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In the early days of my Linux use I was on Mandrake 7.2 and loved it. All the "just in case" random packages were very entertaining and educational to me, alth
by mark_undoio 3y ago
In the early days of my Linux use I was on Mandrake 7.2 and loved it. All the "just in case" random packages were very entertaining and educational to me, although they were probably a distraction from whatever I was meant to be doing!
Still, the experience seems to have served me well in the end. I do miss that feeling of discovering all the weird themes and window managers they packaged by default, I don't get the same vibes of "any UI is possible" these days (even though the UX is probably much better by conventional criteria).
- qup 3y agoMandrake! I'm the other guy who used it! In 1999 I paid about $30 for a copy so I didn't have to spend weeks downloading it over 56k.
- kergonath 3y agoSame! So I guess there are at least 3 of us :) Memories…
- jtorrents 3y agoAs the sibling comment says, was relatively popular here in Europe. It was my first GNU/Linux disto. I had problems installing Debian in a laptop with a nasty Wifi PCMCIA card, Mandrake was able to make it work.
- qup 3y agoSame, broadcom wifi issues and 3dfx driver issues for my voodoo card but mandrake mostly just worked. I eventually learned enough to install debian-netinst and get everything working, probably within about a year.
- jtorrents 3y agoExactly the same here ;) I also ended using Debian when I learned enough.
- kergonath 3y agoSuSE for me (well, actually, FreeBSD in between, and MacOS the whole time). But same difference.
- walteweiss 3y agoMe too! Count me in! Mandriva was my first ever Linux distro! It was so long ago that I forgot it happened. I came to think that was Ubuntu, but it came after Mandriva and after Ubuntu I was on Debian, of course. Now it’s Arch on my laptop and Fedora on my desktops.
- toyg 3y agoIt was actually pretty popular here in Europe (I have a feeling the core devs were French, but I could be wrong).