

Really dating myself:

1. Slackware - 75 or so floppy disks borrowed from the sysadmin at school and couldn't get X to work because of my Diamond SpeedStar Pro graphics card
2. RedHat Linux (no, that is not missing an "Enterprise") on recommendation from a friend after I upgraded to a machine with an ATi Rage card
3. Debian - moved to Japan and the version of PPP on my laptop wouldn't connect to my ISP, so bought a Japanese Linux Magazine I couldn't read for the Debian JP CD in the back. Connected fine, and no more dependency hell! Yay!
4. Gentoo - Enoch Linux had a version especially compiled for the AMD K6-2, but it morphed into Gentoo before I got back to Canada and broadband, so jumped into that. Brief forays into OpenBSD, Ark, Mepis and LibraNet during this time, but none of them stuck.
5. Fedora - Fedora was well supported at my new job and a new baby ended my time with Gentoo. Unfortunately, it was dog-slow on my laptop.
6. Arch - All the advantages of Gentoo, with none of the hassle. All of the advantages of Fedora, but booted in less than 10 minutes. Works great. Fast. Until...
7. Fedora - I switched jobs and had to give back my company-supplied ThinkPad. And made the big mistake of buying myself an HP. Nothing worked. Spent a month fighting with Arch, finally got it set up, and the HD ate itself. Didn't have the patience to do it again, so back to Fedora. It runs much faster than it did on the Lenovo laptop, but there are some definite issues with power management. Gave Mint Debian a try, too, but it worked about as well as Arch.

Next upgrade, I'll by a ThinkPad and probably go back to Arch.

Recently, if anybody asks (nobody does anymore), I push newbies towards Ubuntu. My wife uses it, and I actually really like Unity (ducks), but use tend to use KDE4 unless I'm on her machine. To be honest, I use Win7 most of the time now because then the fan doesn't deafen me and it'll wake back up after putting the thing to sleep. I'm getting use to it, but the UI is still a PITA compared to ones on Linux.
Mint might be a good starter, too, for the slightly more technically inclined. After that, depends on what they want: bleeding edge - Fedora, learn Linux - Gentoo until they get tired of compiling, then Arch.

Re:Wouldn't subject anybody else to this order

[Outtascope]

couldn't get X to work because of my Diamond SpeedStar Pro graphics card

That takes me back! I remember what a PITA it used to be trying to get X to run with Vipers and the like. Glad those days are (mostly) behind us. (don't mind the proprietary kernel patch for NVidia, beats the hell out of searching through doco trying to find refresh rates that don't destroy your monitor).

LinuxPPC -- Scientific Linux

[dowobeha]

Started of with LinuxPPC on my PowerComputing Mac clone. After that, I believe was Yellow Dog Linux, although I toyed around a bit with MkLinux on pre-PPC Mac hardware. Then SuSE at work on IBM PPC servers, and Mandrake at home. I loved Mandrake! Pretty sure Mandrake was my first x86 Linux. At some point I moved to Fedora because of the good MythTV documentation for that distro. Also toyed around with Linux From Scratch. At work, we used to use CentOS and now are on Scientific Linux.

Re:LinuxPPC -- Scientific Linux

[UncleRage]

Yup, YDL first, too. Kept it going until my old Yikes G4 bit the dust.

Got the buzz and went Redhat on x86 from there for a bit, then Debian, played with Gentoo during my Debian days and then realized my Debian days would probably never end.

So far, they haven't.

In the beginning was MCC

[amp001]

then TAMU, SLS, Slackware, Red Hat, and finally Ubuntu

My Order

[Venotar]

Initially I installed a number of distros in a mult-boot config to figure out which one I wanted. I evaluated:
CalderaLinux,
TurboLinux,
Debian (woody),
SuSE (6.2), and
RedHat (also 6.2).
I picked SuSE - mainly because every package I looked for in the first few weeks of use were available on one of the 6 cd's the distro came on; but for other reasons, too (liked some aspects of Yast and there was an early LVM how-to written with SuSE in mind).

From there, it was (in order):
SuSE 6.2
SuSE 6.3
SuSE 6.4
SuSE 7.0
SuSE 7.1
SuSE 7.2
SuSE 7.3
Lindows/Linspire (remember those $799 laptops? yeah, I had one)
RedHat 9
Gentoo (forget the version number)
FreeBSD 4.0
Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger)
Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake)
openSuSE 10.2
openSuSE 10.3
openSuSE 11.1
openSuSE 11.2
openSuSE Tumbleweed (based on 12.1)
Ubuntu LTS 12.04

Gentoo - LinuxMint at home; CloudBioLinux on EC2

[heuermh]

Slackware -> Gentoo for many years -> Gentoo + Ubuntu -> LinuxMint

Gentoo+Fluxbox configuration is still my favorite, but I've lost interest in keeping it up, so I've migrated to LinuxMint Cinnamon for my linux desktops and laptops now. The Amazon AMIs I use are based on CloudBioLinux

CloudBioLinux
http://cloudbiolinux.org/

which is Debian, although I don't really notice. BioCloudCentral is a great tool for launching CloudBioLinux instances

BioCloudCentral
https://biocloudcentral.herokuapp.com/launch

Different distro for different purpose

[bastafidli]

Suprisingly few people ended up using Fedora, interesting. Me

Desktop: Mandrake -> Fedora -> Ubuntu -> Kubuntu (also tried OpenSuse/Suse/Arch/Knoppix/DSL/Puppy)
Server: Mandrake -> Fedora -> CentOS + RHEL
Embedded: Arch

Re:My Order

[Venotar]

Point of clarity - the above list only refers to desktops/laptops. Servers would complicate the chronology pretty significantly.

Let's see if I can remember

[jmitchel!jmitchel.co]

OS History Roughly
MS/DOS 3, MacOS 6, CP/M -> MS Xenix (On a TRS/80 Model 2 modded to 16b specs) -> Minix -> SLS -> MCC (IIRC) -> Slackware -> Red Hat -> Mandrake -> Debian -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu -> Windows Xp, Windows 7, MacOS X

With occasional excursions to BSD/386, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD choking due to unsupported or fussy hardware, and later discarded due to a userspace that made Linux feel full featured and easy. And probably a few other visits to Debian along the way.

15 second re-boots

[jmichaelg]

I bought a Asus i3-based laptop for $350 at Best Buy. Came loaded with crapware and no Win7 CD - you had to burn your own DVD before you used the machine. Even with an after-market SSD, it was very slow.

After several freezes, I finally gave up and installed Ubuntu 12.04. It runs much more smoothly than with Win7. It freezes sometimes when it resumes from suspend but it's not bothersome because rebooting takes 15 seconds. Apps start within 2 seconds and I'm simply able to get things done more quickly.

Re:My Order

[Venotar]

also, now that I think about it I'm pretty sure the inital debian I evaluated was potato, not woody.

Start with Mandriva!

[Urza9814]

I've used over a dozen distros, but I can't remember the order and probably wouldn't even remember all the names...but I think the advice I got to start with Mandrake (now Mandriva) was the only reason I'm still a Linux user. Of course that was also before Ubuntu existed and before Linux hardware support was so good -- for a while I ran two desktop PCs right beside each other so I could run XP on one and bridge the wifi connection to a wired connection to my Linux machine beside it -- no matter what I tried I couldn't get the damn wifi drivers running on Linux! And I was in highschool, so I didn't have money to buy a different card, I didn't have a credit card to order one with anyway, and I wasn't paying the electric bill ;)

But to get back on topic, the distros that actually stayed installed for more than a couple months were:

Mandrake > Slackware > Mandriva > Arch

Mandrake/Mandriva was and still is an absolutely awesome newbie distro; Slack was great when I was in highschool and had plenty of time to kill configuring it, but these days I want something that just works.

Arch is orders of magnitude nicer than any other distro I've ever used but I wouldn't give it to someone who doesn't have SOME Linux experience already. Once you get everything installed you don't really need much, but the installation process would be pretty tricky if you didn't know what you were doing. And I DEFINITELY don't miss the days when I was on Mandriva waiting for the next version to be released so I could do my annual reinstall. But I'm also the kind of guy who sees a new kernel release announced on Slashdot and immediately go check if there's an Arch package yet. And yea, I know, if I REALLY wanted to be cutting-edge I would compile the damn thing myself, but I just want the bells and whistles without having to work for them :)

When I'm recommending distros to others I go with Mandriva if they don't know anything; Arch if they're good with computers and want to jump right in the deep end. No need for any other distros as far as I'm concerned ;)

That takes me back

[WillgasM]

mandrake, slack, redhat, suse, centos, debian, buntu, arch, android.

main distros i've used

[frogslegs]

starting around 2005: Ubuntu -> Debian -> Arch (desktop)/Debian (servers)

tried out lots of others for very short periods of time, especially minimal distros like puppy and damn small linux

Re:The SW analogy was some insulting geek panderin

[TheCycoONE]

Yeah, I started on Corel as well. On a computer without internet, didn't stick with it for too long, though my mom liked the mahjong game that came with it.

So
1. Corel Linux in 2001.
No linux 2002 until 2005
2. Debian ( 1 year)
3. Ubuntu ( 1 year)
4. Gentoo (2006-2010)
5. Fedora ( 1 year)
6. Arch Linux (current)

Very simple... but long...

[rdebath]

• SLS 1.02
• SLS 1.02 + Manual updates
• Inplace manual upgrade to Debian Bo
• Debian Hamm
• Debian Slink
• Debian Potato
• Debian Woody
• Debian Sarge
• Debian Etch
• Debian Lenny
• Debian Squeeze & Ubuntu

All the upgrades have been on a single filesystem that's been upgraded and transplanted from machine to machine. Some secondary machines have had other copies of Debian and an occasional other distribution (but never for long). The Ubuntu (on a little laptop) is just Debian enough that I don't replace it.

Parts of the home directory started life on a SCO Xenix machine with honest timestamps back in 1989. A few files are dated before that but they are generally DOS backups and files that have lost their timestamps for one reason or another.

Yggdrasil..

[Paracelcus]

AT&T SVR2, Xenix, SCO, 386BSD, Yggdrasil, Slackware, RedHat, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu.

SLS-Slackware-Debian-Gentoo-Ubuntu

[ajlitt]

Now get off my lawn.

