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Comment by j45 | Hacker News Reader

It’s more common now but Debian was the first distribution that really opened Linux up for beginners like me. No offence, Slackware.

Many derivatives have been able to expand in other directions because of the ability of Debian to create beginners.

HBD!

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Yup, I started with RedHat... forget what version, 4, probably 5? Really couldn't get behind the rpm system. I think Debian might have been like the 2nd or 3rd distro I tried and it stuck a lot better. This was back in... 97 or 98? or so.

Still using it today in the home lab/personal server in the basement.

Raw rpm was horrible. I used it and I wrote about it, but it was a nightmare. I think I sold an article which was just "here is how to install KDE 2.0 on Red Hat Linux". It was about 3 pages long, and included something like 200 dependency packages that you had to hand-install, one by one.

I am curious to hear what Debian was like before APT came along in 1997 or so.

Slackware in my circles around '99 was always the elitist option from day one.

You were using Debian, Red Hat or SuSE? Not Slackware? Pfff... normie.

I think that consolidated it as difficult for beginners. The fact it offered very few technical advantages was the nail in the coffin.

I remember I used SuSE for ages based solely on how good Yast and Yast2 were. Its almost quaint to remember how Linux was back in the day, where an installer/setup tool that actually managed to make your system fully usable and configured without any extra tweaking or compiling kernel modules for hardware support was an honest to god selling point and killer feature.

Reflecting back on it makes me appreciate all the early gurus who got us to where we are now.

Same here.

But I tried Ubuntu "Warty Warthog" and jumped ship.

Same, via a Raspberry Pi :]

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