MX Linux Forum

Circa 1998 I had a Walnut Creek Linux CD set which IIRC had Slackware, Red Hat, Debian, & Turbo Linux. I got Slackware & TurboLinux to run CLI but never got X to work properly due to inadequate hardware.
Started using Mandrake in 2001, continued with it until I got tired of rpm dependency h3ll (I was building drivers & applications not from the repos) and started looking around at apt-based distros. Didn't like Ubuntu but MEPIS 3.4-3RC1 in Jan 2006 was as perfect as Linux got in those days. Stayed with it to the end, then joined the MX team.

Mepis Pro 2005 beta if I recall correctly. :)

I had fiddled with knoppix before that, but only on the cd, nothing else. Mepis was the first one I truly used, dual booting still at the time. My brother who was a Mandrake kid at the time installed it for me, I never understood what he did with all the partitioning. I am SO glad I learned how to easily do things myself and now that I have removable hard drives it's even better. If I am totally unsure I just take the good install out of the system and slide a different drive in to fiddle with.

Xandros was the first Linux I used as my daily driver until they self-destructed. Before that Knoppix a bit. Then Mandrake until they had their problems, finally Mepis and here. First computing experiences were IBM1620, 1130, pdp-8.

I guess I am a latecomer to linux. My first distro was Zorin in 2016 when I was looking for a way of keeping my pc alive beyond the end of life of Vista which was the OS it came with. No way was I going to use W10 and I knew the computer was a good machine so didnt want to scrap it. So I had a go with Zorin but very soon wiped the drive and installed Mint 17.3, then 18x. Found 17.3 fine but had trouble with 18.2 which was how I found my way to MX 16.1. A guy on the Mint forum had mentioned he uses both MX or Mint XFCE on older machines so I decided to try MX as I was a bit annoyed with Mint by then.

So far so good. Initial troubles with graphics and the like were quickly resolved with help from the good folk on here. No plans to switch anytime soon but might dual boot with Mint when 19 comes out......or maybe Ubuntu Mate. I like the idea of having two distros.

I can use my floppy drive (yes I know its 2018) with MX but couldnt with Mint. Bluetooth was less problematic too, particularly importing photos from my phone and tablet which was a hassle on Mint. So I rate MX very highly indeed.

Oh and my first computing experience was a BBC Micro in 1984 then nothing until my first Windows machine in 2004.

Linspire, in 2005.

First Linux experience was with Debian my second time around in College circa 2001-2003. Debian was what the small regional College was using to teach with, as opposed to Red Hat, primarily because it was free. Even though my major was Information Systems, I never used it at a place of employment, for various reasons, so I continued to stick with Windows 2000 until my desktop IDE HDD crashed in 2011. By that time I had acquired a 1st gen Atom based netbook from Walmart for $200 with Win7 Starter (which I converted unofficially to Professional). In 2013 I had a friend who was an IT guy (who turned out to not know much more about the nuts and bolts of Linux than I did) install Easy Peasy 1.6 onto a 4 GB Partition, which turned out to be disastrously too small. Ended up deleting the partition. While recovering from emergency gall bladder surgery and the effects leading up to it in January 2016, I decided to give Linux another go. Ordered a Manjaro Xfce USB drive. Didn't like it. Did a bit of distro hopping after discovering Easy2Boot to create multiple booting USB sticks, ended up adopting 32bit MX15. Pretty much stuck with MX ever since, along with Win7SP1 Home Premium.
My first computing experience was in 1977 on a PDP-8 (I think) maintained by the University of Idaho Physics lab. The assignment was to listen to the hour long cassette on the fundamentals of programming it, then write a physics related program--your choice--to produce some verifiable output (to a printer). I chose to write a radioactive decay program for some isotope of Thorium. Wasn't too hard--once I acquired the decay equation from a helpful physics grad student.
My next foray was a disastrous punch card digital drafting assignment from a metal machining class that I stupidly signed up for.
My first personally owned computer was an Atari 800XL that I acquired in October 1984 from Walmart for $100 as I was mustering out of the Army--"leaving Louisiana in the broad daylight" as it were (Fort Polk to be exact). Used SynCalc to maintain my family budget on it-- never used it seriously to play games though. It just wasn't my thing.

First successful install was one of the first Ubuntus, either 4.10 or 5.04. Installed as a dual boot alongside my mainstay W2K. Once I got a handle on disk partitioning and editing grub, I loaded up a bunch of distros and played with them all -- Xandros, PCLOS, and MEPIS all come to mind, but there were many more. I ended up gravitating toward MEPIS. (MEPIS 3.4-3 was the first one I got to connect wirelessly on the antique laptop I had back then.) But they were always secondary to my W2K daily driver. When M6.5 was released and I got it set up the way I wanted, I gritted my teeth, made it my default boot, and made it my primary daily driver. Soon, I found I nearly felt the need to boot Windows. I haven't looked back since.

Lots of old timers here :) You guys make me feel young. SimplyMEPIS 11. I was a bit nervous about installing it even though I had read the documentation several times over. Was so pleased to see it boot up. What a beautiful OS and it did not break no matter how hard I tried to screw it up as I was learning about Linux. It ruined me though. I expected everything Linux to be so reliable and after distro-hopping just about everything, nothing compared to MEPIS back then.

KBD wrote:Lots of old timers here :) You guys make me feel young. SimplyMEPIS 11. I was a bit nervous about installing it even though I had read the documentation several times over. Was so pleased to see it boot up. What a beautiful OS and it did not break no matter how hard I tried to screw it up as I was learning about Linux. It ruined me though. I expected everything Linux to be so reliable and after distro-hopping just about everything, nothing compared to MEPIS back then.

M11 is still my daily driver. Haven't found anything I like better. And I've tried.

First Linux was the disk coming with "Point-and-Click Mepis" by Roblimo. I think it was 3.4? Completely new to me in those days and would have gotten nowhere without the help of my old friend Jon DuQuesne, who used to be a pretty active moderator on the old Mepis forum. When antiX came out after Warren moved on to other things, I tried it and haven't jumped to anything else. I rarely post because I rarely have trouble. I just keep updating to whatever the newest version is...