MX Linux Forum

I met Linux at the turn of the millennium. The first release was a Red Hat that ran at a gateway to my workplace at that time. Suse followed. I got to know Debian later. It was a tool for gaining experience. Then came Linux Mint four years ago, later last year Manjaro and Antergos. I heard Antix at that time, and I thought it was promising, but I just got to the point of installing it on a regular machine. I must say, knowing Debian, I wasn't disappointed. Lightness, speed, airiness are the words I first thought about MX Linux. To tell the truth, I have recently bought an SSD, on which MX Linux without systemd starts like lightning. Everything has what it takes, and developers have added some useful tools that aren't in other distributions.

My best friend used Mepis, I started converting in .. 2004, 2005? The rest is history

I first tried Linux back in 2000 because Windows 98se was so unstable that it would freeze in under 10 minutes once online and continued to freeze and then the "Blue Screen Of Death." I tried Corell, Mandrake, and Red Hat which none of them I could connect to the Internet even though I was using a external US Robotics modem because the D.U.N. was rubbish. The sound didn't work on any of them and on Madrake video would stop working. No support at all for Linux back then but an over abundance of lame excuses. I didn't try Linux again until September 2015 after reading the E.U.L.A. for Windows 10 which shows that it's Spyware/Malware. After using openSUSE for a month I removed Windows 8.1 which was on my computer. I haven't used Windows since. After 2 months I made the mistake of trying another distro which I can't discus on this forum. I was lucky to find MX-15 at that time and have been with MX Linux ever since.

I mentioned before but it's an interesting story how a closed source program converted me to Linux, Xandros released a version that included Opera by default since I was an Opera user and realized that I live 99.5% of the time (or something like that) inside the browser, this was the lightbulb moment "if I can use Linux + Opera for 99.5% of the things I need it means it's pretty ready for me to use it as a desktop"... obviously Linux was able to run a browser before, but Xandros was easy to install and pretty user-friendly, and it had a good community (hello Rich) so that was my home till I switch some sources around and did a upgrade that broke Xandros' KDE, at that time MEPIS was releasing 2004 beta, I tried that and I liked it, I stuck around since that time till Warren abandoned development, I was already using Arch when Jerry contacted me and invited to take a look at his MX project, then I started to tweak the installer and the rest of Qt apps and that was it, MX pulled me more and more and eventually gave up my Arch installation.

I am sure we crossed paths on the Xandros Forum Adrian. I was moderator on that forum, but had to do very little moderating . As you said it was a good forum. And I thought a pretty good distro. Started with SimplyMepis 2003.10, the second release. The reasons for my move away from Xandros are clouded in the mists of history. Since then I flirted with only one other distro other than MX ,Kubuntu. That did not last long once MX was introduced.

Been in the Linux world since about 2006.... my first conversion to daily Linux use was shortly after Ubuntu came into existence. I futzed with other things earlier, but left the Widows world about then.

I became aware of Microsoft's business practices in the 90's and didn't want to support them anymore. Tried slackware circa '98 but my hardware wasn't up to running Xf86.
By 2001 I had a better machine and started using Mandrake. Got tired of rpm dependency hell after a while and tried a few others before finding Mepis 3.4-3. Been around here ever since.

I have no computer background like everybody else, but just got super annoyed with MS in 2002 or so, so switched my business computer to Mandrake--which highly irritated the corporate IT people. Then had a bad upgrade with Mandrake, so moved over to Mepis (can't remember why) 3.4-3 and have been working for Warren's vision ever since.

Windows made me start on Linux. July 15th, 2003 SimplyMepis. I know it was the middle of July of 2003. Not sure if it was the 9th or the 18th. So met it in the middle. Got tired saying Middle of July 2003. July 15th 2003 was much easier to say. I started just before Ubuntu made it's first release. SimplyMepis was mention many time, when I was searching for a Linux distro to checkout. So I download SimplyMepis on a CD. I just lay it on top of my PC. Three days later my Windows XP got a terrible virus. Which required to do a reinstall. Now this was my third trouble with Windows XP that year. I had my Windows XP almost in the CD tray. But I seen that Linux disk laying on top of my PC. So I lay my Windows XP disk to the side and just put SimplyMepis into that CD tray. I knew how to install OS's, so the procedure to install SimpleMepis was quite simple. Now I just install SimpleMepis on the whole hard drive, so no Windows XP at all. After the reboot, there she was a KDE Desktop beauty. I poke around a little bit. I just click onto Firefox and try to learn how to install Linux software on this PC now. That's when I read about the Package Manager. I just look on SimplyMepis and there it was a Synaptic Package Manager. I spent my first two hours inside that Package Manager. I start searching of names of software. I did use many opensource software on my Windows XP. So I was kinda familiar with some of these. After I learn how to install packages. I was mainly on the home stretch already. Slowly after my first 5 days using SimplyMepis. I was up and running like normal on my PC. I even had all my peripheral device working. At this point, I said to myself why go back to Windows. I never went back to Windows so here I am with MX. It's like I went in a complete circle with Linux. Since MX is related to SimplyMepis.