Since 1994

[LVSlushdat]

1994-1995-Slackware
1995-2007-Redhat, until Redhat went "Enterprise" then switched to Fedora
2007-Now-Ubuntu.. Since Shuttleworth saw fit to shove Unity down our throats, I'm moving from plain-jane Ubuntu to either Xubuntu or Lubuntu. Kinda leaning towards
LXDE.. Works fantastic on 12.04 on the older Dell D620 laptop....

many and varied

[Chirs]

slackware
debian
redhat
mandrake
fedora
yellowdog (for work on powerpc)
Wind River Linux (for work)
centos (for work)
redhat (for work)
currently using fedora on work laptop

Upgrade Path

[rtobyr]

Red Hat -> Fedora -> CentOS -> Slackware -> Ubuntu -> OpenBSD -> Ubuntu -> PC-BSD -> Mint -> Ubuntu -> OSX Where I can't use a Mac, I stick with Ubuntu. AFAIK, it's the only distro that can always be upgraded from one release to the next without the need to re-install.

Starting back in, what, '94?

[DNAgent]

Counting only my primary desktop distro and skipping personal/work servers or experimental installs my history is like this:

Slackware -> RedHat -> SuSE -> Debian -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu -> Mint

I, like many in the thread, started with Slack back in the "box full of floppies" era. We generally would have install parties at the offices of
the ISP my buddies owned so real internet could be used instead of interminable disk swapping or (even worse) dial-up. Fun times were had.

Upgrading that system, by hand, from a.out to ELF without completely hosing it was a great adventure!

Currently I'm running Mint 12 on my desktop, Mint 13 on my laptop, and Debian Squeeze on my home file/DHCP/etc. server.

Started in about 1999...

[binary paladin]

Redhat (from a CD that came with a book) -> Slackware -> Linux from Scratch -> Gentoo -> Debian

For servers I used to used Debian but run CentOS these days.

Yggdrasil anyone?

[nurb432]

Anyone even remember them? First GUI installer. Yes, i bought one.

I don't know if id call it a 'distribution' but i started back when you had the boot and root floppies, and had to hex edit them to match your hardware. Then it was off to SLS, which i believe predated Slackware and Debian both. Ah the late nights in the PC lab at the college desperately trying to download floppy images before closing time, and then hoping they wrote properly...

But once we had a system running, one could Kermit updates directly home. And it wasn't all that much slower.

Me, too.

[aussersterne]

Slackware (1993) -> Red Hat -> Debian -> Fedora -> OS X (2010)

During the Slackware period I was in love with Linux.
By the end of the Fedora period, I was constantly exasperated.

As an aside, I'm not at all "in love with" OS X the way I once was with Linux (I wrote books, converted people and organizations, founded a company, worked for some big Linux names back in the day). I was a Linux fanatic. I'm not the same with OS X. It has its problems. But it works for me, and I rarely think about it, and that's where I am (and want to be) in life.

Distro? When we were young...

[knarf]

...we gathered bits in the autumn with a pick and shovel, assembled them all winter long and punched out turing tapes for the stuff to run on come spring.

Apart from that:

SLS (1992) - Slackware - Redhat and Debian - Dumped Redhat, gained Ubuntu, kept Debian - Dumped Ubuntu (wife still runs it though), kept Debian

Debian because it lends itself to all purposes, from lightweight base for eg. i-Opener and Webplayer to server and desktop. Not to mention the fact that you can move between these configurations without needing a re-install.

Mainly Red Hat

[DaveAtFraud]

Home use started with Red Hat Linux (RHL) 5.0 in 1998 and stuck with RHL through RHL 9. Tried Fedora Core (FC) 1 after RHL split into "Enterprise" and Fedora. FC1 was too bleeding edge but then I found White Box Linux (RHEL 3 clone). Stayed with White Box until it became too much for the guy maintaining it (there was also a hurricane that messed things up and he was in Louisiana). Moved to CentOS for clones of RHEL 4 and 5. Needed RHEL 6 when it was released for its IPv6 support so moved to Scientific Linux since CentOS had build issues with RHEL 6. Currently also running FC 16 xfce on my laptops. Have FC 17 on a separate partition and will start migrating from FC 16 to FC 17 when I have some slack. Tried Ubuntu, Mint and Gentoo at various points and I keep a current live CD of Backtrack handy.

Work: previous job had me supporting Linux Router Project, RHL 7.3 through 9 and RHEL 3 and 4. Current job has me supporting RHEL 5 and 6 plus SuSE (SLES) 10 and 11 plus AIX, Solaris and HP-UX.

Cheers,
Dave

Since 1992..

[fingon]

'what distro' -> SLS -> Slackware -> Caldera -> Debian -> XP -> OS X .. in parallel, on XP/OSX Debian/Ubuntu VMs .. and SunOS / Solaris / *BSD on various other boxes since 1992 as well (and had to professionally deal with stuff like HP-UX, Digital UNIX, and other atrocities. *brr*)

Me too!

[water-and-sewer]

I otherwise wouldn't have posted but I see I took a different track from most:

Starting in 2000: SuSE 7.1 all the way up to about 9.1 when it got too heavy to run on my PIII with 128MB of memory. I tried Xandros for a while and also taste-tested Vector, Mandriva, Grml, and Mepis, but I always returned to SuSE.

That got me interested enough in Unix that now for anything serious (servers) I use FreeBSD, and no going back.

I've currently got FreeBSD on the server, openSUSE 12.2 on the desktop, and Bodhi on the netbook. I must be the only one on this site who skipped Ubuntu. I never liked their KDE install, never liked Gnome in any way, shape or form (especially now), and never really understood what the big deal was.

Re: Caldera

[DNAgent]

I'd forgotten about Caldera. I had a copy of the original 1.0 Caldera Network Desktop that Lyle Ball gave me at a conference. I still have the t-shirt somewhere, not sure about the box & software. I never used it much beyond a test install, but I remember thinking it was cool that it came with a legit WP, even though I really didn't have any use for it.

What a long, strange road it's been...

[capebretonsux]

First few were via sneakernet....

Slackware > Debian > Slackware > Mandrake > Slackware > Redhat > Slackware > SuSE > Slackware....

And there have been secondary machines with Libranet, Ubuntu, Xandros, Puppy Linux, various BSD's and such. Even took SkyOS and QNX for a spin on the desktop, but Slackware will always be the favourite, methinks.

I'm backwards

[Outtascope]

Starting back late '93ish early '94ish
Slackware -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Ubuntu + Oracle Enterprise Linux (on select servers)
Brief instances of SUSE, RedHat and Cent O/S mixed in there, but they never took (OEL notwithstanding)
Went the opposite direction (Deb to Ubu) because of slow releases from Deb with needed updates.

Corel Linux

[samuel.mg]

Corel Linux -> RedHat -> Slackware -> SUSE -> Fedora -> Ubuntu -> Zenwalk -> Mint Since I tasted Slackware I use it for my production servers, it has never let me down. Often I jump one distro to other, to have a taste of it.

not too much variety

[thetoadwarrior]

My steps away from Windows went like this: BeOS, Mandrake Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, Solaris, Xubuntu, OSX / Ubuntu and probably Mint next or Debian.

Mid-92 Start

[David Greene]

SLS (0.97pl?? kernel) -> Slackware (wow, packages!) -> RedHat (wow, dependencies!) -> Debian (wow, apt!)

I probably still have the fullscreen Linux 95 gif somewhere.

And for the record:

twm -> fvwm -> GNOME (very briefly) -> KDE

eh

[shimage]

Madrake --> Xandros --> Libranet --> Debian --> Gentoo --> Arch I didn't care for Mandrake, and in fact stopped using Linux after trying it out for a few monhts. A year later I tried some Debian derivatives before settling on vanilla Debian. I used Gentoo and Arch for several years each; only a few years with Debian. I've sampled variations of Ubuntu on occasion (usually when I get a new laptop), but it's never stuck more than a day.

Here's mine

[tomtom]

SLS, then Slackware, then Redhat, then Fedora, now CentOS. But I've always had other boxes around like FreeBSD and Gentoo.

Xubuntu - OpenGEU - Fedora - Mint - Ubuntu

[metamarmoset]

My reason for exploring Linux was originally to make an old, inherited, laptop usable. Gnome was too heavy, KDE was waaay too heavy. Didn't know what I was doing and xubuntu happened to be the first distro I was successful in installing and was capable of administering. I then experimented with other lightweight DEs and WMs, stopping longest on IceWM, Fluxbox and E17.

When I finally got a decent desktop PC, my priorities were stability and wide range of up-to-date packages. I felt like I was familiar enough with debian-based distros and wanted to try out the red-hat family. Fedora served me well, but I missed apt.

I eventually got sick of endlessly tweaking my UI, so more recently my priorities have shifted towards a pleasant out-of-the-box experience, hence mint.

I now prefer plain ubuntu over any 'enhanced' re-spins. It has plenty of out-of-the-box niceness (so I get on with my real work) and has an insane range of supported, community and commercial packages.

And I like unity. *ducks*

Forgot some of them...

[frooddude]

Started with Slackware in 93/94 (I think, just remember a ton of floppies and I definitely used Slack back then, just don't know that I started with a distro, this was kernel .98alpha or so)
I know I played with Yggdrasil (that became SuSE, right?)
After that everything is pretty hazy, but I spent many years on Debian then switched to Gentoo a couple years ago.

On the other hand I professionally support RedHat and OL (and any other enterprise flavor should something broken come up).

Queue the Vikings

[jmccue]

Slack

Slack

Slack

Slack Slack

lovely slack wonderful slack........

SHUT UP -- SHUT UP ....

Still using Slackware as my main OS

Started with Redhat

[asmkm22]

Back in the late 90's, it Redhat was had the most exposure. Download speeds were gimpy, which meant I relied on UK Linux mags for distro disks.

Only problem was I really didn't like Redhat. When Ubuntu came out, I actually enjoyed using it, and it became a stepping stone for Debian, which is what I've used since about '06.

Evolution

[Feadin]

Started back in the 90's: Slackware->Gentoo->Ubuntu->Windows 7 :) You could definitely spot a trend there, and believe me it's not laziness.

