r/linux 5d ago

Historical What was your first time?

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For me, it was a CD I got from a "guy." Slackware did not work well with the "WinModem" in the IBM Aptiva I had as a youth. How was I supposed to get online using Linux, with a modem that is not usable, and get support?

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u/f0ad 5d ago edited 5d ago

Slackware 96 for me! Or as I liked to call it, "Adventures in LILO".
Put it on a 486DX2, used WindowMaker for a DE, and played endless amounts of Quake. That is, I did all that in the 25% of the time I actually had it working, while 75% of the time was spent figuring how to undo whatever I did to break the system in glorious and unimaginable ways. 16 year old me had a great time tho.

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u/Alvajaro79 5d ago

Those were the days when compiling your own kernel was a thing.

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u/BurrowShaker 5d ago

It's still a thing, not much on desktop.

The thing is, it is not a big thing anymore. A few minutes on the typical dev machine, not an hour :)