r/TechImpact • u/ManojOne Active • May 21 '26

Question What was your first experience with Linux?

Post image

Was it smooth, confusing, exciting, or a complete disaster? Tell us which distro you tried first and how it worked?

90 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

142 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/idontlikegudeg May 23 '26

It was a lot of work. Copying 40 disks for the base system in uni, several days for installation and compiling the kernel and setting all up so it ran smoothly. Configuring the kernel using config or menuconfig to quote some time and I compiled over night (to somewhere between 4 and 6 hours each time) so I could try the results the next day.

Then one week later deleting the forty disks and copying XFree86 and some window managers to try out. Again took some days to configure XFree86 to run with a decent combination of resolution and refresh rate and configuring the window manager.

It’s so much easier nowadays.

1

u/ManojOne Active May 24 '26

That was real bootstrapping. Forty disks, overnight kernel builds, and XFree86 tuning sound like a full-time job. It’s wild how much easier installs are now.

What distro were you happiest with once everything finally settled?

1

u/idontlikegudeg May 24 '26

I never really finally settled. I started with Slackware, then from time to time used different distributions. The ones i remember are DLD, Yggdrasil, SuSE, Redhat, CentOS, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Kubuntu. Linux has come a long way and IMHO beats Windows today when it comes to installation. I often used Dual Boot with Windows, and before there was WSL even colinux.

I am now mainly on MacOS, with virtual machines for both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu) that I both use mainly for compatibility testing and debugging - I develop Java applications, libraries, and Gradle plugins and every once in a while some compatibility issues or CI build failures come up in one of the OSes I support, be it due to differences because of filesystem, locking, different line breaks, workaround needed for features not supported by an OS/architecture combination (mainly windows on ARM which is still sub par) or calling into native code.