Linux nostalgia thread

Slackware, don't remember if it was 7 or 8. It had that comfy KDE 2. The last DE actually worth shit.

Ubuntu 9.04 was my first Linux distro. I couldn't believe that it did 99% of what Windows XP did at the time, except for gaymen. Wireless networking was a bitch (firmware cutter for broadcom). I put it on an HP Laptop from like 2006. I miss that beautiful thing.

I put Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on a Dell Dimension 2400 and I couldn't believe how fast it was. I made so much shit on the PC. Star Fox fan fiction, crappy remixes, short videos in Kdenlive. Fuck I miss those days. Everything is 16:9 Mac OS clones now. The Lucid Lynx theme was so good, too.

Ubuntu before the unity implementation. So versions 8.04 to 10.04. Once unity hit I did some hopping.

Looking back I really appreciate how stable most Linux systems are. Gnome age Ubuntu was glitched as fuck. Good times.

MacOS 7.5.1
>tfw you could browse the web with 40 MB of RAM

Just install Debian stable, no need to reminisce about old software OP.

Damn, KDE looked like this?!

some strange distro that came preinstalled on the Asus eee PC, first computer I ever used, my father gave it to me and my siblings when we were children

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ubuntu 16.04 with based unity

>What was your first free operating system?
FreeBSD
>How was it?
Pretty good.

I first was able to use GNU/Linux with Knoppix, which was Debian but made to work as a live CD. I ended up dual booting our Pentium 4 machine with 512MB of RAM and Windows ME. My parents got mad at me because they couldn't figure out how to get back to Windows, until I made it boot to Windows by default. That was a learning experience. I eventually moved out, that install survived long enough to be wiped out by a Computer Tech installing a new hard drive for my parents.

I actually inherited that computer and used it as a headless server running Ubuntu years later. Until the graphics card died and finally it stopped booting or at least it stopped responding to ssh requests. Now it's been recycled.

Knoppix with kde 3. That pic def hit the nostalgia.

Knoppix and Hardy Heron, one was for my laptop and the other for my shitbox

Yellow Dog Linux

I briefly tried out things like Lucid Puppy, but Crunchbang was where I started to get a hold of things and learn my way around a Linux WM

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I loved KDE 1 to 3.
Same with early Gnome.

Where did it all go so wrong? (KDE is still usable but not as comfy.)

Mandrake.
Didnt have a clue what I was doing with it though

Ubuntu 12.04, in 6th grade (18 btw). I'm a zoomer but Linux is Linux.

Alright kids and zoomers, sit together since uncle boomer is going to tell you a story.

There used to be a time when GNU/Linux didn't have the driver support it has today, everything from messing with Nvidia drivers to WiFi was a huge pain in the butt, we even had shit like NDISwrapper.
But I, the hardcore edgelord had to run GNU+Linux on my shitbox no matter what, even though I didn't have a long enough ethernet cable to search into my room, so I was using a USB WiFi dongle, but good luck with that on GNU-slash-Linux, since there were no drivers and it also didn't work with NDISwrapper...
What did the young boomer me do? I installed Windows in a virtual machine, forwardered the USB WiFi stick to the VM and shared the internet connection from the VM back into the host.

...it worked fine though, but hogged up my Dual P3 like a bitch.

Mid to late aught's version of ubuntu, or maybe it was debian?

My first was Ubuntu 8.04, but as far as defunct distos go I really miss OG Crunchbang. I wouldn't still use it, I just really liked it

Linux Mint 9 XFCE

Still the gold standard of what a properly setup laptop experience should be.

PCLinuxOS XFCE from the same era was next level as well

B R U S H E D
S T E E L

I have a folder of alot of my old desktop screenshots from 2008-2011 an interesting time as I was 16 years old then, just getting int gnu/linux

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Xubuntu 12.10
Honestly still on Xubuntu, but looking to distrohop to something more fresh soon (and less focus on the snaps meme)

What did you use to host your VMs back in those days?