Mishmash

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Redhat > experimented with mandrake but didn't use it much > gentoo > ubuntu

Slackware to Ubuntu to Windows

[afs909]

Lets just be fair, Linux was not always on my radar. I started with an Apple 2 clone, then Apple 2C Then moved to DOS 3 -> 6 (1987 - 1990) Then moved through: Windows 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, XP, 7 (1990 - ) Parallel to this I used: Slackware (downloaded to CD) as a server back in 1997 to run apache and a Perl site I developed. Moved to Fedora 3(?) through to Fedora 7(?) Then switched to Ubuntu when Fedora was unable to run my projector as a second scene (after spending days on the config file - I know I'm not that bright!). Ubuntu lasted several years until just recently when I upgraded to UEFI bios motherboard. I was unable to get any Linux systems to run on this hardware natively (Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, etc) so moved back to Windows 7 - to my disgust! I still run Mint, Fedora (Amahi) and Ubuntu as Virtual machines. I will wait and see if Linux distros fix the install difficulties with UEFI before I bother using it again on new hardware. So for now Linux has been put back on the shelf when it comes to everyday use. Have tried Suse 10 (I think) but did not like the interface. Currently running Windows Home Server 2011, Windows 7 , Windows XP (x3), MythTV server (Ubuntu). Plus virtual machines. Plus the family machines( 4 x Windows 7, 1x XP)

my order

[Dwedit]

Caldera, Mandrake, Knoppix, Ubuntu, Mint

Caldera had the nicest installer, since it had a Tetris Game built in.

1996 - present

[bluefrogcs]

1996 - present .. Slack -> debian -> RH -> fedora -> corelinux with blfs packages -> oh fsck it, 2003 - 2007 LFS dev version + BLFS -> ubuntu / ubuntu server (current) tried mandrake and suse, didn't like same for gentoo currently, vm system running 12.04lts server + 7 vbox vms also running 12.04lts server. Have 12.04lts installed on my desktop and laptop (dual boot systems), but rarely boot because unity just pisses me off .. lol

If you can't do it with Slackware...

[spaceyhackerlady]

...is it worth doing?

At home I've only ever used Slackware, from 1997 (Slackware 3.1 aka Slackware '96) to the present day. I did my thesis on a Slackware box, initially a 486/66, upgraded to a snazzy (?) Pentium 233 MMX. My personal development/play machine at work is Slackware.

The Powers That Be insist on RedHat for production, but tolerate us using CentOS for development. So be it.

I've played with Debian on Sun UltraSPARC boxes, but the novelty has since worn off.

...laura

My Distros (Linux & BSD)

[Zamphatta]

1999 - Slackware (desktop), 2000 - Mandrake, 2000-2001 - FreeBSD (laptop), 2002-2011 - Only used Linux via SSH and it was usually Debian, 2011-current - Ubuntu.

Slackware –- RedHat --- Fedora --- OSX

[ogrizzo]

You mean 'on your main machines', don't you?

• Slackware around '94: kernel was 1.2.3
• RedHat around '96 then Fedora when it was released
• OSX '10

Running Fedora and BusyBox on other machines.

In order?

[multicoregeneral]

Redhat 6
Suse
Mandrake 7
Mandrake 8
Debian
Fedora
Ubuntu 5
Ubuntu 6
Ubuntu 8
Ubnuntu 10
Ubuntu 11 (with unity)

Unity drove me back to Windows.

Re:In order?

[oreiasecaman]

Mandrake->Debian->Ubuntu->Mint

Re:The SW analogy was some insulting geek panderin

[multicoregeneral]

Oh! I had forgotten about that one! Corel Linux was cool. Too bad it didn't last long. I was a redhat user at the time.

Re:Another greybeard

[Ralphus Maximus]

Always remember to number your punch cards! It only takes dropping the stack once to get that ingrained. :)

My first ever was an NCR 310, with paper tape. I then moved up to an IBM 1620, then to the 360.

I never got into the VMS arena. moved from the dino's to the PC's.

Cheers,
RM

We do

[Dadoo]

We do, at my office, mainly because each one fills a slightly different need. We use Red Hat (with an up-to-date subscription) for the mission-critical servers, CentOS for the not-so-mission-critical servers, Fedora and Ubuntu for workstations (depending on user preference), and Debian and OpenBSD for older computers that would have been thrown in the trash, but are still usable for things like routers. (CentOS and Fedora refuse to install on a machine with less than 768Meg; Debian and OpenBSD work fine on a machine with 32Meg.)

Re:We do

[icebike]

Exactly. Like I said, who uses only one distro?
Maybe some kid it his parents basement some place.

Re:We do

[Dadoo]

Oops, sorry to respond to myself, but I forgot to answer the question.

Started with Slackware (1.02?) - the one that was released in April of 1994 (I think).

Then, around Slackware 4, there were no updates for a very long time. I got tired of Red Hat people talking about cool new features that I couldn't use, so I switched.

After a few years of that, I started checking out other distributions and found that SuSE, with KDE, was really getting polished, so I started using that on my desktop, even though I stayed with Red Hat, on servers. Unfortunately, the last decent version of (Open)SuSE was 10.0 and, by that time, Gnome had significantly improved, so I switched again, to Fedora.

Currently, I'm still using Fedora 14 on my laptop, and I'd like to upgrade, but Gnome 3 is terrible. I can't switch back to OpenSuSE, because I'm not impressed with KDE 4 (though I haven't looked at it, in about 9 months), and I can't switch to Ubuntu, because I really hate Unity. I have no Idea where to go next.

order is difficult to remember...

[pjr.cc]

slackware -> sls -> yggdrasil -> redhat -> mandrake -> debian -> gentoo -> fedora + redhat + centos + ubuntu

I dont remember the exact order.... and the last four are what i use currently (all of them)

rpm to deb

[Teun]

I had trouble with Windows applications and a colleague suggested X would offer more options.
Looking for information about this X system I ended up on Slashdot and was directed to Linux.
So in 1997 I bought a CD with Red Hat 4.1 and after the upgrade to 4.2 it became usable for me, I kept upgrading till the introduction of Fedora.
I found it hard to get Fedora running on my hardware so one day I tried a Knoppix Live CD and because it had (a lot) better hardware compatibility than the Fedora of the day I decided to install it, effectively that was a Debian
I quickly realised the deb system was much better than the rpm and yum of Fedora, around the same time the net was buzzing with the news of a new distro called Ubuntu, the main attraction was hardware compatibility.
So October 2004 I changed over to Ubuntu 4.10.
Because I never liked Gnome I quickly changed to Kubuntu 5.04 and that's how I'm writing this post, using Kubuntu 12.10 beta1.

Beginning with RedHat 5.1

[hduff]

RedHat 5.1, Mandrake-all, FedoraCore-up to 4, Mandriva-up to 10.2, Mageia-2 (currently in use).

for the record

[nazsco]

dos something -> dos 6 -> dos6 + window 3.11 -> slackware -> conectiva -> redhat -> back to slackware and stable for years ....

after that forked into (depending on machine role):
- irix (couple years) -> openBSD (never bought a cd)
- windows 95 -> windows 98 -> windows NT for a long time -> windows XP for a long time -> windows 7
- gentoo -> Ubuntu for a long time -> ubuntu + gnome3, unity, whatever (a couple hours) -> debian + blackblox (after testing gentoo again but feeling more at home with debian)

Re:for the record

[nazsco]

oh yeah, and beOS (after it was long dead i gave it a try and liked) and QNX.

Slackware --> Mandrake/Mandriva --> OpenSuse

[forestgomp]

Full story:

c. 1994 to 1995
Slackware

c. 1999 to 2010
Mandrake --> Mandriva

c. 2005 to current
SUSE --> OpenSuse

c. 2006 to current
CentOS & RedHat

c. 2007 to current
Ubuntu

It's a tree, not a progression.

[Medievalist]

A tree with many forks for work, and laptops, and home, and HTPC, etc. And therefore, it cannot be represented on slashdot, due to the so-called lameness filter.

Anyway, I started on Yggdrasil and now run quite a few distros simultaneously for different use cases.

Oh, and Fedora has been a huge disappointment, but RHEL is reasonably good for business purposes.

Depended on my Computer

[brisk0]

Kubuntu -> Damn Small Linux -> Puppy Linux -> Ubuntu -> Arch
Kubuntu was only installed on my brother's computer, which I used for lack of my own alternative. My first computer was a stripped out shitbox (frequently referred to as a craptop) that was unlikely to run anything bigger than puppy, nevermind storage on its gigabyte hard-drive. DSL wasn't doing much for me as a desktop and this was before I got a grasp on the power of linux, plus Xorg never worked right on that machine so I 'upgraded' to puppy. I got my first decent personal computer (I had access to others) in 2007, a netbook, which I installed Ubuntu on. I quickly discovered that Ubuntu had a lovely habit of breaking something practically unfixable every time it updated (something about drivers I think). When I couldn't run without my screen constantly flashing at me and sound not working, I gave up on Ubuntu for Arch which I also installed on my desktop, which is the best decision I've made. Arch still isn't everything I wanted, and the amount of manual labour to get around the inadequacies of the package manager is a little over the top, so next stop I'm looking at Gentoo, when I have the time and botherance to change it all up again. I only intended this as a test install on my desktop, only using 200GB of a TB hard-disk, but it's been good enough to hold its own.

one of these things

[Swampash]

1997 Red Hat
2000 Mandrake
2001 Debian
2004 Ubuntu
2006-present OS X

Minty Fresh - Finally

[DaveJ45]

Started out with Mandrake on 3-1/2 inch floppies
Fooled around with some others, Damn Small, Puppy, Mepis, PCLinuxOS, even Debian, but never seriously.
First full time dual boot OS's were Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and OpenSUSE
Used KnoppMyth and NASLite for special purpose appliance distros for quite some time.
For the past few years it's been Linux Mint all the way, many times as the only installed OS. It's not perfect, but it does seem to me to be the most completely functional, out of the box, solution.
And I've switched from KnoppMyth to Mythbuntu, since the KnoppMyth transition to the Arch based LinHES required too much effort to re-learn the nomenclature, etc.

Yellow Dog -> Ubuntu/Debian -> Arch

[roto3]

I started with Yellow Dog on Apple PowerPC hardware, which I mostly used for servers, but played around a bit with various desktop environments. At that time I wasn't doing serious work so much as I just wanted to know as much about various platforms as I could. My primary OS for day-to-day computing was classic Mac OS (System 7, OS 8, OS 9) at that point.

As I moved to x86 hardware and Ubuntu became popular, I used Ubuntu as the primary OS on my development machine at work, and Debian on my servers. Nearly all of my servers (those that don't require anything bleeding-edge) still run Debian stable. Around the same time, I was running Mac OS X as my primary day-to-day OS on my personal machine.

Two or so years ago, I got tired of Ubuntu trying to push a particular desktop "experience" and having multiple layers of indirection and automation to deal with if I wanted to change anything. I briefly passed through Gentoo, which I enjoyed, but found that it required a little bit more time to maintain than was practical for me. I tried Arch and found it to be a good balance between customizability and niceties like binary packages. I switched to Arch on my main desktop at home, still using Mac OS X as my primary on my laptop.

A few months ago, I also switched to Arch on my laptop, more or less removing the Mac from my workflow.

