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!
The old Ubuntu pre snap and Amazon era.
Early Knoppix live CDs have a special place in my heart
I wonder whatever happened to Knoppix. All I’ve been able to find online is speculation and questions.
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.
Mandrake 6.0 was my first distro in '98-'99. Mandrake hasn’t existed for a long time now; I have no idea if you can still find an old iso of it. It used KDE 1.1.1 as it’s DE, and to this day, KDE has remained my preferred DE.
There is an active fork https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMandriva_Lx
I’m still nostalgic for CrunchBang, and I continue to use OpenBox with any distro I try… Keep your DEs, I’m good 😄
CrunchBang was my jam in late high school. I couldn’t believe how much more lightweight it was compared to Lubuntu, which had been my main for years due to having a potato laptop
Right? Those terrible low-spec, off-the-shelf laptops can really cook with Openbox on a Linux distro.
Arco, Mabox, and Bunsenlabs are my current vm favorites.
I respect Bunsenlabs for lacking the chaotic instability that I loved to hate about Crunchbang in high school, and which I hate to wish I could love as a busy adult requiring a stable system…
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.
Red Hat used to be a really solid choice for desktop back in the 90s and early 2000s. Some milestone releases:
- 6.2 was the first version to put up ISO images for install. This is the one to get if you really want a blast from the past (early version of anaconda installer, ext2, LILO bootloader, Linux 2.2, Gnome 1 etc.)
- 7.3 was the last version to come with the Netscape browser.
- 9.0 was the last version before they split into Fedora and RHEL. It’s the last and most mature desktop release of that era, included the “Bluecurve” unified look and feel introduced in 8.0 but had bugfixed versions of KDE and Gnome.
Yes. I think around Red Hat 6 was the first time I compiled the kernel to make sure some hardware worked. Good times
What do you mean 6.2 was the first version to put up ISO images for install? I installed 5.2 from ISO not long ago. I have installed 4.2 in the past.
I think it was 4.2 that came with the “awesome” window manager.
Before 6.2 you had to get them on actual CDs which wasn’t an option in many places. Starting with 6.2 they put them online on FTP.
I may be remembering wrong but I am sure I got CD images off FTP for earlier versions as well.
I have been downloading Linux since grabbing floppy images of SLS, used Red Hat for years, and do not remember having more than one version on actual CD that I did not burn myself ( for sure never DVD ).
Hanna Montana Linux, just for giggles
AmogOS too
Gonna recommend this to all my co workers.
It is not vulnerable to Windows viruses.
:-)
Lubuntu with LXDE
- ZenWalk was unique and great about 15 years ago as an easy Slackware with minimalist install.
- Chakra Linux was an Arch+KDEmod distro that kind of went away.
- Bodhi Linux has its own desktop called Moksha.
- There is a GNUstep Live CD that comes out every few years, based on Debian. It is a unique setup from a time when the future of computing was promising. I think it is distributed on LinuxQuestions or some other forum.
- There was a distro called gOS about 15 years ago that used a lot of desktop widgets and Google apps. Their business model was basically, “We are going to re-skin Ubuntu and call it gOS and hope Google buys us.” It did not work out.
- Darwin was upstream for macOS and for many years, there was a community of users who would port the traditional *NIX stack to it. Xorg, traditional window managers, a ports system, etc.
- Frugalware Linux was well polished and kind of a spiritual successor to Zenwalk.
- openSUSE 10.3 had the most beautiful Gnome setup. It was unique in that it had a single panel, a modified Clearlooks theme, and a Vista-style start menu.
- OpenSolaris likewise had a very unique and beautiful look, with its macOS-inspired Nimbus theme. I think this was the best looking theme of that era.
- SimplyMEPIS was my first Linux on a T61. I had used FreeBSD for the decade prior. I don’t know what was better about SimplyMEPIS than Debian, nor do I know what SimplyMEPIS meant versus regular MEPIS. It’s kind of like Claws Mail and Sylpheed Claws. Some times we just throw words together and give it an icon and there it is.
I used all of these at some point.
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
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.
Idk about nostalgic but north korea makes their own linux distro, that’s gotta rank high on the interesting list
