I remember back then it was easier installing the OS than installing third party software π«£
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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Both are hella easy now, flathub my beloved.
thats me installing windows in the 90s, waiting for hours, not sure if it just froze
SUSE on 6 CDs
Hm. I started using Linux (Ubuntu) somewhat around 2007. And I was quite fascinated how flashy it was with all those desktop effects compared to the rather boring XP. Only problem I had back in the day was wifi, but I didn't play a lot of games at that time.
But yeah, once I solved that wifi problem I had internet, so there was a difference.
My Linux journey was pre XP, I was still in 98Se edition and my Linux disk didn't have a working GUI on it.
I used xp for 15 years and i miss it. Fuck this ribbon nonsense too. Where is the desktop cloud? My precious is lost... i'm lost...i have no fucking idea where that file i just saved went.. i built a pc in 2002 and progranned a vcr as well. Now i'm toast.
Still have my physical Ubuntu Hardy Heron DVD somewhere
Lmao I did this exact thing. Installed Ubuntu on the home desktop. Immediately occurred to me that I couldn't connnect to the internet to look up how to do anything else. Scrambled so hard to find that XP disc and atone for my reckless folly.
My first Linux distro was Puppy Linux, on a computer with no internet. I downloaded it on an internet cafe to replace Windows XP Fenix Edition.
My PC was too weak to run any flavor of the major distros, and I wanted to give it a go.
Best computer-related decision of my life to ditch Windows and use Linux as my daily driver.
Dude I remember when live booting knoppix was impressive. Hell my intro to Linux was mandrake. We have so many great distros and documentation available now itβs crazy.
Ahh Knoppix :β) I think live boots were my introduction to Linux.
I ended up learning by memory the US keyboard layout because i got tired of having to change it whenever i booted knoppix up.
Now i have all my keyboards set to US international. Best layout for programing.
Definitely describes my switch back in 2008 when canonical still sent out Ubuntu CDs for free in the mail. We had dial up so it was faster for them to mail me a CD than to try and download the image myself.
If the ping rate is irrelevant, then the good old sneakernet is a great way to transfer large amounts of data.
I remember first learning about linux OS and how to create a Linux USB installer using rufus to bypass the password my parents had put on the windows side. In those days there was no eifi boot loader lock you could access the files just by trying out the new OS you had in your USB. LOL.
Exactly what happened when I tried ubuntu on my brothers pc back then. Couldn't even get the internet working. Right now I'm impressed its an easier time to install than windows.
Meanwhile I'm sitting here having grown up on among other things (like a TI-99A) with access to a Macintosh 128k, an Apple ]|[, a Commodore 64, and various 286, 386, and Pentium machines, as well as some SGI machines by the time I was 8 years old, so it would seem that I would have embraced Linux. It just never happened because consoles, and later windows dominated gaming so much that despite the fact that I have tried Linux out maybe 20 times at this point, it's only recently that I can seriously consider switching off of windows and consoles.
Windows wouldnβt boot so I burnt an Ubuntu live image to a cd and used that to copy my files off my windows partition
I want to powerwash that hallway.
It forced me to learn. It took me weeks to get X configured and working correctly. I had an internet subscription and a modem but it also took weeks to get it to work on Linux. My distribution came on a CD from a magazine but some dependencies were not included, so I had to reboot under Windows to download a missing package, reboot on Linux and try again, then need to get the next dependency. We came a long long way from having to specify the vertical refresh rate of the monitor in xf86config.
Starting with a French version of Slackware was brutal but I had nothing else.
Be 12 in 1998
Literally just ecstatic that I could wiggle around a little X on a blank screen after giving up trying to load a window manager.
Pop in a BeOS live CD to feel like I did something cool
Exact same experience. What district did you install for the cursor wiggle? Mine was slackware
Later mandrake was noob friendly enough for me to get a real start
ah i had forgotten about xf86config. /silenthillvoice
Started on Slackware too. I remember building my own kernel and having to make sure it fit on a 1.44MB floppy.
make menuconfig
My first experience with Linux was trying to install TurboLinux 6 from a CD I got at a HAM Fest.
Short story shorter, I didn't successfully use Linux the first time until I tried a different distro (probably Debian?) a few years later.
Knoppix was the shit back then.
I tried out knoppix. I probably used the shell in knoppix more than any other distro than Irix.
Why does this capture that feeling so well lol
Damn that was my exact experience
me after installing Ubuntu because it was the only other OS I'd ever heard of, because I accidentally nuked my Windows Vista install by trying to overclock the CPU in a Gateway laptop:
hehe, mine was Ubuntu too. I thought I'd fucked up the emachines tower my parents just bought me.
us emachines and gateway kids grew up to be lightweight distro enthusiasts
like now my laptop has 16 gigs RAM, quad core fuck even knows GHz processor, and a GPU but if a process starts using >2% of my resources i will
-killall -9
it from orbit
Similarly, my XP install just died and I didnβt have a copy of Windows to reinstall. Gnome 2 taught me computers donβt have to look or feel boring and the terminal taught me they werenβt scary.
Learned a lot that first year.
I love bricking my entire installation by trying to downgrade OpenVPN
My first was SuSE 6 or something like that, back in the 90s. And my mom freaked out, because the PC didn't boot Windows95 anymore. And I had a huge book, telling me what to do. It came with the CDs.
Iirc Suse used to give away previous versions to highschools, so probably yours was running Yast with a lot of software included.
Me as a kid booting into Corel Linux that I got from a used bookstore.
Yes, with Mandriva. I had just switched from 98 to Xp and was like βNo, no, no, this sucks!β.
Mandriva looked so nice in comparison. But no internet, it just wouldnβt connect and I didnβt know how to troubleshoot it.
Honestly there are probably very few people who can troubleshoot dial up on Linux.
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