Is this a serious question?

[UltraZelda64]

I mean... since 2004, when I first got serious about finding an alternative to Windows and really started learning a lot about Linux, I've "tested" hundreds of distributions (many of which are no longer developed). Before that--like in the very late 90s or around 2000--I tried downloading Red Hat, but I admit at the time I didn't know what I was doing and didn't get very far after installation once I got to the desktop (heavy Windows user at the time--enough said...). But the major ones, I guess, would be:

Red Hat Linux 9, SUSE Linux 9.x*, Slackware, Zenwalk*, KateOS*, Arch, Damn Small Linux~, Feather Linux~, Ubuntu*, Debian*, Linux Mint~, Dreamlinux, KNOPPIX~, KANOTIX, Mepis, Parsix~, Pardus*, Sidux~, Aptosid, PureOS, Absolute~, CDLinux~, Salix~, Slax~, Vector~, Wolvix~, Fedora, Kororaa~, BLAG*, CentOS, Scientific, Stella, Foresight~, PCLinuxOS~, Frugalware~, Mandriva~, Mageia, openSUSE*, Puppy~, Slitaz, Tiny Core, SolusOS, CrunchBang*, Dream Studio, Spri, MoonOS, Trisquel~, ArchBang, Chakra, Kahel, Manjaro

Note: An asterisk means I settles on a particular distribution for at least a while at some point. A tilde means that while I haven't actually settled on a distro, I did use and/or test it quite a bit. These are not exactly in order either, and it's definitely not a complete list (I've tried out hundreds of distros, many times serveral versions). It's obvious I'm leaving out countless distros (Ark, for one) and not really putting them in any special order in the list.

I've tried pretty much all the source-based distros just for the hell of it (Gentoo, Sorcerer, Lunar, Source Mage), CRUX, etc. Not to mention BSDs including FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, but I only really had luck with DesktopBSD and PCBsd.

Devolution

[The Raven]

Redhat > Gentoo > Ubunto

Redhat because I knew no better (it was popular, and it was 1997, and I was just starting to use Linux).

Gentoo as an informed choice after being displeased with the maintenance of RPM based systems and the kludgy /etc that Redhat used.

And Ubuntu now, because I just wanted a Desktop fast without a bunch of configuration.

In the near future, I expect I'm going to switch again to another Debian based system, but with a saner default WM. I may go back to a Gentoo based distro... the compile pain gets less with every processor generation, and even more so with the switch to SSD storage.

Slackware to Debian

[John Hasler]

In a previous century.

Old hat

[jmdjmd]

Red Hat (before it became Fedora) -> SUSE -> Gentoo (happy with it)

Lots

[markdavis]

SLS -> Redhat -> Mandrake -> Mandriva -> Mageia
but that is just my main home computer.... I use all types of distros. RHEL at work on servers. CentOS and Scientific Linux on other servers. Mandriva and Fedora on workstations. Ubuntu and Fedora on my netbook. And lots of others.

Choice is good and I tend to see advantages of the different distros in different use applications, although it can be confusing at times.

If I were forced to use only ONE distro on all machines, I would probably pick Mageia right now since it tends to meet most needs without being trendy but also being very open, flexible, and easy. But I am glad I am not forced to use only one.

Caldera 1.3

[fast turtle]

RH 5, Mandrake/Mandrivia, Debian, ZipSlack, Gentoo, FC14, Gentoo, LFS, Gentoo, XP, Win7

Here is mine

[Artemis3]

Red Hat; Caldera; Suse; Slackware; Debian; Ubuntu; Linux Mint; Xubuntu.

My Distros

[ms4sman]

Slax, Linux Mint, Crunchbang, and finally settled (as much as one can settle on a distro) on Debian

It began with Yggdrasil

[Lawrence_Bird]

and then quickly moved on to Slackware for about 15 years before moving to NetBSD (briefly) and then FreeBSD where I remain today.

Slackware forever

[TobiSGD]

Ubuntu -> Arch -> Debian -> Slackware

Manchester

[drwho]

MCC interim, then SLS, the Slackware. Stayed with Slackware for many years. Dicked around with BSD and RedHat, but then found Debian and have stayed wit that since, sorta. Went to Ubuntu for easy desktop installs, but then the recent versions have sucked so much that I went to Mint. But I am not satisfied that either, because of Gnome asshattery. I'll probably head back to Debian for the desktop, uniting my server and desktop choices.

I'd say the state of Linux on the desktop is bad, mostly because of the way there has been GUI modification towards stupid users. I am not a stupid user. I want things to be where I expect to find them; where I got used them being.

Speaking of which, they are screwing up on the command line as well. Big heavyweight app that is a catch-all to find out what package you need to install when the shell can't find what you've typed. Uh, often its a mistake...Just give me the standard error message and if I want to find the package, let apropos or something else handle it. And put stuff in my path. I shouldn't have to be root to get ifconfig in my path, if I just want to see what the status of the network interfaces are. Sure, I know I can't change the data as a mortal user, and I know I could just type the path, or modify my .profile or .bashrc. Stop making me have to.

Give me back my nslookup while your at it. Sure, the app may have been buggy (all crap from ISC is), but I got used to it and didn't get used to dig. Give me something else named nslookup that works similarly. I am an old linux fart, yeah sure....but it gets the job done and I don't see any reason why there can't be some distribution that lets me operate in ways I am used to. I am not asking for Unix/32V or anything...just give me the Linux I got used to, circa 2001.

Debian circa 1994

[TiberiusKirk]

Debian circa 1994
Windows
FreeBSD
Redhat
Windows
Corel
Gentoo
Windows/Colinux
Ubuntu Dapper
Mint
Ubuntu Koala
Ubuntu Precise (with Unity!).

My Linux Order

[ci13urn]

Slackware -> Fedora Core 4 -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Mint

I can't have been the only Libranet user...

[capnkr]

RedHat - SuSe - Libranet - 'Drake - Turbolinux - Corel - Xandros (Beta Tester then user) - Mepis - Knoppix - DSL - Arch - Ubuntu - Mint.

Those were the primaries, as I recall - distros which stayed on the disk long enough to remember having used them for work/play. Libranet always stands out as the first distro I ran across with a graphical install (ncurses). It was amazing and fun to be able to see results so quickly. :) Was a Beta tester for Xandros from the beginning, dropped it when they started getting *very* commercial and climbed into bed with MS. Beta'ed for Mepis, too - Warren did a good job. Besides these, being a "distro 'ho", I've tried out any number of other solutions, a few from the top of my head:

LOAF, Peanut, Yellow Dog, PCLinuxOS, Puppy, Bodhi, etc etc...

Re:Slackware

[melikamp]

When I came back to Slackware 12.0 after years of using Ubuntu and toying with other distros, I was simply stunned because it was far more stable, simple, and much easier to manage. I keep Debian around because it's good to have a plan B, and I tend to recommend it to people who would like to use GNU/Linux without necessarily learning all the nuts and bolts of OS administration. Wheezy is a bit dated, but Squeeze already looks and feels gorgeous.

oh wow... back through the mists of time...

[Tastecicles]

...
Slackware, Debian, Knoppix (live then Debian via KNX), Dyne:Bolic, Mandrake/Mandriva (caught that one on the transition of names), SuSE Pro, OpenSuSE, RHEL, SLES/SLED, back to OpenSuSE, Lubuntu.

Currently using OpenSuSE 11.4, Lubuntu 10.04, Zipslack-custom (from Slackware 8 originally, just so heavily modified I don't think I could build the image in any other distribution or version!) and Knoppix (currently 5.01 but I've just this minute pulled in the torrent for the latest version EN-DVD).

Distros

[aklinux]

Redhat (6.1 - 9.0) -> SuSE Linux Professional -> Fedora -> Android, as daily drivers.

On the side, I tried Debian, Gentoo, Puppy, Slackware, Vector, Novell Linux Desktop, Centos, Linux Mint. Of these, the only ones I seriously considered changing to were Gentoo & Novell. Centos seemed like a good server, but I'm basically a desktop user.

Tried Many, Used a Few

[sorton9999]

In this day and age of VMs and high bandwidth connections, I've downloaded quite a few ISOs (or grabbed a few from Linux Format) and at least poked around a little. I've tried Sabyon (?), Mandriva, Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, Mint, Knoppix. But the one's I actually do anything useful on are as follows in order Slackware (floppy) -> Redhat (floppy to CD to DVD) -> Fedora (CD to DVD) -> CentOS -> Ubuntu I develop seriously on CentOS and Fedora. Redhat was painful to develop on up until 5.0 then settled down and became more standardized.

Still Slacking After All These Years

[Riktov]

1996: Slackware? -> Yggdrasil -> Slackware -> TurboLinux -> Slackware/Ubuntu.

Still Slacking After All These Years.

My path

[randomErr]

RedHat(very old and crappy install disk, never worked right)
-> Corel (nice for desktop and WordPerfect)
-> Lindows/Linspire/Xandros (caught right in the transitions)
-> Mandrake (really liked it, hahaha, ha, hahaha)
-> Mandriva (liked it)
-> Ubuntu (Nice GUI, hardware support and very responsive) Here and there I've used PuppyLinux for small projects and diagnose PC issues. DOS 6.22 has been favorite non-Linux OS.

From Debian to Debian, via a few stops

[ignavus]

Debian -> DOSLinux/Slackware -> Red Hat -> Caldera -> Debian

I started with Debian back in 1997 - on an old spare PC

I wanted to run Linux inside my more powerful Windows box, so I moved to DOSLinux (I think it was), and got any extra packages I needed from its parent distro Slackware.

I wanted to run Linux in its own partition, so I moved to Red Hat.

I wanted StarOffice (predecessor of LibreOffice), so I bought and tried Caldera for a while - before they went evil.

I went back to Debian when Fedora began (this time, Debian testing) and have remained there ever since - starting with WindowMaker, then moving to Xfce.

I like Debian testing with Xfce - so I have stayed on that for years - now just moved to AMD64

So I am back where I started in 1997 - Debian.

Good Old Days...

[ericcc65]

Caldera --> Slackware --> Ubuntu --> Fedora --> Linux Mint Debian Edition Of course dabbling in a little bit of everything, BeOS, FreeBSD, CentOS, Linux Madrake, etc.

