Voice of the Masses: What has been your distro path over the years?
Spring is here, the sun is shining, and we’re downloading new distros to test. For our next podcast recording, we want to hear from you: what has been your “distro path” over the years? As in, what distro did you originally start with, which other ones have you tried along the way, and what are you using now? Have you gone through many to find the perfect flavour of Linux for you – or have you always been satisfied with a single distro, and never felt the need to change?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below and we’ll read out the best in our upcoming podcast. Oh yes.
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About The Author
Mike Saunders
Mike stores his data by printing out hex dumps and laminating the sheets. He's the author of The Haynes Linux Manual and the creator of MikeOS, an operating system hand-built from assembly language.
I first installed Linux around 1998, so it’s been a long time to remember them all but I /think/ it went
SuSe – because it was on a magazine coverdisk
RedHat – probably for similar reasons
Mandrake – ditto
Ubuntu – a revelation. I installed an early version and stayed for about a decade.
Linux Mint – because, urgh, Unity
Kubuntu – because Mint moved to using long term releases from Ubuntu. This meant a really annoying bug in some library digiKam was using, didn’t get fixed. And as I was mostly using KDE apps, a move to a KDE distro made sense.
Fedora – my most recent install. I moved because when I installed Kubuntu 16.10 it would just lock up on the login screen – mouse and trackpad just wouldn’t work!
To be honest I’ll probably try the next Kubuntu version when it arrives as Fedora has yet to win me over. Plus all that time working on Debian based distros makes changing just that bit harder!
Hey guys.
I started on mandrake 6.0 to about 7.x then went to slackware because it just worked for me. Then landed on an ubuntu years later, then to mint. Now have debian and ubuntu mate on different systems.
About 20 years ago i started using linux as a server OS only and started with Redhat 6.x and switch to Fedora later. When the Raspberry Pi came out, i went over to Raspbian, but nowadays i am switching all the server stuff to centos/ubuntu server. Since a few years i also started using linux as a desktop OS and started with ubuntu LTS 14.04, which i got overwritten very quickly with kubuntu because as a poweruser, the unity DE seemed like a dumb end user environment. I it together with Sparky on another system, then switched everything to Manjaro(because i Arch seemed like an os for me, but i wanted to “try” an Arch like OS first) and finally i moved completely over to Arch with i3 and Xubuntu as a backup OS in case Arch would fail on me.
Red hat 5.1
Mandrake
Pclinuxos since
I was introduced to Linux Mint by a colleague at work back when Windows XP was dropped from support by Micro$oft. I have stuck with the Mint Mate desktop ever since – except I now immediately install the i3 tiling windows manager with J4 d-menu for speed of launching applications and I only use the touchpad when I can’t remember the hot key. Now all computers in the household are running Mint MATE (just one or two still have a dual boot into WXP for legacy stuff with no Linux drivers).
Ubuntu 8.10 to start with, then Mint when Unity first came in.
Did not like Cinnamon so tried KDE and Kubuntu.
Have finally found Gnome 3 is my preferred Desktop so use Korora. All the Fedora goodness and latest Gnome versions with added codecs etc for ease of usage.
I started with Linux Mint, switched to Ubuntu for I-want-to-switch reason. After Ubuntu I got into arch, but after arch always took an excessive amount of configuration to get a proper feeling that the installation is ready to use.
Between these two (and a few derivates) I switched for a couple of years, but now I use opensuse because I want to try that out (and wanted to get my nvidia driver finally working).
Yast really is a fantastic tool which makes it easy to configure literally everything, I think I’ll stay here at least for a couple of months, although the nvidia driver still doesn’t work.
Started tinkering with redhat & debian around ’98, tried a lot of distros & live cd’s (mandrake, knoppix, slackware), eventually years later settled on ubuntu 7, upgraded every year until 12.04, clean installs every one of them with the hassle of installing the extra applications. Finally tried archlinux, have not reinstalled since, just rolling with the releases, still responsive as before. I remember only one mishap after updating which I fixed after following the arch forums. AUR is a huge step in evolution over ppa’s.
Rolling releases IMO are a huge improvement over the point releases.
