wa4chq Posted February 28, 2022 Posted February 28, 2022 (edited) It's interesting seeing what was popular 20 years ago. I'm missing my Beehive Linux Edited February 28, 2022 by wa4chq 1 Quote
sunrat Posted February 28, 2022 Posted February 28, 2022 I see only one Linux in top 10 of both of the lists. The 2 number ones - Mandrake was the first I ever used and I would hazard a guess EndeavorOS fanbois have been spamming page visits. DistroWatch stats have never been an accurate measure of actual users. I suspect Debian and Arch users don't visit DW often at all. 3 Quote
securitybreach Posted February 28, 2022 Posted February 28, 2022 It is neat seeing some of the old distros listed but Sunrat is right, that only counts how many people have been to the distro's specific page on distrowatch. Back in the day, it was a good estimate as it was a lot more popular of a site but that was long ago. 1 1 Quote
abarbarian Posted February 28, 2022 Posted February 28, 2022 I see only one Linux in top 10 of both of the lists. The 2 number ones - Mandrake was the first I ever used and I would hazard a guess EndeavorOS fanbois have been spamming page visits. DistroWatch stats have never been an accurate measure of actual users. I suspect Debian and Arch users don't visit DW often at all. Interestingly there are only two and a half in the whole list, Debian, Slackware and SuSE/openSUSE. 2 Quote
wa4chq Posted February 28, 2022 Author Posted February 28, 2022 Beehive users haven't been visiting much... 1 Quote
securitybreach Posted February 28, 2022 Posted February 28, 2022 3 hours ago, abarbarian said: Interestingly there are only two and a half in the whole list, Debian, Slackware and SuSE/openSUSE. Well technically Suse came from Slackware Quote The company started as a service provider, regularly releasing software packages that included Softlanding Linux System (SLS, now defunct) and Slackware and printing UNIX and Linux manuals, and offering technical assistance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUSE_Linux#History 1 1 Quote
Hedon James Posted March 1, 2022 Posted March 1, 2022 On 2/27/2022 at 7:17 PM, wa4chq said: It's interesting seeing what was popular 20 years ago. I'm missing my Beehive Linux Wow...interesting comparison! I didn't stumble onto Linux until the late aughts, and didn't install to hardware until early/mid 2009. Some things that catch my eye: Who would've thought Gentoo was ever one of the most popular distros? Lindows was in the top 10? Even back then, someone was crafting linux distros to woo Windows users! Yellow Dog? Isn't that the distro that morphed into Fedora? Check out all the "do it yourself" distros! Gentoo, Slackware, LFS, Crux, Arch! Maybe more, but that's all I'm familiar with?! Quote
wa4chq Posted March 1, 2022 Author Posted March 1, 2022 1 hour ago, Hedon James said: Yellow Dog? Isn't that the distro that morphed into Fedora? I think it turned into a movie! Quote
V.T. Eric Layton Posted March 1, 2022 Posted March 1, 2022 3 hours ago, Hedon James said: Yellow Dog? Isn't that the distro that morphed into Fedora? Nope. Yellow Dog Linux was a distribution based on RedHat, Fedora, and Centos. It didn't morph into anything except Discontinued. https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=yellowdog 1 1 Quote
Hedon James Posted March 2, 2022 Posted March 2, 2022 20 hours ago, V.T. Eric Layton said: Nope. Yellow Dog Linux was a distribution based on RedHat, Fedora, and Centos. It didn't morph into anything except Discontinued. https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=yellowdog Aha....seems you are correct sir! Thanks for the background! I tinkered with Fedora during my initial Linux introduction, before deciding it wasn't for me, so I remembered YUM. And I knew YUM had something to do with YellowDog Updates, so I figured there might be a relationship there. Enter google....while Yellow Dog was a derivative of the distros you cite, I'm guessing the YUM tool made it upstream into the "mother distros", similar to how some Ubuntu-originated tools make their way to Debian. Linux history is fascinating to me... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yum_(software) Quote
