Two years into full-time Linux and I’m finally burning the distro-hopping cycle. I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.
Switched back to Fedora, and it’s boring in exactly the way I need it to be. It’s a stable launchpad for my projects, not the project itself.
My first Linux distro was Red Hat 6 around 1996 I would suspect. It came with a Linux book that I bought.
I am pretty sure I started with either Halloween or Mother’s Day because Red Hat Linux for Dummies came with Red Hat 2.1 which I am pretty sure came out in 96 or 97. I know Red Hat 6 was released in 1999, because I was neck deep in Y2K work at the time I installed it on my Compaq laptop.
I found the O’Reilly Red Hat 6 book online and it came out in August 1999. I would have pegged it earlier than that but I guess not.