the f00fy one asked Those of you who use Linux: What was your f…

Ubuntu was my first Linux distribution. I had it on my very first laptop (Lenovo Z50-75), I had a HDD at the time so it was quite slow. Windows wasn't great either.

I tried Linux again on my desktop PC (Dell Optiplex 7010), and I was struggling to play games on it. Eventually I got a GPU, and it made things much better to the point where I could use it every day.

I'm not currently using it at the moment (using Windows 10 LTSC rn), but I will probably install Fedora or Arch Linux :)

David · 7mo

My first linux distro was Ubuntu, if I remember correctly. Back in 2018 or something. Didn't stick for it long and moved to arch, as stupid a decision as that was.

Pyrox · 7mo

Ubuntu 14.04
Everything was kinda good back then, even if early hints of the future were visible

The King · 7mo

my first distro was mint and i loved it lol

i first tried to install it on my laptop, but i had to turn off rst, which meant windows no longer booted, which scared me and made me give up on the idea until i got a pc

on my pc i daily drove it for a week until i (thought it) broke it 🥴

Alex · 8mo

Ubuntu! I found the option in Virtualbox and wondered "Huh what is this other thing?" It was so intriguing to younger me cause it was not windows or Mac.

Zen · 8mo

my first distro was fedora, and i have continued to use fedora since maybe november or december, i've had nothing but positive sentiment for linux, at least as compared to my lifetime of using mac and occasional usage of windows for school stuff.

shroomiePerson · 8mo

Ubuntu, as a live USB, when I was trying to troubleshoot an old ThinkStation that I got for free. I didn't really understand what I was doing, and eventually I concluded that something was wrong with the motherboard, that it just couldn't detect any IDE devices.

As for a first experience using a Linux install on a computer, then that would be elementary OS, first in a VM and then as a dual boot with Windows 7 on tank. I got a ThinkPad knowing that it was considered a good Linux machine, though the two main reasons I got that one are that it was quite cheap on eBay and that a laptop with a stylus sounds rad (fuck touchscreens), so I wanted to try Linux. I chose Elementary because it looked like it had more work on its design than other distros and I thought that could motivate me to use Linux. I ended up switching to using it full time rather quickly and removed the Windows 7 partition. I learnt the basics not by following any "intro to linux" tutorials but just by working through various problems, only really learning the things I needed at a particular time for a particular situation.

I started to truly learn Linux when I got into my last year of computer science classes. The first two years were in a very Windows-oriented school, but that last one had 0% Windows. They made us write an HTTP server in Bash and in Perl, I learnt Python by myself, etc., and switched to Xubuntu while I toyed with Arch Linux on my other computers. Now I just feel like I can't get anything done on Windows because I got far more control on my computer thanks to Linux systems, but I cannot say that anyone should switch to Linux because the desktop experience keeps on getting worse; the huge fragmentation means nothing is ever consistent and understandable by normal people.

~lucidiot · 8mo

The year was 1999, I was using Linux Mandrake 6.5, which I bought in a physical box containing CD-ROMs and a floppy disk and an actual printed user manual.

I remember being frustrated about getting the sound card working, but I had fun because I loved exploring new systems and figuring things out and I was just completely enamored with the idea of open source and free software at the time.

Steve · 8mo

pretty sure it was ubuntu 10.04 in 2012, which i used in a vm a little bit. my computer was too slow to run unity in a vm smoothly, but then i later dualbooted 12.04 on bare metal with windows 7. my experience was a mix of "wow this is annoying" and "wow this is really cool". the customisation was super nice and the ui was slick and fresh to my 9 year old self. all of my problems with it were just normal linux issues at the time, or were typical ubuntuisms

nano · 8mo

My phone.

Shannon. · 8mo

Mandriva, it was pleasant, if a little confusing. It's pretty intuitive though!

I don't use it as my main OS currently but I wanna remedy that, I just game too much and WINE is a pain in the ass. also I'm out of the loop on distros so idk which one I'd use...prolly arch or smth that I have friends who use so I can crowdsource help x3

mana · 8mo

It was Ubuntu. If I'm not mistaken, version 16.04. It was cool in that it could run Firefox out of the box and do web browsing. But I didn't know how to download software properly, and ended up thinking like it was some sort of unfinished/experimental stuff that was being taken too seriously.

Fast forward to today and my esteemed KDE Ubuntu handles everything I throw at it (except sustained workloads like gaming but that's a firmware support issue)