Show us your first and also your favourite Linux distro

my first distro was unexpectedly manjaro kde. Then after some distro hopping I ended up with arch (my fav distro now)

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My first distro was Ubuntu, a few weeks before they introduced Gnome 3 / Unity. I thought it was pretty neat. Then the update “ruined” the DE.

My favourite DE is now also my daily driver - EndeavourOS.

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Same here although I think it might have been 1994 for me. I remember downloading floppy disk images and I don’t think X support was available yet.

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Desktop environment =/= distro.

My first distro ever was Linux Mint, and my first distro on bare metal was KDE Neon. I hopped between distros a few times, but not much, I mostly use other distros on virtual machines.

My fav and current distro is NixOS, but I also really like Artix/Arch/Endeavour, Devuan/Debian and a few others. Outside Linux, I like FreeBSD.

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I think that is a typo, as they differentiated them in the previous sentences.

Likely, yeah. I still felt the need to point that out.

Had to look up the Linux Mint release history to see if I could remember. It was definitely the 2012 release of Mint Maya with the option of mate or cinnamon

I briefly tried Linux at that time for something to do. Shortly after that, windows 8 was released and it was an abomination. I stuck with windows 7 because I didn’t mind it. Upon the release of windows 10 I decided to abandon windows forever as it had continued with the same hideous abomination of windows 8

I went full into Linux and never used windows again except for about 30 minutes to test out windows 11 on a laptop I bought last year. Windows 11 was a big improvement in UI but this was my experience…
“For your security…” nope
“would you like to link…” nope
“start your free trial today…” nope
“Microsoft can…” nope
“backup copy, blablabla, security, blabla, phone, credit card, windows can, bla bla…” uninstall

As far as current favorite distro it’s Endeavour/Arch. I really like how you guys have made it into a convenient way to install Arch with a few extra tools but no bloat. The default themes are good too and I often keep some elements of them. The forum has become one of the best in the Linux community

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It’s funny how you say “big improvement in UI”, I don’t think there was a single huge improvement since W10. [In fact win11 made me switch to Linux.]

“This won’t change the number of ads you see…”

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I don’t remember much about windows 8 and 10 other than feeling physically ill looking at them. With windows 11 I just felt annoyed, bored, and disgusted

I didn’t want to set my computer on fire with windows 11, just desperately shred the drive

I clicked “no” so fast that I didn’t read most of the suggestions completely lol

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What’s funny to me is that many “modern DE” (looking at you, XFCE, LXDE, LXQt) looks worse compared to early GNOME 2 (UI/UX wise). And kudos to MATE’s puke green which managed to make timeless GNOME 2 design looks undesirable.

That being said, everything made in late 2000s was just… awful. Lack design direction. I think in a lot of DE made in this time trying to mimic apple design, but with lack of knowledge thus it never evolved since.

I mean look at these Frankenstein-ish “design” (or rather lack there of):


(I mean they can’t even make the icon size make sense).


(the icons looks like android’s material design… but born out of wedlock).

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My first Linux distro was Ubuntu 10.04, which I used until 11.04, even growing to like Unity; I then went into high school and because that laptop needed to be wiped because of HDD failure, I stopped using Linux. Unfortunately, because of the need for Microsoft Office, the OpenOffice and LibreOffice forking drama, and the move from console to PC gaming, which at the time wasn’t very good on Linux, I had to stay with Windows until late into Windows 10, even seeing Ubuntu kill in-house Unity development.

I then tried Ubuntu again in 2018 and was not impressed; GNOME 3 was a nightmare to use and I couldn’t get used to it. If I wasn’t a computer science college student who was trying to use Linux for programming, I probably would have just given up, but I didn’t. (And good thing I didn’t!)

I distro hopped for about two to three years trying to find a good near stock and up to date KDE distro, as I didn’t like GNOME, Cinnamon wasn’t very good for my use cases (and Linux Mint often didn’t work with the newer hardware I had at the time), and I didn’t know any other DEs existed. Unfortunately, I found that a good KDE distro didn’t exist as a “point release distro”; Tuxedo OS didn’t exist then, Kubuntu wasn’t very stable and had the maligned snaps, KDE Neon was the same but had even worse stability, Fedora KDE was also not very good, and Linux Mint had just dropped their KDE Flavor to the anger of many using that flavor. I was almost ready to give up again when I decided to just go all in and learn bash so I could use Arch. After learning about bash through a class I had to take for my major in college, I just decided to bite the bullet and go with a (at the time) new Arch-based distro called EndeavourOS (hey, I wonder why I brought that up) that was basically Arch but with a better community and a GUI installer.

Even though the first year or so was rough after being off of Linux for a while (and this was before the GRUB issue), after Windows 11 was released in all of its unholy glory, I decided to stick with Linux full-time, especially as Proton became more and more capable thanks to Valve’s work on the Steam Deck and now Linux could legitimately fulfill my gaming needs as I didn’t play Fortnite, Valorant, or any of those other cringe games with rootkits that didn’t support Linux (as I would later learn, that’s what Vanguard is). And as Windows and macOS kept getting worse and more locked down, I felt more and more comfortable using Linux and its freedom. As I learned how to control my system more, I definitely wouldn’t go back to Windows 11 and definitely would avoid macOS.

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My first distro was knoppix, but aside from playing frozen bubble, it didn’t grab me so I went back to dual booting win98/XP. Several years later, Ubuntu 14.04 was my first real linux distro for about 6 weeks until I replaced it with Mint Cinnamon. I also distro hopped, exploring any 32/64 bit distro that would install on a baytrail 2-in-1 with 32 bit UEFI. Win32 never really ran well on it, but with some patching, linux ran great. The baytrail is retired(RIP) and now I use both Mint and EOS daily.