Gantt chart

[Trogre]

Here's my list of distros that I regularly use, as a rough Gantt chart, starting in the late 1990s and running to the present day.

|- RedHat -----|
 
    |- Knoppix ----|
 
          |- Embedix+QTopia -------|
 
            |- Fedora -------------------->
 
            |- Debian -------------------->
 
                |- Ubuntu ---------------->
 
                        |- Arch ---------->
 
                            |- Android --->

Depends on your end goal

[ezakimak]

My path was:
Caldera OpenLinux 1.1 - 1 year
Mandrake - 1 year
RedHat - 2 years
LFS - 2 years
Gentoo - 8 years and counting

With some HP-UX, IRIX, and debian sprinkled in on some non-x86 arches.

If your end goal is to be a master of Linux/unix in general:

I highly recommend doing LFS at least once. It strips away all the helpers (which sometimes complicate things), and forces you to know for each package how it natively behaves, their own config files, locations, etc. You learn what happens from boot on up to the login prompt. You learn what all the pieces are, what they do, etc.

I also highly recommend trying Gentoo at least once--at least until you learn how portage keywords and package use flags work so you can honestly compare to rpm/apt in other distros. Gentoo is a happy compromise--a step back from LFS in that it normalizes most of the configuration locations and services control, and adds full package management, but all while still allowing you to take finer-grained control selectively as you want/need. (Personally, I prefer gentoo's way of configuring services to the other main distros--it feels more flexible and less "in-my-way"ish, especially for disk layout and network configuration.)

From there, you can learn any distro you want/need. (But I'd guess that most people that give gentoo an honest try wind up sticking with it since it has fewer cons and more pros than most of the other canned distros. BTW, it does support binary packages--many do not know this.)

If your end goal is not administrative prowess, but simply to use it as a desktop:

You probably should stick to a well-supported end-user-focused distro such as ubuntu, fedora/redhat, suse. You may not get bleeding edge, but you won't bleed--and many help topics on the web cater to these main distros. IMO, for such an end goal it really doesn't matter which distro you use first--they will all have some shortcoming that will require some googling to figure out--no distro of any OS has all the kinks worked out.

Mandrake - Red Hat - Slackware

[Obliquitous Cowherd]

Of course, I've played around with some others, but those were first, and Slackware is still my main OS.

Distros

[fak3r]

Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo, (FreeBSD), Debian

Only 3.

[sparkeyjames]

SuSE 6.2
Redhat 6.1
Slackware 7.2 through 13.37

I hate distro bloat and Slackware does not have major amounts of bloat.
I've built some damn near bullet proof web/email servers and firewalls for small business's with Slackware.
Some of which are still running 6 or 7 years later with only fairly minor security upgrades and regular hard drive replacements.
Yes I do get over 99 percent uptime.

I also use Slackware for my personal desktop box.

I'm a confirmed Slackware fanatic.

NetBSD

[manu0601]

No Linux distribution: I am using NetBSD, you insensitive clod!

Redhat - Ubuntu - Debian

[TheStonepedo]

The first burned CD I ever had in the late 1990s was a copy of Red Hat.
This was in the day of dial-up internet and my winmodem was either unusable or too complicated to figure out.
Installing Red Hat was an exercise in learning how to install an OS and nothing more.

In 2005 I downloaded and installed Ubuntu for fun after seeing relatively user-friendly Linux installations at the Georgia Tech math lab.
Upon dist-upgrading to Ubuntu 6.06 I found that most of my hardware, including accelerated graphics, worked without significant effort.
A couple Ubuntu dist-upgrades later I experienced a nasty regression in hardware support and switched to only using "LTS" versions for the sake of stability.

One of the recent LTS versions of Ubuntu changed the photo album software used by the default "ubuntu-desktop" metapackage, giving me the feeling that Ubuntu was more interested in keeping up with trends preferred by non-technical users than keeping functional features for nerds.
At that point I switched to Debian stable.
I have old hardware with Debian+GNOME and even older hardware with just CLI - both working smoothly with hundreds of days of uptime.

Ubuntu-Arch-Gentoo

[GigaBurglar]

And it ends there... Unless something totally dazzles me. Using Arch for a desktop (pain at times - nice though) and Gentoo Hardened for a server.

Long and winding road

[the plant doctor]

Red Hat 7.3
Yoper
Mandrake
OpenSuSE
Slackware
Ubuntu
CrunchBang
Mint
Arch
Ubuntu

I flirted with other more obscure distros along the way, had one on a netbook and something else on my main workstation, etc. Lately I've taken to just using Ubuntu these days on my workstation. I can compile the stuff I really care about for optimization (R), everything else is easily available and it just works on my Dell workstation. At home I've gone over to Mac for my photography and just the whole ecosystem.

1995 2012

[tmontes]

Slackware @1995- >> RedHat @1998- >> Mandrake @2002- >> Ubuntu @2005- >> CentOS+Debian @2008-

Ubuntu

[yurikhan]

Ubuntu --> Kubuntu -(KDE4 happens)-> back to Ubuntu -(Unity and GNOME3 happen)-> Xubuntu.

At home:

[naturaverl]

Debian->Knoppix->Ubuntu->Mint

At Work:

[naturaverl]

RHEL->SLED

My Order, and why

[uem-Tux]

RedHat 7 through 9 -> Then slackware when half the linux tutorials on the net didn't work for RedHat -> Then Ubuntu when I got tired of compiling everything from source

RedHat all the way

[jroysdon]

Red Hat Linux, Fedora Core, Fedora, MythDora, CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Long version of it:

There were a set of Red Hat Linux 5 CDs sitting at work - let me back up first - A buddy at work had played with Linux a little, but he was still a PC tech at the time doing printers and desktops, and I'd moved over to doing Novell and Microsoft server stuff for work and some Cisco work, but basically we were living paycheck to paycheck, living in studio apartments and no real spare PCs to dink on (each of us just with a PC and a dial-up modem).

I'd been tasked 6 months or so ago when I was a lowly PC tech to clean out this storage room. I'd found this PC, in an IBM AT case (with the big red switch power supply on the right side), that had been sitting there forever. The service tag was very old, and if I recall right, the person who had dropped it off didn't want to pay for the work or whatever, so it was just sitting there. I asked if I could have it, but was told that the customer might still pay for it (yeah right). I ask if I could put a Post-It note on it with the date or something saying I could have it in 6 months. "Sure." So 6 months later, I had a spare PC - 486 DX4-100 with like 4mb of RAM. These were the days of Win95, but this piece of junk had Win3.1 or something on it.

Where I worked had just opened a new office in a bigger city just north of our HQ. One of the things we offer was ISP services to commercial accounts - T1s and nailed-up (always connected) ISDN. We had some BIND DNS servers that had been installed at this office, but I wasn't in charge of them and couldn't touch them. But sitting on the desk by them was a set of Red Hat Linux 5 CDs.

I burned a copy, and my co-worker and I installed my first Linux install on that old 486. I'm pretty sure we didn't even install the GUI (storage and/or RAM limitations), but just CLI. We got Apache and an FTP server working on it.

Great, but we only had dial-up at each of our places. But by that time I was helping maintain the ISP side of things. I think I was stuck recabling and cleaning up the 3 racks of gear we had late on a weekend. I snuck the old 486 case in to one of the training office cubes and put it on the floor, wired up power and ethernet, and told the gal there to be quiet about it and it'd help keep her warm (that office had a bad HVAC setup and it was late fall / early winter). So I gave the Linux box ("Artoo") a public static IP connected to the public ISP switch, and that's how things started.

A little bit later one of the senior server and network engineers gave us two sticks of 8mb RAM (we're still broke these days), and we were able to get the server up to 20mb of RAM. I think about then we started running an IRCd and MUD game, payed $70 to register artoo.net (back when NetSol was the only game in town, and you had to pay for 2 years up front at $35/year). We started hosting domains for friends and family... it was an amazing time and we learned a ton.

We were so lucky too. We used plain auth for everything, including just telnet. Our setup was small enough and we were lucky enough that even with no firewall and horrible stock default settings that we never got owned for that first year.

Sometime during that first year the service center assistant manager (no kind words for him) was having problems with his PC. He blamed hardware, said he'd swapped all kinds of stuff out, and still it was flaking out on him. I asked if I could have his old desktop as he'd just gotten a new one from inventory (they build custom beige boxes). He smugly replied, "sure, but it's just going to keep locking up on you."

I don't recall if we just took the hard drive from the old 486 or if we reinstalled, but basically we got our same setup going on that "new" Pentium 166 (32mb of RAM?) and we just kept learning and hosting more and more. This was still on RHL 5 (probably 5.0, but I don't know, and didn't know anything about updating originally).

We kept getting used parts -

Started like so many before me

[scrimmer]

1. Slackware on floppies (first installed on a 386dx!)
2. Redhat, briefly
3. Slackware
4. Debian, (potato)
5. Slackware
6. Ubuntu, briefly
7. Slackware
And though not Linux, FreeBSD all the while too!

Ubuntu LinuxMint Debian

[quixote9]

1) Actually, around 1997 or 1998, I started trying to switch to Redhat. Setup (esp. couldn't get graphics working on my computers) and package installation were way too time-consuming for somebody who didn't know much and did have other work to do.

2) 2003-2005 got a laptop with Fedora pre-installed and moved to Linux as primary OS

3) early 2005 moved to Ubuntu

4) early 2011, refugee from Unity, moved to Linux Mint Debian

Now: still there, but playing with Solus....

My Linux experience

[Serious Lee]

SCO Caldera (before they morphed into the new (now thankfully deceased) SCO abomination) until the proprietary desktop lapsed. I was doing my MCSE at the time and one of my fellow students mentioned at one stage that if you really want to know about PC's, you should install linux. Since I was already becoming disillusioned with Microsoft, I decided to give it a whirl. Next was Mandrake, followed by Mandriva, then Mageia (1 and now 2). I also played with Mint, SUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, ArchOS and maybe one or two others, but the Ma***'s suits me best. Gnome was the dealbreaker for me (or: KDE floats my boat). On servers it was Mandrake, Ubuntu (for a short while) and then Debian.

Caldera, Corel, Turbo, Storm, Mandrake.....

[unixisc]

I'd split my experience w/ Linux into 2 phases - one in the late 90s, and another 2 years ago.

In the late 90s, I got hold of different Linux CDs through different ways - usually by buying Linux magazines that almost always had a CD w/ a distro on them. Using that, I had distros like TurboLinux (today purely in Japanese), Caldera, Corel, Storm, Mandrake, and maybe one or two more that I just can't recall.

More recently, 2 years ago, I had a RHEL 5 CD which I had installed, and later, when the HDD got somewhat corrupted, I replaced it w/ a RHEL based distro called Maximum Linux. Only difference w/ RHEL was that it had a whole bunch of other s/w bundled, and also, during the installation, it included LVM as a default, which I used, so that I could later grow my HDD.

