What has your experience with Linux been like so far? How long has been your Linux journey? Mine began while I was studying computer science, and I’ve been in love with Linux since.

    • azimir@lemmy.ml
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      3 hours ago

      I had a Pentium I 120 MHz Packard Hell machine. It came with Win95 OSR 1 and I loved that beast. I upgraded the disk (1.1 GB to 3.1GB!) and the RAM up to 40MB. The screen was a 13" fishbowl so I get a Sony Trinitron 15" screen eventually.

      The combo modem/fax/sound ISA card wasn’t worth keeping, but I got a PCI Sound blaster as well as a 3Com 3c905 fast 10/100 Ethernet card. I had one of the best machines in the dorm for a while. Warcraft II played so very good.

      The Linux support in RedHat 5.2, then through 6.2, and sometimes Mandrake, OpenBSD, and some other distros was great. As long as you set the IRQs in the bios right it worked like a dream.

  • ghashul@feddit.dk
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    7 hours ago

    I started with a book about Red Hat 5.x that included a cd with the OS. I generally went back to Windows after a while (except i did run a server on an old pc for quite a while), but tried I again every few years.

    I always liked the idea of Linux, but gaming kept making me go back to Windows. Early last year I tried installing EndeavourOS alongside windows and have stuck with it since. My new PC that I got later that same year has never seen windows.

    I’m loving it, and don’t foresee a return to Windows.

    • bad_news@lemmy.billiam.net
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      6 hours ago

      I’m a fellow 5.x-er (5.2). Those were the days, trial and erroring every package combination on rpmfind.net to try to meet a dependency for the package you actually want…

  • ElectronBadger@lemmy.ml
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    6 hours ago

    I’ve started several decades ago, with some ancient Slackware (?) version, downloaded using 56k line modem as 1.44 floppy images. Meanwhile I had a period of a difficult relationship with Windows (2000 was the least bad) and a longish affair with MacOS. Now Linux-only everywhere, for the last ~5 years.

  • Thorned_Rose@sh.itjust.works
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    15 hours ago

    Heh, that box and version of Redhat was the first I tried Linux, as well as the same year - 1999 Cost me $110 brand new from a local stationary shop. Which was a lot for a poor student! Sadly didn’t last long as I just couldn’t get everything done in Linux as I could in Windows. And this was despite studying computing at the time.

    Oh well 15 years later I tried again (Mint then Arch) and haven’t gone back to Windows since. 🎉

    • wulrus@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      In the 90s during the first “mild hype”, I had Suse for quite a while, twice. Same problem with unavailable software though, I remember PGP Disc not being available back then. I remember the cool kids talking about Red Hat and Debian, you must have been one of them.

      Probably going back now, since my 2011 hardware won’t work with Windows 11.

  • perishthethought@lemm.ee
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    19 hours ago

    What COM Port is your mouse on?

    That question got me. SO glad we got past setting IRQs and setting up modems and dip switches and all that.

      • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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        15 hours ago

        I have a pack of about 40. I needed 2 to set some old drives and talked to Geek Squad staff and other local computer places. The young staff had no clue what I was describing, so I had to order in bulk on AliExpress

          • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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            9 hours ago

            Yep, I assumed they would have run across them on a motherboard, or sata card at least, but no. It was like I got dropped from a time machine and was aaking for a phonograph

    • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 hours ago

      I remember I made a thread asking for advice running an older version of Linux for funsies and to experience it and unironically someone said something along those lines to me, like “uhm Linux isn’t windows you can use modern packages and new distros support older hardware” like ughh

  • TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org
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    22 hours ago

    I bought a copy of Corel Linux in 2001 at a USAF base exchange because I was a broke airman and was building my first homebuilt PC and didn’t want to shell out money for Windows, and I didn’t have Internet to pirate it in the dorms (this was the days of no wifi and pay as you go Internet cafes). I thought it’d be JUST like Windows, and I could get shit done, and the differences were just like those between Mac/PC. Just a different interface.

    Boy was I wrong. It sucked balls. I didn’t pick up Linux again until Ubuntu in 2006. Now I daily drive Debian. Oh well, at least it came with an inflatable penguin.

    • psud@aussie.zone
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      16 hours ago

      I think in 2001 I was making a Linux from scratch system having not gotten enough from red hat and Debian with home configured and compiled kernels

      Fun times and no, nothing like the commercial home operating systems back then

  • Cyborganism@lemmy.ca
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    23 hours ago

    Wow. I had this on my removable hard drive for our operating systems class in college back in 2000.

    • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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      22 hours ago

      me too. it had some unspecified issue with xorg that prevented bootup and i was never able to fix.

      • Cyborganism@lemmy.ca
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        19 hours ago

        Internet access was more complicated back then. If you didn’t have a second computer or couldn’t dual boot into a working OS it was a big problem. And there wasn’t a lot of Linux users back then either.

        • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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          16 hours ago

          yea no way i would have been willing or even able to troubleshoot it at that time.

          i just gave up until ubuntu came around many years later and just worked.

    • bababu@feddit.orgOP
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      22 hours ago

      Seeing all the issues in the video, I feel like my experience with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx as my first self-installed Linux OS was much smoother :D

      • Cyborganism@lemmy.ca
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        21 hours ago

        Oh yeah. Ubuntu really simplified everything.

        My first distro on my own PC was Mandrake. I don’t know how many times I had to reinstall it because of my fuckups.

        Two years later I was compiling my own kernel with the source code of special modules that I had downloaded for my NVidia card that had composite video input.

        I’ve never had to compile a kernel since Ubuntu. I completely forgot to be honest.

        • bad_news@lemmy.billiam.net
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          6 hours ago

          God, I’m soooo glad you don’t need to compile anything anymore. I spent my entire early 20’s debugging C compile errors building LAMP stacks… I had forgotten (blocked out?) how many things you used to need to compile yourself…

  • electricprism@lemmy.ml
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    23 hours ago

    is there a website with all the redhat box art of that time.

    I remember having this box or another similar.

    The .1 is very memorable.

  • grue@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    I got a copy of Turbolinux 6 from a Hamfest and never managed to get it installed correctly. A few years later, I did succeed in running Debian and Gentoo in college.

  • icerunner_origin@startrek.website
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    22 hours ago

    This was also my first Linux distro after having used Sun’s Solaris while at uni. I think I tried out Slack and Suse at around the same time, but stuck with RedHat and related distros for about 6 years.