I tried Slackware Linux from floppies, IIRC. (I’m not sure… it involved a stack of disks for X, a stack for Emacs, and so on.) I hated it from the moment that I tried “man fopen” and it didn’t work.
I switched to FreeBSD for a very short while, until it failed to install on 3 different pieces of normal hardware and I realized that it was crap. I used Red Hat Linux before it became non-free and “Enterprise”.
I moved briefly to SuSE, hated Debian because it was hard to install a custom-built kernel, then fell in love with Gentoo because it was so customizable. I could get anything to work, with enough effort. Eventually my computer turned into a white-hot ball of wasted electricity and burrowed into the center of the earth, and I humbly went back to Debian.
I’ve tried a few Debian forks (Ubuntu, Mint, Crunchbang), but never saw the point since I could just use Debian. I used Arch for a bit, but went back to Debian after a few wasted hours due to updates that broke the system and repeatedly blowing away my PostgreSQL setup.
Now I just use Debian, with ARM-specific versions (Raspbian, Bananian, Armbian) for a few special-purpose needs.
My path is:
Caldera
Debian
Gentoo
Arch
Fedora
Ubuntu
Something i cant remember
SuSe
Fedora
Stayed with Fedora for awhile now as i use rhel at work.
Ubuntu “Hardy Heron” thanks to a LinuxFormat Special pack. Switch to LinuxMint when Ubuntu introduced the Unity desktop. Currently on Ubuntu Mate 16.04 LTS. Have stopped distro hopping (it’s usually a waste of time).
I started with Mandrake because I heard it was easiest for people new to Linux, but when it seemed to be floundering there was this new distro called Ubuntu that I tried. And when I found they had a KDE version, that was what I wanted. I occasionally try something else to see what is out there, but my daily driver is still Kubuntu LTS.
My path so far..
Slackware: My first foray into Linux after the HP-UX box in my dad’s study packed up, he let me install it and read off the instructions to me. It was just different enough to cause a lot of hiccups in his learning, but the comp we installed it on ran like greased lightning. Sadly I was probably a little too small to appreciate it or understand it as much as it deserved.
Debian: When graphics started becoming a ‘thing’ we decided to install Debian on a frankenbox cobbled together from various different salvaged machines from the school’s skip out the back. Ran that for a good many years and it was made even better when I managed to get my hands on a CD reader/writer that hadn’t been rained on.
Gentoo: My go-to distro of choice from my last year of secondary school until now, took me about a week to do since it was the first one I did solo, it’s been a steadfast favourite ever since.
— since then I’ve given dad Linux Mint since he made the switch to Windows many years back and it’s since been rooted by some self-loading ransomware.
Running Raspbian on my RPis and an ancient version of Trixbox on the phone server which I think uses CentOS as a base.
I started using GNU/Linux in the late 90s with:
Red Hat 5.2
BeOS 4.2
Gentoo
LFS
Crunchbang
Centos (for servers)
Debian
Although I may have dabbled with various distros over the years I keep coming back to Debian for actual long term, everyday use.
I started off dabbling with different distros like mandriva and Ubuntu about 10 years ago but it was only when I had the original Asus eee pc 701 that I used linux regularly.
After dabbling with the pre loaded Xandros I quickly switched to CrunchBang, probably based on Ubuntu 8.04 I think.
Stuck with CrunchBang for years on a lot of my PC’s at home but now I use Ubuntu Mate edition after it was discontinued, but I can’t say I’m in love with it, not like CrunchBang.
I first used Linux in college when a friend introduced me to Ubuntu. I dual-booted with Ubuntu 11.04 for awhile. Later tried out Mint because I liked Cinnamon over Unity. Years later, I finally wanted to buck OSX on my laptop, but I couldn’t get most distress to install on my hardware. Out of desperation I tried Arch, and I’m so glad I did. I love it (rolling, bleeding-edge, the AUR…). I tried Fedora once for awhile and liked that too, but COPR doesn’t have the software availability of the AUR, so I came back to Arch. Arch is all I use now — even for my home server, because my server apps are all in containers.
Distros*, not distress
Hmmm for the desktop/laptop…
Mandrake
Mandrake and Caldera
Mandrake and SuSE
Mandriva and SuSE
OpenSUSE
OpenSUSE and Xubuntu
Mint and Xubuntu
Mint and Solus
And on my server, only ever Ubuntu.
