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!
Hanna Montana Linux, just for giggles
Gonna recommend this to all my co workers.
It is not vulnerable to Windows viruses.
:-)
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
Slackware like 7-12.
Basically until they pulled fortunemod.
Although not my first distro, I feel a lot of nostalgia for SimplyMepis
I think the LARP elements of this distro put me off trying it back in the day. Calling the package manager a “Grimoire” and having to “cast” packages to install them was just too much for me.
Great distro! I ran Lunar Linux so Source Mages sister from the fork of Sorcerer Linux. Lunar I know is still going and updating. Need to drop into their IRC channel for support and what not. Wonder if Source Mage is still kicking. Amazing how great the bash scripts were to run it all. I feel like if they added binary support they would get a lot more traction
Yes SMGL is still active. You can try joining one of their channels. There are still people looking for source based distros, not sure while Gentoo is the only thing that pops up for them. I used it for some time, and it’s fantastic. Sadly having to build stuff takes too much time, particularly on old, and not performance oriented HW. They had support for binaries, and actually include a binaries grimoire, so you could install binaries that used to take too much time, like Firefox for example. Still it takes too much to keep a source based distro. And if you go all the way, then when changing parts of the building toolchain, like gcc, the recommendation was to build everything so that everything would be built with the more up to date toolchain, that was cool, since SMGL has tools for it, but those fancy stuff take as well a lot of time. There I learned 1st about ccache, hahaha.
Sooo fun, :)
Just for curiosity, where do you get these old distributions?
I might try the Ubuntu version which got me into Linux one of these days😇
https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/
At least Ubuntu makes it easy to roam through their archives. Have fun :)
Thanks I’ll check it out👍
Wao, Mandriva and DamnSmallLinux 🤣🤣🤣
Get a CD with RedHatLinux, SUSE or Debian 1 or something and try to install that
Tom’s Root Boot.
One floppy disk, one Linux machine!
Gentus Linux comes to mind, obscure distro based on Red Hat (not RHEL mind You) released by now forgotten ABIT, a motherboard manufacturer. I was daily driving it as teenager back in 2001 for couple of weeks until I learned by trial and error how to get windows 98 installed back. Another one would be Mandrake Linux which I was dual booting couple years later.
Corel Linux
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’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
The distro used by the one laptop per child project. Fascinating GUI
Conectiva Linux in late nineties came with Window Maker as default. That’s old school as they come.
