I tired Linux a few times in the past, but didn’t really start using seriously until 2019. I love poking around old OSs and distros, and I want to spin a few up in some VMs my next free evening.
Any suggestions? Open to any distro (or let’s be honest, DE). Any versions that holds a special place in your heart or that’s exceptionally novel? Really interested to see what’s out there!
Idk about nostalgic but north korea makes their own linux distro, that’s gotta rank high on the interesting list
Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger, oh my god the color scheme, all the earthy tones. 😊
The distro used by the one laptop per child project. Fascinating GUI
Although not my first distro, I feel a lot of nostalgia for SimplyMepis
Me: how many applications have you got installed? SimplyMepis: Yes.
I’m nostalgic for Ubuntu when it still had Unity as default, and Linux mint around 2014. That’s when I began coding, and that’s the time I liked the look of them more than the current modern offerings. Plus there was more ease of customization it felt like
Wao, Mandriva and DamnSmallLinux 🤣🤣🤣
My first distribution was Slackware 7.1 when I was in high school. It took a week to download the .iso on dialup, and I had to use a download manager (GetRight) so that I could resume the partial download any time the connection dropped (usually because someone had to use the phone).
I’m old o_o
I still vividly remember not being able to figure out how to install new packages, or knowing how to compile from source.
I still fondly remember sitting in the Sun Lab at University downloading SLS disk by disk.
SLS 1.0.x still had Linux kernel 0.9x on it.
Just getting X at all on your own PC was like a magic trick.
The number of hours I put into figuring out what X was, the difference between XFree86 and X.ORG , fixing resolution and DPI issues, installing video card drivers (mostly nVidia)… I think all that tinkering prepared me for my career as a systems admin.
I think Slackware came with KDE, which is probably why I leaned toward it for so long. I’ve been using XFCE for many years, now.
Slackware 2.x, on two floppies. A boot and a root disk, downloaded from a BBS using a dial-up connection (I think it was a 57.6 modem). No X, but I still loved it, so much better than DOS.
Oh I remember those disks :D I think I had to either pull them off the ISO, or download them separately so that I could boot the system to the point where A: the install could occur at all and B: it had enough drivers to use the CD-ROM drive XD
RedHat.
Not Fedora. Not RHEL. Back when it was just RedHat Linux.
I install Red Hat 5.2 recently. Amazing blast from the past. The only web browser installed was Netscape!
By Fedora Core 1, it was all starting to seem surprisingly modern.
I’ll probably be alone on this one, but there was this Brazilian distro, fully translated to portuguese named Kurumin, an indigenous word for “boy,” that was my first distro. The distro where I learned how to program in Python ages ago.
As a trivia, this distro main maintainer gave up on tech and was living as a monk or something far from any internet connection.
Lubuntu with LXDE
Ubuntu ca 2010
Play some Nibbles from that era
I have fond memories of Kubuntu Feisty Fawn and the whole suite of KDE apps that were around back then. It’s nice to see that Amarok got a new release recently after such a long time.
I booted a VM with BeOS for nostalgia a couple months ago. Remember booting that as a kid and drooling over how fast it was.
BeOS or haiku?
I have a dual 603 BeBox I haven’t fired up in a while…
Haiku. Was close enough for the feels.
I’ve been meaning to fiddle with OpenIndiana and Illumos for a while, which both trace their roots back to Sun Microsystem’s Solaris. It’d be really cool to poke around in a system that didn’t grow off of BSD or Linux.
First distro I got to work was LibraNet. Easy to set up and use, ran by a father-son team. Died when the father passed away. 😥