On virtual machines, a huge number of others, but just for the fun of it, when I had the time and curiosity.
Back in 2006, I was a Windows XP user, and remember being excited about the new Windows Vista being released soon, but being relatively poor was disheartened to discover my old PC would probably not cope with the proposed hardware spec. Coincidentally, I read about this “free” operating system called Linux. Hmm, “Free” I thought to myself. A new OS but without paying a penny. Linux Magazine was sporting a shiny version of Fedora Core 6. I decided to overwrite my old Windows ME drive and within ten mins had a gorgeous new, but slightly alien, OS running. Revelation #1: How sharp it looked, I thought. No really, because Fedora had detected my monitor had a higher screen resolution than Windows had been displaying for years. I was extremely impressed, but didn’t care for the Gnome interface. Then I discovered KDE 3 looked like Windows. Then I discovered Fedora was too hard, so I switched to Mandriva, and stuck with it for a few years. In the meantime I had acquired an Acer Aspire One netbook which struggled with Mandriva KDE, so found Puppy Linux worked wonderfully. Then one day, my printer died and the new one didn’t work on Mandriva or Puppy. Revelation #2: I had avoided Ubuntu thus far as I disliked Gnome, but its live environment came to my rescue and recognised my printer! I soon switched to Kubuntu to remedy this, but was frustrated by the lack of multimedia support out-of-the box, and still used XP in the background on occasions. Revelation 3#: This was something Linux Mint addressed. It could play my DVDs and music out-of-the-box. It also had a cool Fluxbox and LXDE version to run on my netbook. I stuck with Mint for a few years, but then got frustrated by their upgrade policy, and longed for an easy route to install new releases, so changed back to Kubuntu. My ageing netbook still works and runs Lubuntu now, and my main PC still has Kubuntu, but I have always longed for a KDE focussed distro, and my prayers were answered recently. Revelation 4: KDE Neon. Now running on my Laptop and soon to be installed on my PC. Throughout this time, I too have changed and using Linux is less about the free software, and more about Software Freedom; It’s less about proprietary multimedia support and more about supporting free formats. My Linux journey has taken me from being carefree about software to caring about Free Software. And that’s the biggest revelation of them all!
I started in ’08 with Ubuntu Hardy Heron, tried my hand on Kubuntu, Mint, openSUSE, but always came back to Ubuntu – it was the only distro that I could get the wifi working on reliably. In 2010 I deserted to the Mac, but in 2013 I came back to Linux. I started on Debian, switched openSuse, then tried a whole lot of distros I can’t remember and eventually arrived via Manjaro and Antergos to Arch. Here I’ve been for over 2 years. Every now end then I try something new, but so far nothing has stuck.
Xandros – Yes, I’m one of the few who bought it. It was a good intro to Linux.
Ubuntu – Xandros really sparked my interest so I made the switch to the cool new distro. Really liked it as at that time it was nice simple, reliable distro that felt good to use. But that started to fade and it started to become less reliable.
Elive – pretty but somehow didn’t feel ‘right’. Couldn’t quite get comfortable with it so moved to…
PCLinuxOS – I’ve been using this for the best part of ten years now. Love it. Simple, reliable, fast.
I’ve flirted with other distros since my first PCLinuxOS install (Kubuntu, Puppy, Mint, Manjaro) but, after only a few weeks, I always return to it. It just works. It’s not the flashiest or most cutting edge but, for me, it’s perfect.
You know, I had completely forgotten about Xandros. You weren’t alone in buying it, but I just can’t remember what I ran it on.
First starterd in 1997 with Redhat then suse followed by a brief dalliance with Lindows / Linspire. After a short break onto Ubuntu during which I tried most other distos when they dropped gnome 2 until 14.04 where. Settled on ubuntu gnome. But now I am on the move again to Solus which I find excellent.
red hat 5.2
suse
corel linux
sharp zaurus linux based pda
ubuntu
xubuntu
lubuntu
linux mint
probably slackware next
First experience was around 2001/2 at University. A friend was running RedHat, I’m guessing around 7.2. I think it was terminal only and I didn’t give it a second thought (other than why they would want it).
