What distros inspired you to want to learn Linux?

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What distros inspired you to want to learn Linux?

For me,the RPM based Mandrake 6.0 was the distro that provided my gateway into the Linux world, from there I spent a few years in Ubuntu, but it wasn’t until I tried Slackware, that I really began to understand and appreciate the inner workings of how Linux worked,

Prior to becoming a Slacker, I spent some time in Vector Linux, which is Slackware based. I played around with install new kernels, editing config files, and learning to appreciate the power and flexibility of the command line. Reading the documentation and posting questions in user forums soon became something I came to relish in my quest for knowledge and the pursuit of experimentation.

I lost my fear of breaking things, and that freed me, in order to find and apply solutions and understand those inner workings. I’m no Linux guru, even now, decades later, but the joy of having your system behave exactly the way you want it is it’s own reward.

When I did get around to Slackware, I knew to read the documentation and was able to get it up and running quite easily. I appreciated the KISS approach and the lack of dependency resolution made me see software differently. I had control as to what libraries or internals were being added to my base system. It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t the pain it was supposed to be in getting it up and usable. With a little time, reading and effort if was well within my grasp.

Fast forward a bit later on, I used Archbang in a similar way, I followed the documentation and started to get my legs in the Arch way of doing things. Feeling comfortable and confident, I soon was using Arch Linux proper, and felt at the time, a great sense of pride and achievement in navigating the system from the terminal. I had come a long way in my journey into Linux.

Perhaps my journey will continue into source based distros like CRUX or Gentoo, maybe even FreeBSD, but for now, I’m enjoying my time with EndeavourOS.

How did you get here?

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For me it was Slackware :wink:

I went from my Atari directly to SuSE Linux 1.2.13. That was in 1995 and it as based on Slackware at that time.

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I’m relatively new to fulltime Linux, so:

  1. Linux Deepin (Please DON’T!) but it inspired me big time
  2. Manjaro (i thought Deepin in there was little better :laughing:)

But just in general over the years without full-time switch…
Probably Linux Mint and Kali Linux :upside_down_face:

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In 1993, around the time that M$ 3.1/3.11/3.11wfw were current, I managed to acquire what was at the time a pretty sophisticated MidwestMicro notebook pc with a 386DX-33 CPU, 120MB drive and 12MB ram and something like SVGA or XGA graphics (I can’t recall exactly what set of letters it was, but it was close to top end at the time). Feeling the pains of trying to make M$ Windows work on this machine and being quite dissatisfied, I went looking for alternatives.

My first *nix hit came in the form of Coherent Unix a commercial Unix product that was $99 at the time. Within a year of getting semi-proficient with Coherent, I discovered Slackware v2.1 and it was off to the races …

I’ve distro-hopped over the years and for a long time Linux was my ‘spare time hobby’ but never quite my daily driver. That changed with early versions of Ubuntu somewhere around Gutsy Gibbon or Hardy Heron I actually switch my home laptop and daily driver to running Ubuntu.

Somewhere around Raring Ringtail I’d had enough of the 'buntu drama and started more distro-hopping … suse, puppy, fedora, manjaro, arch I tried a few different distros … through I never went as far as to try my hand at LFS!!

I did sort of land on manjaro for a while, but after a brewhaha or two there I decided I didn’t like the direction they were taking that distro and I ultimately found my way here to EndeavourOS which is my daily driver for both of ‘my’ laptops though my employer and clients all require me to use their laptops and Win10 :frowning:

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slackware was my first entry into Linux. I remember downloading the disk images and writing them to a stack of disks so I could do the install.

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I had a job about 5 years ago where several ancient computers with hopelessly filthy Windows XP were put in front of me. We (our department) were supposed to work productively on these computers. Normally I would have reinstalled Windows immediately, but there were no legal installation media. The employer was just too stingy for that. However, we had time without end … So I switched these 5 computers to Ubuntu without further ado. That was my first real contact with Linux. A little later I found out that I liked Linux Mint much better and then came the usual distrohopping.