The first time around, every distro I tried was very smooth to install, and had I not required internet access, they would have been fine. However, at the time. none of these distros had support for many ethernet cards (I had a RJ-45 port on the motherboard itself, as well as a cheap add-on 100 Base T card from Micro-Center), so having done everything, there was no way I could get the network recognized. I gave up on Linux totally.

Fast forward to 2008, and as a part of an RHEL course, I got an RHEL 5 CD, and installed it on my laptop. This time, no disappointments as far as network connectivity was involved. Getting sound to work was a struggle - download multiple ALSA versions and then see which one worked. Also, software packages - even the ones that came in RPM format couldn't be simply extracted using yum - I found out that the rpm utility was only good for updating the kernel. Synaptic too did a bad job in telling you what software was already installed, what was available either on the CD itself or online, and what had updates available. One day, my HDD somehow seemed to have gotten corrupted, and I couldn't recover anything, so had to do a clean install. This time, I used the Maximum Linux CD from where I had installed some of the extra software previously, and did a complete install. It was quite better than RHEL and ran for a while. But I noticed that it had the same problem w/ .RPMs, which is why I decided that going forward, I'd either go w/ a Debian based distro, or something else.

Oh, and did I mention - in b/w, I did try installing Ubuntu (this was long before Unity) and another distro called GNUSTEP OS. The former - at least the magazine cutout I had - refused to install unless I already had Windows on my laptop, but I had freed up the whole thing for just one OS - I don't believe in dual booting. The latter was a CD-only thing, and wouldn't install. Gave up on that as well.

Currently, I use XP on a desktop, but plan to try out PC-BSD once I get my hands on a DVD.

Windows OpenSUSE No turning back!

[nemesisfixx]

Not been around a long time, but my journey goes something like:

WinXP > Mint 7 > Mint 9 > OpenSUSE 11.4 > Ubuntu (unity) > OpenSUSE 11.4 (personal) + OpenSUSE 12.1 (work) + No turning back!

I've noted how so many nerds here don't seem to show SuSe love, but as for me, SuSe is the only way I know I really got to fall heads-over-heels in love with the Tux + KDE rocks - I love waking up every morning to another experience of messing with High-Energy Distros involving plasma -- SO HOT!

1995-2012

[veberic]

redhat -> fedora -> gentoo -> ubuntu

Windows & POSIX

[unixisc]

NT had POSIX, but did Windows retain it forever? I thought that from Vista onward, that was something that had to be separately added.

Linux on SPARC

[unixisc]

Why did you scrap SPARC? Couldn't Linux have been installed on Solaris? A whole bunch of Linux distros have run on SPARC - RHEL, Caldera, Debian, and on the BSD side, FBSD, OBSD and NBSD. That SPARC could have been handy for quite a while.

Re:Linux on SPARC

[bobthesungeek76036]

I am aware of the Linux distros for SPARC. I started working for Sun around that time and there was a big push for everyone to become OpenSolaris "champions". And at that time, OpenSolaris was not available for SPARC so that is how that played. It was a sad day when I packed up my U5...

Include the interface - ssh or touchscreen?

[jago25_98]

I find this kind of interesting for figuring out which methods are best for learning. I found Ubuntu to be better for learning before it got so popular, but it's still OK. Gentoo I found I learnt the most by far. I know Android isn't strictly linux but I've found it a lot harder to learn anything with this... any tips on resources?

Mine is:
Mandrake -> Debian -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu -> Ubuntu & Sabyron -> Ubuntu, Sabyron, Android

Next move will probably be something for a Raspberry Pi.

These days though I find other things matter, such as which interface you're using. That path for me has been, with overlapping use:

Amiga500 -> Vic20 -> Amstrad with DOS -> 486 with DOS/Win3.1 -> Win95 -> Win98 -> Mandrake6 with KDE -> Debian with Gnome -> WinXP -> Ubuntu with KDE -> Debian via Putty -> CentOS via putty & XP -> Sabyron via putty & XP -> Ubuntu with AwesomeWM -> and I'm finally on triple boot Win7, WinXP, Ubuntu with XFCE!

Not pretty!
I've lost patience for linux on the desktop, much preferring shell use over ssh. These days I expect things to work and if I get something unexpected I just reboot into WinXP. In the days of Mandrake I would have taken great pleasure in sorting it out... these days I would prefer to pay someone else to do it if that was feasible.

I got late into the Android party with ICS, holding off for many years with Symbian. I'm really surpised at how different it is to linux and how hard I've found it to transition. I can't trace wakelocks to processes and there seems to be tons of stuff oing on I don't understand. The filesystem is completely foriegn and it seems rare to find anyone who's gone deeper than loading an alternative ROM but also is willing to swap notes. I need to find a smaller, more niche community to swap notes with.

Lots, but ending up on Debian.

[Anonymous Coward]

Started dabbling in the late 90s with Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, and LFS. Didn't fully switch to Linux until around 2006, with Ubuntu. Abandoned Ubuntu for Fedora when I got fed up of Ubuntu constantly putting out half-baked releases that broke things that had been working perfectly. Abandoned Fedora for Debian when I got fed up of how terrible yum is compared to aptitude.

Oh, and RHEL at work, but I don't have a choice there.

Unknown ...

[hholzgra]

* Unknown CD Distribution (don't remember the name, lost the CD), came with a small paper note with a few line diff to make a broken floppy driver work again
* Slackware repackaged by SuSE, then their own Distro stuff
* SuSE all the way until 2006 or so, some attempts to switch to Debian always faild due to driver issues
* short MacOS/X detour, most stupid window manager ever ...
* Ubuntu until last year
* Short Mint detour, regrettet when it came to version upgrades
* back to Ubuntu (with XFCE) for now ...

OS History

[cha0t1c]

CP/M, various flavors of DOS w/GEOS, OS/2, Slackware from its inception, Mandrake, Mandriva and currently Mageia.

The whole shebang

[hawkingradiation]

Started out with an obscure distro from a "Linux Universe" book - they all came from a book back then. Tried RedHat 5.1 (buggy as hell = web browser kept on crashing) then Linux Mandrake when you could buy it in the mainstream computer stores (around the time of the dot-com bubble). Then got a Mac Mini and used OS X. Got a Dell PC at about the same time and dual-booted to a Linux distro but I forget which one (might have been ubuntu - no it was SuSE before they became part of Novell) and downloaded packages from websites, built some from source. Got used the package management features i.e. yum, apt-get Tried out Fedora Linux for a whlie (has excellent SELinux integration recently). Tried out versions of Debian and OpenWRT on a router and used Ubuntu on a dual boot Windows 7. Used Mac OS X recently, but still have PC's running various Linux distros. Recently, have used Linux Mint->Maya and upgraded Ubuntu on the Windows 7 machine. Never tried Slackware and am interested in Arch Linux from what I gather here about it. Interesting to have your system update for you although Ubuntu lets you do an "apt-get dist-upgrade" which worked well.

Mandrake, Debian, Kubuntu

[Spugglefink]

Mandrake, Debian, Kubuntu

Slackware - RedHat - Gentoo - Ubuntu

[darkeye]

Slackware on floppies at first, with the letter-coded floppy sets

then I went for RedHat, on CDs

then Gentoo, emerge away!

and now I use Ubuntu, though I still don't really like apt

Best for the Last

[apharmdq]

Mandrake (Just a little)
Red Hat (Just a little)
Suse
Ubuntu
Slackware.

My full path

[fromhell091]

My full path! Windows 95->Windows98->WindowsXp->Mandriva->openSUSE

Nearly 20 years worth of Linux!

[cybervegan]

I've been using Linux for nearly 20 years, and have used whatever seemed most useful at the time or whatever was dictated by the organisation I worked at. I used Ubuntu on my desktop/laptop for about 5 years, until Unity came along, then hopped about for a while looking for an alternative to Gnome 3, even trying Fedora 13 with KDE for a while. On servers, I have historically favoured CentOS/Red Hat based systems, but in latter years have moved over to pure Debian.

1993 Yggdrasil - floppy disk install
1994 Slackware
1995 Red Hat 2 - CDROM install
1999 Red Hat 9
2000 Mandrake
2005 Ubuntu 5.04| Fedora Core 4
2006 Ubuntu 6.x|Fedora Core 6|CentOS 4.x
2008 Ubuntu 8.x|CentOS 4.x|Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x
2009 Ubuntu 9.x|CentOS 5.x|Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x|Slackware 9(?)|Fedora Core 8
2010 Ubuntu 10.10|CentOS 5.x|Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x|Fedora Core 8!|Proxmox VE 1.x|Debian Lenny
2011 Fedora Core 13 KDE|Linux Mint 11(?) Debian Edition|CentOS 5.x|Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x|Debian Lenny|Proxmox VE 1.8
2012 CrunchBang Statler|CentOS 5.x|Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x|Debian Squeeze|Proxmox VE 2.1|Scientific Linux 6.x

Debian

[Lennie]

I started with Debian I stayed with Debian-based. Debian on the server and Ubuntu LTS with GNOME-session-fallback on the desktop (GNOME 3 that has the panel and looks like GNOME 2). I think I'm gonna install Debian testing on the desktop too.

Just to see what it is like I installed others like Fedora, Mandriva, Suse, Slackware, CentOS/RHEL of course, never found a reason to switch on the server or desktop.

redhat/fedora for years, but about to move away

[quippe]

All started with Slackware .
Then from Redhat 4.1 down to Fedora 16. Still haven't gone to Fedora 17; because it doesn't like my /usr on a separate partition (madness). And my 100 megs boot partition on raid. And I don't like systemd nor gnome 3. Professionally, rhel and centos but that's just a terminal. Never fallen in love with debian-derived.
All will probably finish with Slackware

CentOS (with an eye on Fedora)

[rklrkl]

I used to use every Fedora release (multi-boot between the "stable" version and the next alpha or beta), but the last time I did that was Fedora 14. Once GNOME 3 came out with F15, I clung onto F14 as long as I could and then did the jump to CentOS 6 (aka F12/13-like).

CentOS 6 gives you these advantages:

* System V Init rather than upstart or systemd.
* GNOME 2 - massively better than GNOME 3.
* 10 years of updates - more than any other Linux distro anywhere.
* Ability to run the exactly same distro (no special server edition) at home and work on servers and desktops.
* If I don't want to wait 10 years for a major upgrade, CentOS 7 will be out within the next year or so, though you'll lose the first two advantages with 7 I suspect.