A year later I had around 5 different distros installed on my computer with a mess of Lilo and GRUB boot loaders installed each with entry points to the others, just in case I selected the wrong one. In no particular order some of these would’ve been
– Mandrake
– Lindows
– RedHat
– Suse
– Linux from Scratch
– Slackware
– Debian
– Gentoo
– Fedora (when that finally came out)
There were a number of smaller distros I tried too but I don’t remember them all.
After all that fun I liked the ‘fun’ of LFS but didn’t want to spend all the time manually compiling thing, so I ended up on Gentoo (and a bit of Debian for a home server) for around 6 years. Relocation to the other side of the world and a change of jobs I tried Arch for a couple of years but with age comes “I can’t be bothered with this” and so for the last few years I’m now on Ubuntu for my main OS at home and the OS I use on my works MacBook Pro. It’s also the OS for my 3 year old daughter 🙂
I am thinking of dumping Ubuntu though, but ‘official’ Steam support is keeping me here for now. Might try out Fedora again at some point, or possibly Solus.
Ubuntu, elementaryOS, Antergos, Ubuntu Mate, Solus.
Ikey, is that you?
After seeing this I am switching to a new winner
https://youtu.be/bmp62gNUqqo
(Mum runs MikeOS)
As a serious answer (not to imply MikeOS isn’t serious), the first distro I ever tried was Red Hat from a cd-rom. I played with that for a while, then several years later Debian. It was not until I discovered Ubuntu around version 9.04, that I began using Linux as part of my everyday workflow, and I’ve pretty much stayed loyal to Canonical every since. I like listening to reviews of different distros and periodically load one up in a VM. At work I use Red Hat for a few tasks, but for my main PC it’s hard to imagine switching off of Ubuntu. I find it very stable, and whatever problems it has I’ve long since learned to work around so quickly that I don’t notice them. I prefer Unity to Gnome, KDE, or even that supposed paradigm of good UI that is OSX. If you told me Mark Shuttleworth eats babies and he killed Popey, then probably I would switch to Arch, but as long as Ubuntu remains an option and doesn’t do anything too freedom hating I’ll stick with it ::Fingers Crossed on this whole Mir thing::
All paths lead to Mint. Some people are just still on their way.
I too began with Xandros because it came free with a book (I felt I needed a book to help me through the process of switching). Since then I’ve largely stayed with Debian-based distros including Kubuntu and Mint Debian Edition which broke Grub. I even tried Mandriva Flash, the system on a USB stick which lasted about 6 weeks before failing.
Now happily using Debian XFCE – think I’ll stick with these guys, they seem to know what they’re doing.
Workbench 3.1
EPOC
Windows XP (‘the lost years’)
Ubuntu 9.04 (‘salvation!’)
Ubuntu 9.10, 10.04, 10.10 (‘I don’t want Unity’)
Ubuntu 10.04 (beyond support…)
several attempts to save desktop linux for me:
(Linux Mint Mate, Xubuntu, Ubuntu-gnome classic, Fedora + gnome)
Crunchbang (pretty good, but wasn’t so keen on all the config)
Ubuntu-mate 14.10 (saved again!!)
Ubuntu-mate 16.04 (beautiful!)
slackware
several others in a flurry
slackware again
Looking at the posts here it would seem that Ubuntu is one of the least popular distros. These fraudster like to say they are cool and use slack, or radical by using arch, or hippy by using fedora, or just a fresh rebel by using Mint, etc. I use Ubuntu because I need to get stuff done…not because I want to make a fashion statement, or a political one. I stopped distro hopping about the time of Precise, but still carry Puppy on a stick everywhere go, but have experimented in the past with Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Fedora and OpenSuse.
Back in 1998, a friend of mine helped me install Slackware. That lasted for about a month. Then I got annoyed with the fact that I didn’t install it myslef.
Started looking around, and found Debian. So I figured out how to install stable, without killing my Windows 95 setup. It took me a while to figure out LILO and get back to Windows. Fun times.
Then in college, there was a Linux install party, where they were handing out Mandrake disks. So I tried that for a while… didn’t really catch on. Then, after learning that “RPM” comes from Redhat, I switched to that…. didn’t like it either.