To answer the question: It was Ubuntu :wink:

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Slackware in the early/mid 1990s - I bought a book with a CD and have been using Linux ever since.

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None. Windows 95 and how much I disliked it inspired me to learn linux. If anything the distro’s of the day seeked to uninspire me, but my hatred of Windows prevailed.

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Some 'buntu? Yeah I don’t need much. :smile:

I am not exactly sure. :laughing:

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… where am I? :wink:

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I was not inspired by some distro, but by the burning, all-consuming, ideologically motivated hatred for Microsoft. :slightly_smiling_face::ok_hand:

The first distro I used was Buntu. I was a normie back then and thought Buntu was great. Then I started hating Canonical :joy:

That said, I don’t even like Linux, but I don’t hate it and I have to use something until GNU Hurd becomes ready.

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Long story short, told it before :slight_smile:
2006 I wanted to learn Linux. Picked Suse (now OpenSuse) because for 20 dollars you could get an official handbook as well.

Worked well, fell in love with the Gnome 2 DE. But found out quickly that Suse was prone to well… dependency hell. If you only added, but never removed, programs it worked fine.

At the same time the original Ubuntu hit BIG. It was on the front page of all the glossy german-speaking linux magazines at the store… So switched to Ubuntu (back in their Gnome 2 days). Then tried Debian. Then decided I wanted something riskier to tried Sid. Then decided I wanted something less breaky, so tried Mint,which was a very new distro at the time.

…Then got a new gaming PC and never got around putting Linux on it.

…Then it was 2018 and I, again, wanted to try something new. Already back in 2006 I had looked at Arch but decided not to. Now I was home alone (Wife visiting relatives for three weeks) so I said to myself “why not”? Then installed first Antergos, that was easy and worked well. Then nuked it all in 12 hours and tried vanilla Arch. Ran that for a few months, then Switched to different Arch based stuff, mostly Manjaro until I heard of this.

…And here we are. Still a filthy dual booter, I find it is not worth the hassle to NOT dual boot; I just give Windows a 1TB drive and game on it, and do everything else on Linux.

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I really haven’t learned Linux. :astonished: But i use it because learning is an ongoing process. Linux is never ending especially in the rolling release, open source world. Linux itself is deep, Arch makes it deeper then there is Deepin! :rofl:

Once in a while I open Windows! But i feel a draft! Then i have to close it! Linux warms me up. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Great responses. Thanks for all your comments, and a special shout out to all the Slackware users. Slackware will always be a very special distro for me.

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Pretty much this. I’d gotten well fed up with Windows (XP, to be precise, but had been using that shite since 3.11) doing what it does best and had vented to a mate, and he asked if perhaps Linux was something for me. “Liwhat? Never heard of” prompted him to offer to install Debian (no idea which version, it was over a decade ago). Had a few issues with that which he solved by installing Kubuntu for me and showing me how he did that (many years of Windows use had left me absolutely clueless still, and not sure of myself).

I did like KDE 3, but something about Kubuntu just didn’t “feel right”, can’t explain it, and someone suggested Sabayon. Did the install myself this time, and when I finally managed that felt like a victory I hadn’t felt in a long time! From there, the fun really started: when I got a second machine, a laptop with Windows 7 preinstalled, I did use that for a wee bit to see if it was any good, and installed Sabayon next to it. The difference was such that it didn’t take long for me to nuke the machine and make it, and with that my house, exclusively Linux. The only times I’ve used Windows since then was at work, it will never enter this house again!

Then, the hopping. I’ve used KaOS and Manjaro as daily drivers on the main machine, then switched it to Chakra which it still runs today (though I have plans, which I’ll come back to in a minute), and at some point I made it a dual boot machine again by adding Antergos.
I’ve also had combinations of those, as well as PCLinuxOS, on the laptop just to practice with multiboot (dual, triple, at one point four OS-es just because). Also tried a few more live, but some wouldn’t install and others I didn’t like enough to install: Fedora, OpenSuSE, Mageia (refused to fully load the graphical environment after taking aeons to boot), and a few more I forgot. That machine too ended up being exclusively Chakra, only with the testing repository enabled - I did report back, and it served as an early warning system for my main machine.