2009

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I wish I had the knowledge to be able to maintain this again. Anyone know how I could learn about making my own distro? Any other good DSL alternatives?

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I ordered a free ubuntu 7.04 cd from the website (back when they did that) forgot about it and like a month later it showed up in the mail. Installed it alongside my windows and eventually blew it away. I use arch now but I havent used windows since.

I'm convinced that knoppix is the only reason linux for the desktop exists today. Before every other distro started doing the same thing, it made Linux accessible to normie/tech curious people, instead of sysadmins or rich nerds. Early 2000s nerd: "I've not got a spare hard drive, I'm not about to overwrite my windows drive just to test out the FAGNU operating system."

Hardy Heron was my first free operating system. I was so fed up with buggy Vista that I installed without knowing anything about using Linux. It was a shit experience (could not get my printer or the Broadcom wifi to run) but also quite fascinating. I especially liked the freedom, the versatility and, of course, muh wobbly windows. Came back to a Jaunty Jackalope/Windows 7 dual boot. Since 14.04 I've been using Kubuntu exclusively. Considering trying SUSE soon, love KDE.

Tinycore

Yeah because thats not even possible so.

I'm fairly certain my first distro was Phat Linux before RedHat

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Knoppix. I used to run it on a live cd, before deciding to install ubuntu

I had discovered Linux and I felt like a big boy for the first time in HS. I believe it was Debian wheezy running on an old red aspire netbook I had gotten a few years earlier. I believe I updated it to Jessie a few months later.

DSL was great

Pretty sure it was VMWare Workstation 3 or 4. Pirated obviously.

>Yeah because thats not even possible so.
Uhm, okay?

depends on your purpose. for "making your own distro," outside of LFS, i'd go with Alpine myself but it's oriented towards running as a docker image which is what I use it for. More powerful options would be "meta-distributions" like (install)Gentoo(TM), NixOS, and Guix. Arch gets overhyped but might be an okay place to start if you don't know much about Linux systems, since it has the biggest community documentation and a big enough package base.

For a straight up DSL replacement, look into special configurations/versions of the distros I mentioned, and I'd actually also recommend looking into BSDs since many of them are much more conservative than linux distros (you tend to get less software, smaller packages, older software etc, but with just enough modern features)

It was definitely one of the first "easy" linux systems. When I was new to Linux I almost decided to install Knoppix to my hard drive because it 'just werked' but in the end I just learned how to make slackware do the fancy shit like automounting and ndiswrappers

Slackware 11.0, pretty late to linux party but it worked. I switched to Debian few years later and stayed ever since.

Gnome used to be really usable. 1 task bar, icons on desktop. Then icons disappeared and I wondered what is the point of having DE at all if I can't have my icons on desktop by default.

I used to have Slax on USB drive which was like 128 MB.

SliTaz

Suse Linux 7 was pretty kino.

i remember thinking it was so cool to have my 256mb flash drive with slax that I could bring to school and boot my own OS from

You sound like a child that is angry when his parents tell him to stop screwing the neighbor girl. Just because you can doesn't mean you should

Slitaz too because i was trying something lightweight for an old computer. I am glad i did it because i realized that there is no reason whatsoever to use Linux for your desktop and everyday computing needs.

Never tried it again.

SuSE Linux Professional 9.1 with some KDE 3. It was alright I guess, but I kept distro hopping for a while, then stayed on Arch for three years, jumped ship to Debian after they kept LVM on boot broken for two years, and have been on Debian ever since.

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Slackware 8.0 because somebody on usenet said that if I had enough willpower I will handle it. Jow Forums equivalent to "install gentoo" I guess. Made me into sysadmin eventually so I am thankful for that.

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Fuck GNUstep shitting in ~ btw

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First was Fedora 7. Everything was so shiny and new.
Eventually I started distro hopping but I remember the days very fondly.

