This week the Slackware Linux project is celebrating its 30th anniversary. It is the oldest Linux distribution that is still in active maintenance and development.
After getting my hands on unix at work but unable to afford the cost to run it at home, I discovered a version of Slackware that installed in a folder on my Windows desktop. It only took a few weeks of playing around before I set up a dedicated server (which was then hacked within the first week, pushing me to learn about this thing called a “firewall”) Whew it’s been almost 24 years now and I’ve been happily using Debian for nearly half that time.
What do you mean by the cost? Because you didn’t want to wipe out your Windows OS? I’ve been running distros on my personal PC for 23 years now. Can’t say I’ve ever spent money on it except for some cheap CDs. I think I even got distro cds for cheap that came with linux magazines.
If you wanted to run actual Unix, there was a significant licensing fee. That’s one of the reasons Linux took off, because it did all the same things but was free.
I mean the BSDs have been around since what? The late 80s? With the more “mainstream” distros (Free and Net) since the early 90s… The 80s if you count NextSTEP and SunOS!
But I get what you mean, there’s a reason Bell was forced to relinquish it’s code with anti-trust laws!
I think it was around '99 that I got into this. The internet was quickly building momentum, I finally had DSL available, and I happened to run across a reference to linux. I had been searching for an alternative to Windows for awhile already (I still have a CD with OS2/Warp on it) so the idea that not only could I replace my desktop, but I could also run free servers??? My mind was blown. It took me another six years to get my desktop to where I could truly ditch Windows completely but I’ve never looked back.
I was a mac guy in the 90s, which was rather unpopular. I started just experimenting with stuff to expand my horizons. In ~97 I started playing with BeOS, and NetBSD. The latter was pretty much the only thing that had a native boot loader for the OpenFirmware. Played a bit with Yellow Dog Linux and MKLinux after that, but NetBSD remained my go to. I almost fully switched in the early 00s but OSX came out and being Unix system I stuck around. By the mid 00s I was using a mix of NetBSD and Debian/Ubuntu for servers, and a couple years later fully switched to Debian to have one single OS that I could use everywhere.
Never looked back!
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Topologilinux?
Took me weeks to get my modem to work with that. Had to keeep rebooting back to windows to disl up to the net and check documentation and tutorials…
After that things picked up, though.
I never heard of that one. A distro that I used for a few years was called “Mage” though, which provided what I thought any of them should have been doing. I eventually stumbled on Ubuntu, but they burned me so many times trying to run servers, that’s when I finally got on Debian. Nothing worse than having their security updates destroy all network access, and still having the ticket open at least 15 years later (I was still getting pinged from other people running into the same issue on bugzilla).
I mean sure, but Debian is far more active, relevant, and only like two months younger…
When I started playing around with Linux 25 years ago Debian and APT was a small revolution in how good it worked out of the box.
I tried to get into Red hat and SUSE and I always wanted up in trouble even before I got any Windows manager up and running. Don’t get me started on RPM and dependency hell
Debian just worked. I had stuff up n running BEFORE I had to go down the rabbit hole to understand how all things was connected.
For a beginner that was a game changer.
I wish I had known about Debian and apt back then! I spent years distro-hopping because I was so tired of chasing down RPMs in redhat. Like seriously, you can’t just tell me everything you need, and grab all those files at once when I try installing a package?
Ugh. I’ve been a Debian (and derivatives) user since the late '90s, and you’re unlocking memories of what chased me away from Red Hat distros back then.
Glad to have been of service! 😆
Debian has a lot of other things going for it - but Slackware still beat it by two months, and Linux wouldn’t be the same without it. Worth celebrating! 🎉
I think I still have disks for Slackware 11 and 13 floating around somewhere. I even ran 13 for almost 2 years as a daily driver… And then got pissed off trying to update packages.
I’ll admit that these days I just run Ubuntu, because it’s easy, and it works without hours of googling how to fix some random dependency that I can’t actually find for some reason.
Okay, so, silly question: What was the first linux distro, regardless of current activity?
I think it was MCC Interim Linux.
Interim Linux would be a neat modern distro name.
Neat! I’ll have to look into that, thanks~
Another one bites the dust 🎵