On another, rather old box, I’ve also attempted installations of pure Arch (successful after buckets of blood, sweat and tears, and it ran beautifully!) and Gentoo (failed, couldn’t get it to boot and after a few tries and zero response on the forum I gave up but intend to try again at some point).

For years, Chakra was my daily driver on both machines, but development and packaging have ground to a halt, forcing me to look for something new again. I can’t remember how I stumbled upon EndeavourOS, it must’ve been mentioned when taking a look at Antergos again as I still found it difficult to believe it was no more, but as it was said to basically be Antergos’ successor, I wanted to give it a try and replaced Chakra with Endeavour on the laptop. That machine died not long after, and its replacement was my mum’s old lappy with a horribly bloated Windows 10 installed. Cleaned that shite up, popped E on the fucka and have been enjoying it very much since.

As for my plans with my main box: I wanted to try out the purple sail on the laptop for a bit, see how seaworthy she is, before deciding whether or not to make it my daily driver on the main box. And, I’ve decided I will. Several kernel (and other) updates later, zero issues. Well done.

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The factory installed Windows 8.1 running poorly on a new baytrail 2-in-1 re-ignited interest in alternatives. Knopix failed to grab me in the early 2000’s, though I did like Frozen Bubble. Ubuntu ran on my baytrail, but Mint got me hooked. Mint-xx.2+ inspired distro hopping…

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2005, my college dorm was broken into and my computer was stolen. The only available computer to me was an old work Dell with a corrupt HD. My buddy at work (Circuit City) in the computer department had an open box HD kicking around. We marked it defective in the system, and it was “gifted” to me. I had no money to buy a Windows License, so I tried Ubuntu then. It was a disaster, and I didn’t understand it at all, and I had to get shit done because I had classes to get work done for. Somewhere I found a Windows XP restore disk from some computer, or maybe at work again. I don’t remember.

I had always really wanted to learn though, and I thought it would be really cool to use something not Windows, and I had always wanted a Mac, but I was always way too poor for a Mac. So. . . I think it was like 2012ish I really gave it another chance. I first used Ubuntu because it “worked” the best on my HP Envy at the time. Then I tried Linux Mint and LOVED it.

Used that a while, and then I had a Chromebook that ended up with GalliumOS on it, and then Manjaro because those were the only two distros I could get that worked properly with the Chromebook keyboard. And, I must admit, I have never understood apt/apt-get, etc, so I was excited to find something that wasn’t apt-get update whatever. So, Manjaro really kicked my want to learn into high gear. I understood very easily pacman -S(ync), comparatively.I always heard Arch was the best, and being based on Arch, I could understand a lot from disecting and going through and reading on Manjaro/Arch. Manjaro was really the Linux that made me want to learn more. Ubuntu and Mint made me just happy to not use Windows. Alas, the last few years have been the only point in my life without a project car to build, and I’ve had the least amount of extra money. Linux gives me something to build that is cheap, and keeps my mind working. Thanks Manjaro, and that dude who stole my laptop some 15 years ago.

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For me, Slackware, Conectiva, Caldera, Mandrake and Suse :cowboy_hat_face:

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I switch after window xp . i read about linux found Arch interesting and thought easy ( I wrong very ) :rofl:

After 3 try to install ( crash +burn badly ) I no let it beat me and as you see I still run Vanilla Arch :smiley: Sadly work is osx i use that many years but Arch is my choice and it no change :+1:

BTW … I still learn new thing every day :+1:

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Same, for me both Micro$oft/Windows and Apple. I was tired of fighting viruses, spam, virus protectors that slowed down the OS, pay-for-play schemes, pay-for-play OS upgrades, paying for apps, paying to upgrade apps. What a rat race.

Debian was my entry, and learning curve. Never looked back. Thank the stars for linux, and sad to see so many people stuck in that horrible Matrix, even today.

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