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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

The first Debian release I used was slink (released March 1999). I stopped using debian on most of my personal machines when they switched to systemd. This is because a few of them refused to boot or exhibited strange init related bugs after the switch.

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My first Debian was also Slink, installed from a box of floppies onto a 486. Had to use rawrite to put the disk image onto the floppies. That box of floppies is still around here somewhere, though the 486 is long gone.

I remember the troubles using "dselect" without a stable internet connection, "apt" came quite later (with Potato or Woody, don't recall). On the other hand, I never had the need to try something else...

The thing that most impressed me about the install was the experimental hardware detection. I had a list of all she system hardware and the installer only missed a single component. Even then, it was an alternate recommendation.

I think apt was actually in slink. I remember the dist-upgrade to potato over a modem. It was so far ahead of the rpm based distros then.

But the installer still dropped you into dselect for a long time thereafter. Once it was installed it was smooth sailing.

Snap. It's only the last year I chucked away my slink, potato and woody CDs.

I had terrible problems with NFS and systemd. In fact, when testing Ubuntu 20.04 in a VM, the problems are still there even today. It's not freezing on boot as regularly, but it's still unpredictable and often freezes on shutdown.

Younglings...

0.93r5

We can play this game, I started on Linux with 0.99pl15 but I can pretty much guarantee you given this place someone will show up within an hour who got on the train in '92 and within a day someone who did in '91.

Related: on the occassion of Little Richard dying I have reflected on how every Beatles album was released closer to World War I than today. (Almost, Abbey Road needs a few more months, it'll be true on Aug 13.)

/me waves

I remember the arrival of Linux.

I'm not even all that old, but time sure does fly.

Let It Be was a year after Abbey Road, in 1970.

Very underrated album too.

Ah yes, sorry I forgot. Well then we have one more year left. Nonetheless... I was more trying to place Beatles as "wow it was that long ago??"

> I started on Linux with 0.99pl15

same here

First distro was slackware, 0.99pl15, bunch of floppies

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