raymac46 Posted March 2, 2022 Posted March 2, 2022 I've been using Linux since 2006 and at first I didn't know anything about Distrowatch or the Linux family tree. Most of my early experience was trying to find a distro that would work with weird old hardware and getting wifi to work on a desktop with some decent degree of security. As I recall I experimented with Fedora because it had a version of Network Manager with WPA when other distros only supported WEP. However, I didn't like strange kludges like PLF back then. Mandriva did the trick for me for many years. Since then Mint has been my go-to along with Debian and Arch. No need for Distrowatch these days. 1 Quote
V.T. Eric Layton Posted March 2, 2022 Posted March 2, 2022 The "watching" on Distrowatch is not quite as exciting as it was 10 or 15 years ago. 1 Quote
ebrke Posted March 3, 2022 Posted March 3, 2022 I've been using OpenSuse since 2003, so I don't "watch" anymore either! 1 1 Quote
abarbarian Posted March 7, 2022 Posted March 7, 2022 On 3/3/2022 at 11:54 PM, ebrke said: I've been using OpenSuse since 2003, so I don't "watch" anymore either! Will you be having a party to celebrate twenty years of freedom from Microsoft next year ? 1 Quote
securitybreach Posted March 7, 2022 Posted March 7, 2022 11 hours ago, abarbarian said: Will you be having a party to celebrate twenty years of freedom from Microsoft next year ? This summer will be 20 years of running Linux for me (2 years from now will be 20 years here on this forum). I did have a dual boot for some games for a couple of years though. 2 Quote
abarbarian Posted March 8, 2022 Posted March 8, 2022 10 hours ago, securitybreach said: This summer will be 20 years of running Linux for me (2 years from now will be 20 years here on this forum). I did have a dual boot for some games for a couple of years though. Fab so we have two parties to look forward to. 1 Quote
abarbarian Posted March 8, 2022 Posted March 8, 2022 (edited) Intrigued by the length of other folks linux usage I wondered how long I have been using the penguins. As my memory is a tad faulty I thought a good way to find out would be to look up posts from another forum I frequent, one I have used ever since I first started out with computers. I thought I had started out with the penguins around 2004/5 and thought I had been using them as my daily driver since 2006. However the earliest posts of mine regarding linux are from 2008. As posts around that time indicate that I was trying to install and run BOINC which I ran through the night on my daily it looks like I started using linux as a daily driver in 2008. You may find my enthusiastic early linux posts entertaining. Kanotix 2007 Thorhammer Rc7 Mandriva One 2009.1 install walkthrough Edited March 8, 2022 by abarbarian 1 Quote
raymac46 Posted March 8, 2022 Posted March 8, 2022 My earliest posts are from 2007 and I already had a bunch of junker desktops and laptops back then. I believe I got started in late 2006. 1 1 Quote
colin.p Posted March 9, 2022 Posted March 9, 2022 I must be "trendy". It was Red Hat 8 and Mandrake 9(?) that were the first distros I used way back in the early "naughties". That was the first and only time I was in the cool crowd. 1 Quote
raymac46 Posted March 9, 2022 Posted March 9, 2022 I remember installing Linux on a Fujitsu Lifebook 735Dx back then - Pentium 133, 1.6 GB hard drive, no CD-ROM, 80 MB RAM, no wifi. I was able to plug in a PC card with Ethernet. I got Deli Linux on floppies and installed a basic system. Then I downloaded a low resource GUI over FTP. And people complain about installation difficulty nowadays. 1 Quote
V.T. Eric Layton Posted March 9, 2022 Posted March 9, 2022 Always easy for me to remember my first actual GNU/Linux installation. It was Ubuntu 6.06 "Dapper Drake". This would have been summer of 2006. Within a few weeks, though, I had installed and played with numerous Linuxes and ended up with Slackware shortly thereafter. A screenshot of my original "Dapper Drake"... 4 Quote
raymac46 Posted March 10, 2022 Posted March 10, 2022 Back when I started with Linux, hardware had a "7 year rule." This meant that most 7 year old systems (or older) were junk and it wasn't worth refurbishing them with Linux. With wifi and 64 bit systems coming along, this quickly changed to a "10 year rule." Now with multicore CPUs, better onboard video and SSDs I would say we have a "15 year rule" although that would have to apply to upgraded desktops and high grade laptops. Netbooks are junk now, no matter how nice they were back in 2011. 1 1 Quote
