Pic related. Just found these in my storage an hour or so ago. Corel Linux Starter Kit (distributed by Macmillan via magazines like PCWorld in 1999). Tried it on an old NEC desktop in the year 2001. Got fed up after two hours of trying to get KDE working nicely, and ended up installing BeOS on that box, using it pretty much for just blasting music and watching movies I burned to CDs under WinXP on my cheap Compaq laptop.
Would be another 2 or 3 years before I gave GNU / Linux another shot, when I finally got Slackware working on that very same box, and also only used it as an entertainment center. The machine survived until 2007. I think I only updated Slackware once on that thing. Wasn't even connected to the internet 99% of the time. Slack did open me up to using GNU / Linux more frequently though, and I eventually bought another cheap desktop to use with Ubuntu in 2008. That's when I realized I could actually get work done under LiGnux, and that it could be a reliable environment.
8th grade, had a mandrake cluster running from repurposed/dumpster dived workstations running a bunch of private servers. (Shoutcast, Ragnarok online, TFC)
Mandrake. Whoah. Blast from the fucking past. PCLinuxOS is still pretty good BTW. Only popular distro based on Mandrake / Mandriva now AFAIK. Never actually seen OpenMandriva in the wild.
Jeremiah Peterson
Ubuntu around 2010. It was shit.
Kevin Allen
An early version of Knoppix around 2001-2002. That's the first version I successfully installed on my family's computer which I dual booted with Windows ME. My parents were mad because it would boot into KNOPPIX by default and they couldn't figure out how to make it go to Windows. So I made it boot Wangblows by default. I think that install lived for a long time even after I moved out, until they got a new hard drive installed and got Windows XP installed.
Adam Perez
Xubuntu 8.04 fast forward 11 years, still using Xfce
Jackson Johnson
Red hat 6.0 in 1999., came as an extra CD with some computer magazine. I installed it and it wiped my DOS partition cause I didn't know what partitions even are at the time. I used it for half a year at least before getting windows 98.
Lincoln Johnson
>linux operating system It's a trap
Grayson Edwards
Sticking with Linux by accident. Love it.
Zachary Barnes
These were actually the golden days of Ubuntu. After 12.04 everything went downhill.
Sebastian Martinez
GNU*
Jonathan Baker
I had this weird all in one from taiwan where the keyboard flipped down off the screen. This was before all in ones were a thing. Any ways support was limited, but I remember the fan blew nonstop at 100% until it died then the pc kept over heating. My brother was not happy when he came home from the navy with a computer that over heated and had linux on it and his ipod video had rockbox installed. XD
SuSE circa 2003 /w KDE3.? Fukkin gawd it looked gorgeous. >compared to windows98se
Brody Peterson
And this is the shit that lead me down this path all that time ago. It blew my mind that this was possible and I needed. Even if it caused my PC to run at 200c and blow the fan.