The disadvantages:

* Most packages never get a major upgrade - tends to be minor upgrades and some backported fixes. Means you may have to manually version chase some stuff (e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice).
* Pre-built binaries don't ever care about CentOS - Firefox hasn't worked on CentOS 5 for quite a while despite it still having more than 5 years of updates to go! Firefox OS is also guilty about ignoring even CentOS 6 - the pre-built stuff doesn't work on it either.

If you want a stable desktop to do serious work on Linux, CentOS 6 is a clear winner for me. If I need to see how stuff like Fedora 18 Alpha is going, I just fire up VirtualBox and test it out (turns out it's utter rubbish at the moment - they've even made the Anaconda installer less useful and more dumbed down). As for Ubuntu, I've got 12.04 on a few Acer Revos purely to run XBMC, but the Unity interface is so awful, I just have it auto-booting straight into XBMC to avoid it!

Too many to mention!

[Simon Brooke]

Started with SLS. Then Slackware. Stayed with Slackware for a considerable while, then early RedHat, then Caldera (remember them? - the distribution included licensed OSF/Motif), then Mandrake (again for a good while) then by 1997 I was onto Debian and I've kept my servers on Debian ever since. My desktops run Ubuntu these days after a brief flirtation with Mint, but it's a heavily customised Ubuntu - Unity really does not do it for me. Before Linux I used BSD4.2 on 68000, SPARC, MIPS and Acorn RISC hardware, and System V.4 (and later UnixWare) on PowerPC and Intel hardware.

One of the really nice applications on Linux back in the 1990s was an office productivity suite called Applixware. It was commercial, for pay, and I don't think it sold well, which is a shame because it was really good - particularly for the time. LibreOffice is pretty good these days, but I might just download an evaluation of Applixware tonight to see if it's still as good as I remember.

Back in those days there was a sort of toy operating system called Microsoft Windows, but it was shockingly bad - fragile as hell and full of security holes. I've kept looking it over the years and thinking 'the next release of this might actually be good enough for commercial use'. I still think that, but now it's really too late - the PC is more or less dead, and various flavours of UN*X have, for the time being anyway, won in the server and in the mobile devices space.

Similar

[dolmen.fr]

InfoMagic -> Debian (but never successfully configured the X server) -> Mandrake -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu
But I've always been dual Windows(MS-DOS)/Linux, being mostly Linux only since Ubuntu.

Also, some live distros, either on hardware or in VMs : BlueOS (Linux on a floppy ; not sure of the name), Knoppix, LNX-BBC (buisness-card sized CD distro), DamnSmallLinux...

Red Hat - Suse - Gentoo - Arch - Gentoo

[FritzSolms]

Red Hat -> Suse -> Gentoo -> Arch -> Gentoo

My way

[sk8_slacker]

Caldera -> Red Hat -> Debian -> Slackware -> FreeBSD -> NetBSD -> Gentoo -> Slackware -> LFS -> CentOS

I tried many more distributions but cannot remember which ones. The only distribution I used and still use constantly is Slackware. After Slackware, NetBSD is my second favorite OS and I am looking forward to the 6.0 release.

The fastest

[ThatsNotPudding]

I need to know which one installs the fastest - and where I can get some concrete blocks. http://idle.slashdot.org/story/12/09/26/0526231/linux-forcibly-installed-on-congressmans-computer-in-act-of-terrorism

My

[atisss]

Red Hat (10 years ago) -> Debian (6 years ago) -> Gentoo (4 years ago)-> Ubuntu (2 years ago til now)

Debian then Gentoo

[rvalles]

Debian stable potato (2 week) -> Debian sid (2 year) -> Gentoo ~testing (10 year).

I used in this order

[GPLHost-Thomas]

monotask computer -> MiNT (read: mint is not TOS, on the Atari computer, not the Debian or Ubuntu derivative...) -> Slackware 68k -> RedHat 5.2 68k -> Debian i386 -> Debian amd64

Gnome 3 isn't better than the Desktop Environment that I had in the mid-90s with MiNT and XAES, and one of so many alternative desktops we could choose from.

SuSE

[quantic_oscillation7]

i started with SuSE in 1998, then Red Hat -> Mandrake/Mandriva -> Mepis-> kubuntu -> Debian and #!CB

Slackware, Mandrake,SuSE, Fedora Redhat and CentOS

[CaptainAx]

Back when I started in Linux, there was SLS and Slackware. The kernel on the install of Slackware I 1st got was .99pl14. I was slackware until 1995 when I went to Mandrake. I did a brief stink with SuSE but didn't like how different it was from Mandrake/RedHat. When Red Hat went commecial, I became an RHCE and stayed with Redhat derivatives.

Since 1992 (Linux 0.97)

[e70838]

SLS
slackware
redhat
mandrake
LFS
SUSE
Ubuntu
Debian
CentOS
Some short tries with knoopix, gentoo and gobolinux.

Start difficult, become lazy

[SmilingBoy]

Debian potato and woody -> SuSE 8.1-9.2 -> Mandrake 10.1-2006.0 -> Kubuntu 5.10-8.10 -> Ubuntu 8.10-12.04

My experience

[swflint]

Ubuntu(variansts included)->Debian->Fedora/CENTOS Never gone back, never gonna

Ubuntu

[Blaskowicz]

Ubuntu, Ubuntu, then Debian and Ubuntu, then Ubuntu and Debian, then Ubuntu (called Mint these days).

There enough work already and I still learnt stuff over the years, the distro also changes enough already (learning to deal with grub 2, with an empty then non-existant xorg.conf, then learning new window manager/environments etc.). There's no incentive to learn other distros and learn to use the tools to deal with .rpm, etc. I once installed OpenSuse, it looked nice and had a better installer but had much less software.

If I had a to try something new it would rather be FreeBSD or specifically its PC-BSD variant. a Unix with binary compatibility sounds cool. Maybe it could be a better gaming platform than linux?, theoretically.

I feel old

[petteyg359]

1. Slackware single-1.44MB floppy version
2. SuSE 6.0
3. Some pre-installed Linux on a Via C3 "GigaPro" from TigerDirect - started with a full screen menu with big buttons in a vertical column in the middle for "Play Music/Movies", "Word Processor", etc. Cannot recall the name.
4. Various other SuSE versions
5. Mandrake (before it became Mandriva)
6. Debian 4.0
7. Gentoo

My own distro path

[Shirley Marquez]

My trajectory was Slackware, Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu. There was also a brief flirtation with Gentoo that was simultaneous with the latter part of the SUSE phase. My first Slackware install was in 1993.

I started with Knoppix from live DVD...

[mic0e]

Around 2007, I installed Ubuntu, and stayed faithful to it until it began tormenting me with Unity in late 2011. Now, I'm using Arch GNU/Linux.

SoftLanding Systems

[yelvington]

SLS (SoftLanding Systems), the very first Linux distro, downloaded at 1200bps from Sunsite. Recompiled the kernel every week from alpha sources. Ran it on a '386, then upgraded to a fire-breakthing 33-mhz '486.

Then RedHat on a Pentium.

Then Mandrake when I couldn't get RedHat to run on a particular box.

Then Ubuntu.

Then Android. Does that count?

it's complicated

[xuvetyn]

freebsd -> debian ... (i'm permanently disabled now and in need of a clicky desktop) ... desktopbsd (hated it) -> ubuntu (didn't care for it) -> (currently trying out) mint.

RH-SuSE-Mandrake-Debian-Gentoo-Ubuntu

[pturing]

I started with RedHat 5.2 in '99. I think the distro I put on the G3 at the high school was LinuxPPC.

SuSE 6.3 was great - there was so much software on all the CDs.

I liked how the dev version of Mandrake had really current packages so I upgraded my live running system from SuSE to Mandrake Cooker. This was a terrible idea especially since that was still before the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. I made it work.

I rebuilt and modified Mandrake and made my own version which I called Malcolm Linux (with the Malcolm X Window System of course)

After I while the folks at the Rice Linux Users Group sold me on Debian

Debian ran too well - I missed fixing things that broke. So I installed Gentoo, which provided countless hours of fun.

When I wanted things to work well again I switched to Ubuntu and that's where I'm at now. I maintain a PPA of a few modified packages, but mostly it does everything out of the box.

Slackware

[BloodyRose]

Slackware was my frist distro. Then I've looked at Fedora, Mandriva, Kubuntu, Ubuntu and a bunch of others without ever using them on a regular basis. Only Slackware has been my main OS for a while. If I weren't that much of a PC gamer I'd still use Slackware rather than Windows. This has been my way of thinking for a couple of years now. What's interesting, though, is that Windows 8 is changing how I see Windows. I'm starting to think that even if I stop playing PC games I'll not go back to Linux. It has been a lot better as a system during the Windows XP era and before that but now it seems like Windows has grown up.

A long time ago...

[guano79]

Being very young I remember getting a magazine with SuSE 6 CDs and was so scared of installing it and losing my Windows 95 installation, at that time I didn't know how to partition a disk. One day I just decided to go for it but since my knowledge about OS wasn't very good and being confused with the GUI, I went back to Windows. Later on, while taking Operating Systems as one of my subjects in university I came across RedHat 6 and went all the way to RedHat 9 while maintaining PCs for the OS and Networking Labs, but Debian was poking my mind... So I tried RedHat 9 on my personal PC and was able to dual boot so I felt more confident, but... my PC would freeze 'cos of some bug making my NVIDIA card and Xorg crash, so RedHat went to the trash can after many tries of recompiling the kernel and using different booting options. It was time o try Debian... failed...didn't know what to do with so many CDs and got lost with apt-get ... lol . Ubuntu 5.04 came to town... w00t... it was MAGICAL!! things worked out of the box, since then I've been with Ubuntu, skiping some versions here and there, and now I'm thinking on moving to Mint to keep it simple since Ubuntu has changed so many things that not interest me. In production environments, the companies I worked for would use RHEL/CentOS or SuSE, to that I have to say, it's my impression RHEL/CentOS has more support from the community, but SuSE has YaST :-) which made my job soooo easy.

Hard to remember back to 1992

[Sabalon]

Am trying to remember the beginning days from the 0.98 or so era in 92. Was using 386BSD for a bit then decided to go to Linux (or perhaps I had them both going...had CP/M installed then too.) I think the first was a boot disk and a root filesystem disk. Then there were all the different disk images for GCC, and so on. rawrite it to a disk in dos, tar vfxM in Linux. Token ring at college, so no networking for me :( First real distribution was SLS, followed by Slackware, which was the main one for a while. Used RedHat at workt, and then Debian (about 1998). Since then, it's been Debian. There are a couple things I use uBuntu for, but that's pretty much the same.