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My first Linux try was around 2017 and after some distro hopping Fedora was the one I chose. But few months later I was back in Windows 10 for various reasons. In april this year I have some free time and I decided to try some distros for fun again. Long story short, EndeavourOs was a nice surprise. I learned a lot. What I did not expect was me to like update and installations in CLI , really no need for GUI anymore. One day I installed vanilla Arch the hard way (sorry, the Arch way :)). It was fun but after all I ended up with nearly eOS default settings installation. So I am back in EndeavourOs as my daily and other 2 distros for fun and learning. Thank you all in eOS team for this amazing distro.

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I first experimented with mandriva/mandrake or what was the name CD that was in computermagazine … but that time it was not usable for daily usage.

First real migration from windows was to ubuntu 5.10 or 6.06 im not sure.
I have playd games (wine) but … after 2 years i get back to windows because games.

Experimented with some distros over time but never as a primary system.

come back to linux mainline with ubuntu and custom DE based on openbox in 2013 ? (steam linux was already there) … but not happy … Moved to lots of distribution ended with for me brand new manjaro based on arch (that i avoided until now even gentoo tryd sunner) with openbox customizet to my :slight_smile:

But dont stick too long (maybe 1 yer) and got back to windows becaus work (Solidowrks + EdgeCAM) …

Meanwhile i have build small useful device (as hobby) on arm dev boards … with armbian … im using that until now → debian based version is best for that.

Now my main working computer ad company and home (home i also gaming computer) running on windows → But my multimedia/NAS/TV center with intel N100 running at endeavour OS wit LXQT and KODI .
An as my daily driver for notebook … in with i do most of the stuff and run parsec o steam and stream PC from main computer is …

My new favorite (i experimented with endeavour for last … 2 years ? from first releases ?) …
Is Endeavour OS with plasma 6 and some customization … but i hope i will find out good replacement for openbox and stuff around him for wayland :slight_smile:

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My first distro was a copy of openSUSE (but called SUSE Linux then) that came on a disk glued to a magazine in 1995. The magazine cover was what would be called ‘click bait’ today, as I distinctly remember them saying it was better than Debian. I kept that disk for years hoping I could afford to buy a PC to install it.

First one I actually installed was Debian, on my girlfriend’s PowePC Mac in about 2002. She needed it for work and it took me about 2 weeks to get MacOS reinstalled. I didn’t touch Linux again until about 2007, again installing Debian on an old Mac tower.

After ups and downs of work in the late 90s and early 00s, I took the bold step of being one of those middle aged adults that went to graduate school in 2009, after losing my job due to the recession the year before. Whilst in graduate school, a professor introduced me to Edubuntu and gave me a copy. My Mac had recently died and I installed it on an old Dell PC the graduate school was going to discard. I’ve been using Linux as a daily driver since. I’ve tried nearly every distro since then (with the exception of Gentoo) and my favourite has to be Arch (I started that journey with Manjaro) and over the past 2 years, I’ve grown quite fond of EOS.

This isn’t always a popular opinion, but I feel many of the mainstream distros are doing what Apple did in the late 90s and early 00s. They started taking away choice and decisions from the user and telling users what they should want. Yes, with Linux distros you can get around that. Then again, when Apple started doing that in the beginning, you could get around it too. Personally, I feel like Arch still lives by the Unix philosophy the most.

I should also give honourable mention to FreeBSD. I installed that in graduate school as well, and really liked it at the time. It was just hard to find available software and took a lot of work to get networking to reliably function. Neither good in a learning environment.

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My first distro that i’ll actually count (I’d installed ubuntu before but not with the intention of using it) was gentoo, I believe i set up kde on it.

This kind of absolute eyesore

It didn’t take long for me to dump kde because of that damn ugly cashew that you couldn’t get rid of (classic kde devs lol, doing stupid shit like that)

Eventually I gave up on gentoo (compile times, amirite?) and after a short bout of distro hopping ended up on arch where i started hopping between DEs instead.

I ended up on openbox for a while. I don’t really remember how i set it up, but it was kinda meh.

Then eventually i ended up on xfce, i believe i used xfce 3 for a bit before xfce 4 came out.

I stuck with xfce for a long time, i eventually went from arch to manjaro because the rumors about the arch community being elitist are in fact not a myth, and, well, i just didn’t wanna set up everything from scratch for the 100th time, + the extra care to the package repositories to ensure that the system didn’t break on updates sometimes was nice.

Then manjaro just kinda started sliding until i came to eOS instead, i had a brief moment on antergos somewhere in between as well (i think maybe before manjaro) but honestly when i was on it i thought “might as well just use reglar arch instead” so that was a bust.

For about a year before i switched to endeavour i was on manjaro using plasma (kde again, but late 5 instead of early 4). But this time i just got sick of it beign kinda crash happy so i started lookign for something new before i’d leave manjaro which as i said had been sliding.

Now I’m on endeavouros, and that is my current favorite linux distro.

I’m using Hyprland now. My rice (i still don’t know why we call it that) isn’t quite complete yet, I’m gonna completely reconfigure the waybar at some point (right now it’s optimized for functionality, not looks, i particularly enjoy having most of what i’d normally use conky to display down there, I never realized just how much a taskbar isn’t needed on linux until I used this.)

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My first Distro was SUSE. Followed by many other. I stayed long with different Kinds of Ubuntu.

Than I discovered Antergos, and really liked it. But my main system was always a Windows machine, because of gaming.

That changed in early 2024. A friend of mine told me that Gaming works so well with Linux.

So I gave it a try with EndeavourOS. Steam Installation was easy, and all went well.
Ok, here and there were some problems. But all could be solved.
Thanks to this wonderful forum :heart:

Windows is gone. My SSD has only room for my favorite Distro EndeavourOS :blush:

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