The movie came out in 1999. In the movie, they state that it’s 1999 (in the Matrix anyway). Neo is pretty tech savvy and a renowned hacker.
My assumption is he would’ve used FreeBSD. Or, maybe, Slackware. But I’m leaning more towards BSD.
Man I wish FreeBSD hadn’t fallen to the wayside. It’s really cohesive and feels put together in a way not Linux distro ever has.
Is it still worth using? Say, for a web dev? Or is it less supported?
Honestly it isn’t. Support for anything front-end related is way more sparse compared to Linux.
That’s a shame. I’d love a new exotic OS to try.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard FreeBSD described as either “new” or “exotic”
New and exotic to me.
“hello system” is pretty nice to look at, and has some Mac-isms I find helpful. FreeBSD has a new release recently, so maybe Nomad or GhostBSD could be worth trying. You’ll find FreeBSD is a lot more “consistent” compared to Linux, but be prepared for random hardware to not work.
I’ll give you “new” but it’s about as far from exotic as you can get… Not a bad thing, BTW, and I highly recommend giving it a try, it’s an excellent system, though probably better for a server than a workstation/desktop (though it definitely can be a very good workstation/desktop if you like)
Its Ports system is the inspiration for Gentoo’s Portage, BTW
You know, I’ve never used it. Maybe I’ll install it in a VM tonight and give it a whirl.
I mean, it’s decades older with a history of being used in business critical applications…
I’d argue that he’d use OpenBSD and be running his own firewall, web server, email server, and ftp server.
Or SuSE Linux, the non-slackware or jurix version was bleeding edge at the time.
Maybe both? BSD for his server, Slackware for his desktop. Or something.
Realistically, Debian, because it existed when the movie was set.
And also because realistically there’s no need for any other distro. :P
Other distros exist to teach people that Debian is better.
Hannah Montana Linux
This, but maybe slackware with the hannah montana ui.
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KDE NEOn
Real image from the really official archived film 👍 👍Slackware.

I wanna know what the newsreader he uses is
Looks a bit like the Arachne browser for DOS.
I think we all know the real answer, the matrix runs on windows XP
Kali
Initial Release: 2013-03-13
Neo lived in 1999.
In a simulation 1999.
It would have been
BackTrackKnoppix back then. And even that wasn’t released until 2000.
OpenBSD
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GNU/Hurd
i’m sure he runs his own, custom distro he spun himself
Debian, the cool guy distro in 1999. The machine overlords run on Red Hat.
In the low budget parody version, Neo ran Slackware, and the climatic battle was basically about Agent Smith somehow fucking up his libc.so.6 but then Trinity got him a copy of the file on 3.5" floppy from another system. Or something.
Slackware or Debian testing