I went back to Debian, but used the testing branch this time. That lasted until Ubuntu Warty Warthog was released. Then I switched to it, and all the brown it came with.
And lastly, in 2012, after hearing about it a lot, I decided to make the switch to Arch. And I’m still using it today 🙂
Slackware
Linux-FT
Red Hat
Ubuntu 7.04 – 8.04
Arch Linux since 2010.
My Linux journey begain in 1994 with Slackware. Back then my favourite OS was SunOS. The first set of discs I bought was for this new-generation (aparently) Linux-FT (which probably stood for F**K That!). Onwards from there I used Red Hat, dabbling from time to time with its derivatives such as Mandrake, but always secondary to Windows. I started actively correcting that from Ubuntu 7.04 and have been Windows-free for nearly a decade now. I dropped Ubuntu at 10.04, moving to Arch, becuase Ubuntu dropped OpenVZ (I’ve since done the same – LXC rocks!). I’m qute happy with Arch now and see the myriad distros as mere noise vs the signal that is Arch.
DOS 4.21 –(…)–> Windows XP
Ubuntu –> Xubuntu –(Manjaro / Void)–> Arch | Ubuntu MATE
I started with SLS (Linux kernel 0.98 or 0.99, don’t remember, a lot of floppies), went on to Slackware very briefly, but then found Debian around twenty years ago. Never had reason to cheat.
Mandrake 9
Suse Linux 8.2
Eeebuntu
Ubuntu LTS (from 8.4 up to current)
Linux Mint LTS (13 up to current)
I used Mandrake 9 on an on-off kind of use alongside Windows XP for a while, when I got my first laptop in 2000. Then I switched to Suse Linux 8.2. I think it was 2007 that I was given an Asus EeePC as a gift, with Eeebuntu installed by a friend at work. I have been using Ubuntu ever since, and Linux Mint more recently. Still can’t decide what I love most, Unity or Cinnamon, so I am dual-booting between those two on a daily basis. I am only moving from stable LTS to LTS version every couple of years (parallel on Ubuntu and Mint).
I started with Suse around october 2005, it was during an installfest while in college; but then following the advise of another friend, either by the end of that year or the very begining of the next year I decided to try Debian. Despite, a couple of codecs problems (nothing that backporting didn’t fix) I stayed loyal until I bought my eee pc, before switching to Ubuntu netbook remix, I tried Debian with Fluxbox, it was a good time I learned a few more things but got so used to it that when using another computer I was so frustrated, that I almost couldn’t work; so that led me to try the previously mentioned Ubuntu Netbook Remix (at the moment I can not remember the actual version 9.04, 9.10, 10.04 etc). Since then, I’ve stayed in the Ubuntu camp despite Unity. I’ve been meaning to try something else but I haven’t found the time to do it, not even to upgrade to a new release, I’m currently on 14.04. I apologize for my grammar or any other mistake, but English is not my native language.
Basically every Ubuntu release.
Ubuntu 8.04 – Ubuntu 16.10
Lubuntu
V
Debian (with a few short hops which made me return to Debian)
V
Linux Lite 3.x
Mandrake6.1/ Suze7.2 switched to Debian when Novell stepped in. Debian, Puppy, BSD, Suze, Mepis, Knoppix, Damn Small Linux, Ubuntu 4.10 –> 12.04, Xubuntu, Debian, Mint, Fedora 20–>25, Sabayon, Manjaro, (last 2 for GPU support) BSD is next if Linux doesn’t fix it’s act on this.
GPU support? And what do you mean with the last sentence?
I started with “Real Red Linux 2000”, which was a special edition for the millenial switch. Since then, I tried so many things:
Mandraker
Slackware
LFS (Linux from Scratch)
Gentoo
BeOS (but not long)
Arch Linux (for 7 years or so)
Void Linux (until today)
Linux installed from a pile of diskettes late 90s, but not much used without having internet .
Mandriva
Ubuntu the last years
(HP UX, Solaris, Red Hat Linux and Cent OS at work.)
Ubuntu 9.04 -10.04-12.04 -Watt os 9- Lubuntu -12.04-16.04 Found a Home in LXDE.