#MyFirstDistro was RedHat Linux 5.1 (1998), which I bought in a box. I had been using OS/2 up until then, but was increasingly using ported Unix applications in full-screen XFree86 sessions. At one point, the OS/2 VLB IDE driver irrecoverably thrashed my filesystem for the sin of going into config.sys and enabling DMA. It was clear by that point that Linux (or GNU plus Linux) had a brighter future ahead than OS/2, so I took it as a sign to switch. I believe the default desktop was KDE 2, though there was a GNOME 1 preview, and I actually used WindowMaker. It came with StarOffice, the extremely cursed predecessor to OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
Same (RH 5.1 w/ KDE), but I used Blackbox for a long stretch between KDE and WindowMaker. And I wasn't a big OS/2 user (having only tried it a little bit at a work* computer). I was actually a big fan of Microsoft, subscribed to Microsoft's Swedish-language magazine and such! Little known fact: Bea Uusma who later became a well-known artist was an illustrator for that magazine (doing an awesome job).
I had Slackware for a while but then found my permanent home with Debian. I really flipflopped from a li'l goody–two-shoes copyright respecter with a shelf-full of boxes for legally bought PC video games and apps to the foaming-at-the-mouth unwashed GNU hippie you all know and love(?) after reading the docs and manifestos and Anarchist FAQ stuff on those Debian CDs.
*: internships; I was a teenager. And I fell asleep on the job and got fired after 1 day 😭
@Sandra@carcosa 1998 when I started working at (large UK ISP), Debian because a friend of mine had illicitly downloaded the floppy images at his job and would make me a copy, fvwm because it's what we were using at work on the BSD boxes. For a while I was running dual boot Windows and Linux at home. Still Debian and fvwm today.
I forgot to say that after WM, I had ion2 and ion3 for a while, then openbox (sometimes with gnome), then windowlab, then openbox but now I've had dwm (with tons of my own hacks that I one day should polish up to patches and release) for at least 16 years, much longer than the total time I spent with those other window managers. Although since 2021 when I regrettably got this iPad I only use DWM rarely since I mostly use TUIs over SSH.
@Sandra@carcosa Yeah. It works for me and I don't really want all those little desktop features - I'm more likely to write my own that work just the way I want them to, which often means on the command line.
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