Slackware turns 30
www.theregister.com
Who needs a graphical desktop manager anyway?

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.

  • Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz
    3·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      1 year ago

      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!

      • railsdev@programming.devEnglish
        11·
        1 year ago

        Had to reply because this is kind of the opposite of my story.

        I grew up in the 90’s using Windows at home and pre-UNIX Macs at school. The Macs were trash and I was totally pro-Windows back then.

        Then Mac OS X came out at school and damn, that UNIX goodness brought a ton to the table.

        But being a kid, I couldn’t afford a Mac so around the Windows XP era I started getting into Linux. Unfortunately none of the distros worked great on my Dell (which my parents totally shocked me by buying one Christmas) so I was stuck installing on some ancient IBM ThinkPad built for Windows 3.1 but capable of running Windows 2000.

        I spent my most of my mid- to late teens on Red Hat Linux and later Ubuntu (like the first release though).

        Once I was 18 I saved up and bought my first MacBook Pro.

        So these days I use macOS as an everyday desktop OS but run Alpine Linux on a Raspberry Pi (and any Docker image I create) as well as FreeBSD for any VPS I might need. I prefer the BSD’s to UNIX (especially FreeBSD) but unfortunately do rely on Docker for development work.