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.

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.

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.

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: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.