I tired Linux a few times in the past, but didn’t really start using seriously until 2019. I love poking around old OSs and distros, and I want to spin a few up in some VMs my next free evening.

Any suggestions? Open to any distro (or let’s be honest, DE). Any versions that holds a special place in your heart or that’s exceptionally novel? Really interested to see what’s out there!

    • ace_garp@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 years ago

      Yeah, Knoppix was kind of a ‘Tucows vibe’ distro. Pretty approachable.

      Zen Linux was another short-lived 2005 liveDistro, which had a nice feel and Art.

      Also, installing all https://trisquel.info/ versions side-by-side and doing a 17 year fast-forward would be cool.

    • FigMcLargeHuge@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Same. I also have an old Backbox distro that I used daily for years and every once in a while fire it back up for shits and giggles.

  • MessyEh@lemmy.ca
    9·
    2 years ago

    Mandrake 6.0 was my first distro in '98-'99. Mandrake hasn’t existed for a long time now; I have no idea if you can still find an old iso of it. It used KDE 1.1.1 as it’s DE, and to this day, KDE has remained my preferred DE.

  • dallen@programming.dev
    8·
    2 years ago

    Crunchbang (#!) linux breathed live into some very wimpy hardware I’ve had in the past.

    Loved the minimalism.

    • Pacmanlives@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 years ago

      Great distro! I ran Lunar Linux so Source Mages sister from the fork of Sorcerer Linux. Lunar I know is still going and updating. Need to drop into their IRC channel for support and what not. Wonder if Source Mage is still kicking. Amazing how great the bash scripts were to run it all. I feel like if they added binary support they would get a lot more traction

      • kixik@lemmy.ml
        3·
        2 years ago

        Yes SMGL is still active. You can try joining one of their channels. There are still people looking for source based distros, not sure while Gentoo is the only thing that pops up for them. I used it for some time, and it’s fantastic. Sadly having to build stuff takes too much time, particularly on old, and not performance oriented HW. They had support for binaries, and actually include a binaries grimoire, so you could install binaries that used to take too much time, like Firefox for example. Still it takes too much to keep a source based distro. And if you go all the way, then when changing parts of the building toolchain, like gcc, the recommendation was to build everything so that everything would be built with the more up to date toolchain, that was cool, since SMGL has tools for it, but those fancy stuff take as well a lot of time. There I learned 1st about ccache, hahaha.

        Sooo fun, :)

    • steeznson@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 years ago

      I think the LARP elements of this distro put me off trying it back in the day. Calling the package manager a “Grimoire” and having to “cast” packages to install them was just too much for me.

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      2·
      2 years ago

      Uninstalled this recently as well. It is surprisingly slick for the time and way more modern feeling than you would expect.

      Linux was just not corporate enough for it at the time.

      In a different timeline….

  • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
    4·
    2 years ago

    Just for curiosity, where do you get these old distributions?

    I might try the Ubuntu version which got me into Linux one of these days😇

  • Sinirlan@lemmy.world
    3·
    2 years ago

    Gentus Linux comes to mind, obscure distro based on Red Hat (not RHEL mind You) released by now forgotten ABIT, a motherboard manufacturer. I was daily driving it as teenager back in 2001 for couple of weeks until I learned by trial and error how to get windows 98 installed back. Another one would be Mandrake Linux which I was dual booting couple years later.

    • 0x0@programming.dev
      2·
      2 years ago

      I read gentoo instead of gentus, found it awkward that someone would call gentoo obscure, did a websearch, came back to the post with gentus as a reply, re-read the post.

  • penquin@lemm.ee
    2·
    2 years ago

    I just started using Linux back in 2018. There is no nostalgia for me, as all the distro I used back then are still working now.

  • Murdoc@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    First distro I got to work was LibraNet. Easy to set up and use, ran by a father-son team. Died when the father passed away. 😥

  • bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 years ago

    I’ve been meaning to fiddle with OpenIndiana and Illumos for a while, which both trace their roots back to Sun Microsystem’s Solaris. It’d be really cool to poke around in a system that didn’t grow off of BSD or Linux.