• umbrella@lemmy.ml
      1·
      8 months ago

      to be fair gnome3 was a hot steaming pile of shit when it released, and was still bad for literal years. i say that as a gnome user, but i’m sorry, it was unusable for a big stretch of time there.

      as much as i dislike canonical for pushing snaps, Unity makes sense to me under that light.

  • umbraroze@lemmy.world
    20·
    9 months ago

    Slackware 3.0 in 1996

    Then this new promising distro called Debian

    Got my own PC, went with Slackware again for some God-forsaken reason

    Debian again and that’s where I’ve stayed for most part - I tried using Ubuntu as a desktop laptop distro for a while but at some point I realised I should have installed Debian to begin with so I went with that there too

    • Sidewalker@lemm.ee
      4·
      9 months ago

      My people! Their screenshot gallery was the sole reason I got into Linux back when I was in the sixth grade. The skills I learned by using it as my daily driver got me a job at a web hosting company and started a very fulfilling career.

    • forgetful_fox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      9 months ago

      I’ve still got my Mandrake 9.2 CDs somewhere that a friend burned for me. Didn’t dig the rebranding to Mandriva.

      • Yaztromo@lemmy.world
        4·
        9 months ago

        It was quite the interesting thing to run back then — it was all very “Wild West” of software, and a LOT of stuff didn’t work well.

        It wasn’t my daily driver; it really wasn’t ready for most workloads back then. But it was nearly free, and we shared around the CD-ROM amongst hacker friends interested in giving it a try.

        • pete_the_cat@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          8 months ago

          I attempted to install RedHat 5 in the late 90s, but I had no idea what I was doing since I was like 12 or 13 and we had just gotten our first computer. I never got around to actually using Linux until a few years later with Ubuntu 5.04

          • Yaztromo@lemmy.world
            2·
            8 months ago

            You can learn a ton installing your own OS, even if you don’t get things working in the end. Especially back in the 90’s when things weren’t quite as plug-and-play and hardware auto-detection was immature. So even if your RedHat experiment failed, good on you for attempting it anyway!

    • syaochan@feddit.itEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      Me too, on floppy disks, kernel 2.0.something… I remember I struggled to get X11 running, so I tried with redhat next

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
        3·
        9 months ago

        Getting X to work required mucking about with a textfile where you specified parameters directing the operation of the electron gun inside a CRT monitor that were so down to the metal, that you could create your own resolution or even blow up your monitor.

        Ah, those were the days ;)

  • zarenki@lemmy.ml
    8·
    9 months ago

    The first I tried was Ubuntu 7.04 but I didn’t stick with it and went back to XP. Until I ended up with a hardware setup that wouldn’t work on Windows XP (widescreen monitor + Intel graphics driver with no widescreen mode options) but worked perfectly on Ubuntu 9.10. I never truly went back to Windows since.

    Tried a few other distros in 2011 then switched to Arch for a couple years, Xubuntu for a couple years, Ubuntu GNOME for 7-8 years, and finally switched to Fedora last year.

    • pmk@lemmy.sdf.org
      4·
      9 months ago

      When I saw the numbers “7.04” I immediately heard the login drum-like sound “bu-du-bup” and remembered Feisty Fawn. It’s one of my fondest computer memories. It felt like a friend.

  • teft@lemmy.world
    7·
    9 months ago

    Slackware 3.5 because my friend thought it’d be funny and didn’t tell me fuck all about distros.

    Helped me learn a lot though.

  • maryjayjay@lemmy.world
    6·
    9 months ago

    AT&T SVR4

    Oh, Linux. Slackware 1.2, but I had already used SunOS, Solaris, Ultrix, BSD, A/UX, and Unixware