Don't care about the free philosophy behind it, and don't really think it's perfect, but it is the one that has felt right. Have touched RedHat and SuSE since then because of things based on it, and still come back to Debian and uBuntu.

not sure why it matters

[fiver22]

but: Mandrake->Ubuntu->Crunchbang->Debian Squeeze->Sabayon->Crunchbang->Sabayon->Arch->LMDE.

Linux use

[dwilcox]

I started to use Linux with 2 floppy drives in 92? maybe it was a year or two later. But the first true Linux distro that I used was RedHat 4.0.

I used that RedHat until Fedora was spun off from it and have used Fedora as my primary distro since. Though I have dallied with Mint and other Debian OS's.

ubuntu ftw

[seshomaru samma]

Ubuntu 6.06 > a bunch of other distros > Ubuntu 12.04

My Transition

[carpus]

RH -> Caldera OpenLinux -> SCO UL -> OpenSuSE -> Ubuntu -> Kubuntu.
There was a brief stint with Mandrake in the middle, but *very* brief.
I need to get work done. Linux/KDE is great for me to get work done. Ubuntu makes it easy, if not perfect :)

Re:Gateway drug?

[ZeroMS]

Hungry troll has been fed.

Coherent ...

[dave87656]

First Coherent (okay it wasn't "linux")

Then Slackware from floppies (this was pre-internet).

Redhat, Mandrake, Opensuse, Ubuntu.

Gentoo

[perles]

I've started with Brazilian distro called Conectiva (2000), then bounced around Suse and RedHat, then Mnadrake till 2004. Finally in the middle of 2004 I've moved to Gentoo, which I use in basically every computer I owned or used since then. Gentoo is the best due its customization potential, even when is not fully used. I used many customization, but there is always more to explore.

I've bounced around quite a bit:

[cycleflight]

DOS 5 -> Win 3.0 -> Win 3.1 -> Win95 -> Win98 -> WinXP -> Ubuntu 5.04 -> Ubuntu 5.10 -> Ubuntu 6.04 -> Elive 0.9 -> Pardus -> CentOS -> PCLinuxOS -> Mandriva -> Fedora -> Win7 -> Arch -> Ubuntu 12.04

will stay with Debian derivative

[jpkeating]

Redhat (1999) > Laser5 (Japanese) > Kondara (Japanese) > Mandrake > Ubuntu > Lubuntu
(couldn't even boot on two machines after upgrade made Unity the default, and it's an abomination anyway)

window manager: FVWM
file browser: TkDesk
both required major config-file changes to pare them down and tweak them, but they now are indispensible to me

Stuck with *buntu

[Bambi Dee]

Amiga OS -> Windows -> SuSE 7.0 (briefly; didn't work well) -> Windows -> Mandrake 8/9 -> Ubuntu -> Kubuntu. I did try and do keep trying other distributions: Elementary, openSUSE, ROSA, Mageia, Mint, Pinguy OS, Manjaro, Crunch Bang, Arch Bang... I just don't seem to have the necessary patience any more to get properly set up with them -- to install uncommon tools and games that I know how to get running on *buntu with little fussing. So in the end just go back to the APT and PPAs I'm already comfortable with. (And why not? Probably because I'd still like to broaden my horizon...)

Depends what you are using it for...

[DarthVain]

I don't think order really matters so much as purpose. Some are just better at some things...

First I used for any period of time was Xandros and Meppis as they were more user friendly however. Used DSL when trying to install to a low storage old laptop. Use Knoppix Live CD for PC repair and utilities. Used Ubuntu for a bit when it got better. Tried Gentoo and a few others for kicks. I think I even tried CentOS to try and config a LAMP server.

Another consideration, is that usualy I am using Linux not on my "main" system, but on other older PC's I have kicking about. Many times there are compatibility issues with the BIOS, so you are limited to whatever will actually work on the system you are trying to install it on. I know some were better at actually detecting hardware also from various video cards, to HD which also makes a big difference what you choose.

I am probably missing a whole bunch too, and I don't even consider myself a big Linux user at all. I think anyone that has tried linux on pc (not come pre installed on a netbook, phone, tablet, etc...) will have tried a whole host of options.

The most useful I have ever used were probably Xandros, Knoppix (only as a LiveCD tho), and Ubuntu.

Multiple machines = multiple distros

[mruwek]

Ubuntu --> Debian testing --> Arch --> Gentoo (desktop) + CentOS (VPS) + Ubuntu (desktop and laptop).

A long and winding road...

[jimmydigital]

Slackware on CD from the back of a book... no way I was downloading that over a modem! Detour to IRIX... then redhat... mandrake.. redhat.. centos.. fedora... detour to solaris... debian... redhat. So in summary... RedHat... it's the linux distro I like the least and use the most! Of course in those early days there was also things like OS2Warp... Desqview.. and NeXT.

The order!

[Arran4]

Redhat -> Mandrake -> Knoppix -> Gentoo -> (Solaris) -> Ubuntu

Puppy, Ubuntu 2005-2009, Mint Cinnamon

[Rainserpent]

It is surprising how many have tried Slackware. I will give that one a whirl when I buy more CD/DVDs. Kind of cut my Linux teeth on 'buntu until my frustration level peaked. I think it is good to experiment with different distros and operating systems as you never know when you are going to be stuck trying something out (e.g.: running recovery software or Alien for Debian CLIs). Overall, Linux has been a great experience; just learning as much as I can. Okay, now maybe you pros can come up with a script to aggregate all this info...

all the way to Debian

[gullevek]

Slackware - first steps into Linux
SUSE - because back than in Europe (Austria/Germany) it was the most popular distro
Mandrake - because my first works boss used it, also on servers
Redhat - after Mandrakes demise back to Redhat (before they went enterprise)
Gentoo - because it was all the fad, at the end a waste of time
Debian - since about 10 years now. Still the best, run it on servers when I run Gentoo on desktops, and then switched to Debian only

A stroll down memory lane!

[NikeHerc]

First distro was Slackware installed in Sep., 1996, on a 486-33 Gateway with ESDI drives (anybody remember those?). At work a couple of years later, I sneaked the first Linux box through the back door into a Fortune 500 company; this box and a sibling became DNS servers.

Switched over to Red Hat in 1999, also played with (and discarded) Suse that year.

Diddled with TinyLinux, Knoppix, Fedora, and several other distros over the years, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux is my favorite for work and home.

Having declared a favorite, however, I recently installed Slackware 4.0 at home to diddle with a tcp/ip protocol, so I've come full circle in 16 years.

Can't find the name of the first one I tried...

[xkpe]

but then it was:
Slackware > Suse > debian > ubuntu > mint > arch

tho I still use debian in a server

Mandrake to Fedora

[BuFf0k_SPQA]

I originally began experimenting with Linux while still in school. Due to my lack of broadband at the time, I got Mandrake 7.2 because of all the software which came bundled on the cd set. I found it unusable for my purposes at the time and completely abandoned Linux for several years. Two years ago I tried Mint, Fedora and Ubuntu virtual machines on my Windows host, playing around but not really finding one that worked. At one point during last year I began using ubuntu on an old laptop I had at home, and finally found linux to be usable for some non critical aspects of my life. I began developing a Latency issue on my audio in Windows 7 and could not resolve the problem. After weeks of diagnostics and troubleshooting I determined that it was due to shared IRQ issues in WIndows, and since I could not manually manage IRQ's to fix the issue, I figured that it cannot be fixed. I then wanted to confirm my diagnosis and completely isolate the problem as windows driver specific, so I figured I would dual boot into another OS. A quick twenty minute recce into the abyss of google lead me to consider ubuntu and fedora, and having installation media for both at hand, I read a comparrison stating that Fedora was more techincal than Ubuntu, my need for geek cred lead me to Fedora as the choice. And I installed a second boot to Fedora 15. I began installing various apps and found the yum interface quite attractive. Eventually I switched entirely to Fedora, currently on Fedora 17 Beefy Miracle and use it as my only OS on my desktop at home. My work laptop dual boots Fedora 17 and Windows 7. I also had a spare server at work and four spare IPv4 addresses on my ISP account. I wanted to learn more about linux now and since I had spare resources I built a Fedora web server as a lab environment to see if I can;t switch our entire business away from Windows. After some messing about I decided to try CentOS for that server, but ran into problems installing from USB (The Server I have is a retired XENON system from three years ago but lacks an optical media drive). From there I then switched over to ubuntu server for that server which is now running three domains (mail and web) as well as the ISPConfig 3 control interface. My next idea is to add services to the server and see if it is in-fact plausible to perform all our corporate funcions from a Linux system. If that succeeds I would most likely opt for a CentOS server and Fedora workstations.

I'm a Mac user...

[stetho70]

...so I started with Yellow Dog in 2000. Then progressed through Red Hat, CentOS, Suse, Fedora, Slackware, Ubuntu and Gentoo. Now have a "tools for the job" relationship with Ubuntu, CentOS and OS X. (Work uses RHEL and CentOS).

Slackware, Redhat, Fedora, Centos, Ubuntu, Mint

[obscuro]

Tried starting with Slackware in 1996(?) - poked around half lost

Bought a gray box with Redhat at Fries Electronics in 1997(?)

Used RedHat for server and desktop stuff

Used a short-lived Linux distro from the Wordperfect guys on laptop - worked pretty good

Used Fedora for desktop on desk and laptop

Used CentOs for server stuff - still do for all but AWS where I use Ubuntu

Used Ubuntu from first version on until the obvious reason why so many people now use Mint ;)

Also used FreeBSD to poke around ZFS.

RedHat, Knoppix (to fix Windows), SLAX, OpenSUSE

[eionmac]

1. start on Linux was as Red Hat on floppies, then Knoppix to fix Windows XP, then ran Knoppix alongside Windows. Then after much experimenting carried SLAX (slackware derivative) to show others and introduce them to Linux , while giving a copy of Knoppix as a 'if you need it' it will help fix Windows. Then various varieties of SuSE then open SUSE
        2 Now boot Windows and open SUSE as regular items and keep Knoppix as 'best friend'

Slackware-nothing-Ubuntu-nothing

[anyGould]

Ran Slackware in university (was lucky enough that I could download it direct instead of 15-floppy hell), and that system lasted me nearly a decade. When the machine died we were on Windows (the wife wanted it, and it was her machine). Ran Ubuntu for a while a few years back, but could never get it 100% stable - video issues mostly - and by then I had a job and kids and other hobbies besides hotrodding OSs.

Every so often I think of trying it again, but it always comes down to the basic time issues.