It was a stock install of Ubuntu 7.10. It was pretty decent.

fuck that woman looks miserable

Linux super gamer 2
Still have the disc too, among other distros I was using at the time

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OS? You had an OS? I had a trash 80 and a tape player.
First OS was dos 1.0, then deskview, os2, Slackware, beos, redhat, Debian, osx. Most flavors of windows from 3.1 onwards, skipping the really shitty ones like me and 8.0.
Daily driver is Debian unstable.

You're not cool or clever, OP specially asked "First FREE OS".
Your TRS-80 still had a interpreter and a IO system which is, wait for it, a OS by very definition.

Ubuntu 9.04 / Windows XP Dualboot on some scavenged hp pc. Rocked that frankenstein for years untill the psu died.

There used to be a utility called remastersys. Basically allowed you to make an installable copy of your current setup, drivers, programs etc. Drawback was it had to be less than 4GB but that was fine as it was just right to burn to dvd.

Fuck I remember this from my distro hopping days.

>What was your first free operating system?
SuSE 8.2. Got it as a CD extra for PC-World.
>How was it?
it was fucking great, KDE 3.1 was the shit. Only if I had internet with it so I could install more packages than what was on CD1.

Slackware 8.0, had a friend with a cable modem download the ISO for me cause I was still on dialup.

PC-BSD was always sweet as well. If only it had the possibility for wifi. Learned more from that user manual pdf on the desktop than the previous months of ubuntu forums and manpages, starting out.

Keep meaning to look back into it, is it TrueOS or Project Trident? I've heard that Ghost BSD exists as well.

It's been over ten years and I've set up X and DEs many times, but it's just convenient to be able to plop on a prefab and go, esp as I only change distros if forced to these days

Some RedHat version from 2003 on my IBM R40 2682CAG.

First computer I ever used, my father taught me how to use it when I was two years old. It ran RedHat, and he tells me how much I used to adore going on the Nickelodeon site to play games.

>What was your first free operating system?
Debian linux
>How was it
Awful. Nowadays if I want a machine to have unix system i install NetBSD or FreeBSD instead.

netbsd & freebsd for desktop usage/?

I'm extremely interested in netbsd for desktop, is setting up xorg the usual pain?

I never use unix for desktop usage.

It's perfectly doable, at least for freebsd. I've been using it for two years on my laptop. Pretty easy to setup.

TrueOS/Project Trident are ready-to-go Freebsd with X-windows for example

>What was your first free operating system?
Mandrake Linux 9.1
>How was it?
I couldn't do shit with it since I was a pretty dumb kid back then

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PCLinuxOS

My first free OS was Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. It had dogshit drivers, but now I remember it fondly.

SimplyMEPIS 2004.4
really quite comfy, given to me by a neighbour after i saw his machine running Slax from a 256M flash drive
use it on my laptop for a while, mainly for media, mozilla and gaim
i didn't really learn anything about linux, and never even learned about package managers with that one, so what was installed on it was what was used on it
the only thing i installed was the ATi graphics driver, which i did the windows way (download the .sh file from ati, and run it, thankfully it just worked, because if it didn't i would have been fucked)
my old Lexmark Z31 printer worked ootb, easier than setting it up in windows

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>Defunct distros are welcome.

In that case, Knoppix.

Why is it that, though I never used Linux before 2017, these images really instill a great sense of nostalgia into me?

because they just look very mid-2000's
you probably used windows XP themes with similar kinds of looks to them

Because your heart and soul know.

same and same

My very first distro was Puppy Linux, installed on a 2002 laptop my father wanted to get to work again. And I still have it, untouched since 2007, pic related.
I also had Ubuntu 8 or 9 (I don’t remember which one it was) as my first desktop distro, though I used it a lot less than Windows (dual boot) due to some incompatible software, even with Wine.

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You're confusing 'relaxed' with 'miserable.'

>What was your first free operating system?
Linuxlite 1.0.6

>How was it?
Awesome. Still run Linuxlite on all my machines to this day.

this was the shit