wa4chq Posted March 10, 2022 Author Posted March 10, 2022 I started out on my Linux journey using an old, used Toshiba Satellite lappy that originally had Win95. I don't remember where or why I got them, but I had Dos on a floppy so I decided to wipe out Win95 and installed Dos (I was a lost pup)..I liked using Arachne browser and seriously thought Arachne was an OS. Friends of mine were talking Linux so I found this site BasicLinux. I started out with BasicLinux (based on Slack 3.5, but later put 4 then 7 on it) Next on my journey I wanted to put Linux on my desktop so I went to CompUSA and bought RedHat7. I really started messing up with this because I didn't understand partitioning and dual booting. I even took my computer to a friend that had retired from IBM to help me but he didn't know or understand partitioning either. One of the friends gave many cd's containing Debian Woody. I ended up installing that. So, I believe my journey with Linux started late 90's. I've lost count on how many times I hosed my computer's during the journey...lol. Have a great day. 2 Quote
V.T. Eric Layton Posted March 10, 2022 Posted March 10, 2022 The system that I had installed that Ubuntu on that I mention above was an Athlon K7 Thunderbird-based system that I had bought at a computer show in '03 some time. It was a "bare bones" system; just the mobo + PSU. I had to add the other required hardware. This was ericsbane02 (for reference, my current machine is ericsbane07 - built in 2016). This is also the same machine that suffered a terrible ending sometime later in '06 when I kept having a weird intermittent data loss issue on its primary drive... the one and ONLY Seagate drive that I've ever actually bought brand new. Josh will remember the story of me dancing the Irish jig on top of this machine in my kitchen after tearing it off the desk and slamming it onto the floor. Turns out the Seagate drive was at fault. Even the Seagate engineer that I spoke with on the phone could not understand what was happening. They refunded me in full and sent me a pre-paid shipping box to ship the drive back to them. They were very curious to see what was causing the issue. I never bought another Seagate. However, I have nothing bad to say about their tech support. It was A+! I salvaged what I could from the pile of debris in my kitchen floor and assembled it into a new case... ericsbane02 was revived. With a new WD drive, it behaved well for a few more years. I actually still have the mobo and the K7 processor out in my shop. I've always wanted to build another system with this because that K7 Thunderbird was just an awesome processor! 1 1 Quote
securitybreach Posted March 11, 2022 Posted March 11, 2022 Nice Eric, too bad that it wasn't caught on video as you could of made a bunch of money on the escapade. Funny enough... before my current Ryzen cpu, the last AMD processor I had was the K6. 2 Quote
abarbarian Posted March 11, 2022 Posted March 11, 2022 20 hours ago, V.T. Eric Layton said: Athlon K7 Thunderbird-based system My first ever pc was an Athlon K7 Thunderbird-based system that I bought of E-bay. I found out it had a pirated version of XP which is what prompted me to investigate linux as it was free as opposed to the expensive Windows offering of XP. It was still working in 2017 when I moved but being unable to upgrade the graphics I decided to junk it as I had four newer pc's. I did not have the energy to cart and store it in my new pad. Shame really as it was a reliable workhorse. 2 Quote
raymac46 Posted March 11, 2022 Posted March 11, 2022 My first AMD CPU was an Athlon 64 X2 which I got new in 2008 to run Linux. That system still works but I have decommisioned it as I have another junk machine with a Core 2 Duo to play music in the workroom. It still has a decent power supply and case - although no USB3 connections. 2 1 Quote
V.T. Eric Layton Posted March 11, 2022 Posted March 11, 2022 54 minutes ago, raymac46 said: Core 2 Duo HAHA! Let me know if you need a replacement cpu (Core 2 Duo) and heatsink (brand new in box). I have one out in my shop (you pay shipping). 1 Quote
raymac46 Posted March 11, 2022 Posted March 11, 2022 (edited) 7 hours ago, V.T. Eric Layton said: HAHA! Let me know if you need a replacement cpu (Core 2 Duo) and heatsink (brand new in box). I have one out in my shop (you pay shipping). Thanks but I have got a gently used E8400 in this rig. I think it'll do the job. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/33910/intel-core2-duo-processor-e8400-6m-cache-3-00-ghz-1333-mhz-fsb.html Edited March 11, 2022 by raymac46 1 Quote
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