Hacker News Reader

A mate cycled 15km to my house back in 1995 with a stack of floppies a foot high, saying "dude, you need to install this right now. And when it asks for mount point, just put a /, that's the only tricky part".

It was Slackware. I've used all sorts since: redhat, Gentoo, yellow dog, Debian, arch. Never looked back.

A job I had once required windows, and I tried WSL, but it felt ... so limited.

View on HN

I had a similar start, probably similar era, maybe a '98ish. My mom grabbed me one day and said I had to meet the new neighbors.

So, I went round and they had a front room full of a whole crazy mix of stuff. Some Next machines, Macs, AUX, Sun, BeOS, everything, on all sorts of crazy hardware.

We got chatting, he handed me a Yellow Dog CD and told me to install it and see what it's like. That led to SuSE 6.4 then 7, some BeOS, Gentoo, Ubuntu, etc. Had to purchase the SuSE CDs early on because on 56k couldn't download the ISO and didn't own a CD burner anyway.

Yeah, I remember a time when it was easier/cheaper to drive somewhere to pick up a burned CD/DVD than to download it :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com