I was just doing some surfing on the Web and ran across an article about Mandriva Linux.
I started out a few years ago with Mandriva. When that ended I went over to Mint. I liked the Debian version of mint at the time because it was more of a rolling release and I could use KDE with it. Then they decided to stop supporting KDE and one of the users there developed his own spin and called it Solydxk. I followed them because they were a rolling Debian release. It was too bad they couldn't get more development support and changed to just be Debian Stable. So I created my own Debian that was a testing version with MATE as its desktop. I had been using that for a while and with Steve's help got my compiz working in testing. So I followed Steve here into MX and I think this is where I want to stay now.

I started with Linux back in the early 1990s. I was working in a Unix shop at The Phone Company at the time but didn't know a whole lot about Unix, so I was looking for a version that would run on a standard Intel PC so I'd have it available to learn on at home. The only thing I found was either Xenix or Minix, I forget which, which at the time was commercial software and was too expensive for my budget. Then I heard about something called Linux, probably on comp.os.unix in Usenet. Where I worked I had an old 286 IBM PS-2 PC at my desk but no Internet access, just the company's internal WAN. While browsing text files on the WAN I discovered a phone number in one of our offices in the next state that gave dial-up access to a system that could access the Internet, low speed only though, with a genuine Hayes modem required to connect. This was back when typically only the government, universities and certain large corporations had Internet access, not most end-users (I did however subscribe to a combination BBS and Unix timesharing system that offered dial-up access too, which is how I was able to read Usenet.) I found a live phone jack under my desk and an old Hayes 1200 modem in the junk room, and spent weeks FTPing all of the Linux components and apps then burning them to 3.5" floppies, probably 4 or 5 boxes worth. It took me a day to get one disk's worth, then I'd start another FTP session before I went home and let it run overnight, then another when I got to work the next day, etc. I had to actually partition and format my hard disk then create the Unix directory structure myself: /bin, /dev, /etc. and all that, then copy things into them from the floppies and un-tar them there. I also had to compile a lot of the OS myself. Very manual, such wow. Anyway, I was finally able to get it to work. That's kind of an extreme example of the adage that Linux is only free if you don't place a value on your time, huh?

My first actual distro was Slackware 1.0 which I got on a CD from a company called Morse, which among other things sold Linux CDs. They were about to release an updated version for sale and still had a dozen or so of their old CDs left, so in the spirit of free software they offered to just give them away to whoever asked for one on a first-come first-served basis. They even paid the postage. I got the next to the last one. It was pretty cool, having everything to run Linux on one disk along with an installer that would set up the system for you.

All of these early Linuxes were command-line only at first. Xwindows hadn't been ported to open source yet (XFree86), and when it did it was a bugger to configure. If you were lucky enough that your particular make and model of monitor was listed in its configuration file, great, but of course mine never were. I had to find the technical specs including its various clock rates and manually configure my X server, getting them exactly right or else I could destroy the monitor, which I actually did to one once. All that to get a very primitive-looking GUI with Neko and X-eyes. :) (I kind of miss little Neko, having a cute kitten chase my mouse cursor around the screen.) Now that I'm an old curmudgeon I don't have much patience for the CLI anymore, plus I always keep new users who've always had Windows and never used DOS in mind, so I'm mostly a GUI-only guy now. (Linux is so much nicer now that we have window managers that run on top of X11.)

So that's how I started, just getting ahold of a free Unixlike OS to play with so I could learn more about Unix commands. I almost always kept a Linux on my PC in a dual-boot configuration along with Windows ever since so I'd still have it available to play with, but I decided to cut the Microsoft cord about ten years ago. I got tired of having to pay more than I could afford for an operating system and software that sucked when I could just download them for free instead. :) (It's the old sysadmin mantra: "All hardware sucks, all software sucks, all operating systems suck.") It probably took 6 months before my wife stopped grumbling but she eventually got used to it too. (I did discuss it with her first and she agreed to let me switch from Windows, but she'd never used anything else so she had more trouble transitioning than I did. I ended up giving her a Windows XP installation on a virtual machine so she could still run MS Office and Photoshop but I don't think she ever even used it.)

To making this on linux

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL8F0B8Hj0o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCtr04cnx5A&t=344s

If nobody make it I'm gonna make it.
Once that happen I'll be the first person in the world that make linux counterpart.
I don't know what tool should I start with but I've Synfig, Tupi, Pencil, openshot, kdenlive in my sleeves.

First I've tried Linux with Suse. Only Suse was the name in 2000 or so. It was a very popular distribution in Germay. But only a try for me. I'm going back to Windows. Windows XP and Windows 7 are good systems for daily use. With both systems I've made unattended install setups with software included.

I'm a Linux-only user since 2017 but I started directly with creating own systems and I'm interesting in such distributions like Arch and minimal systems. I want only install what I need. But the administrative tasks on Arch are too "bleeding edge" for me. In my opinion it is better to use a stable base and tested software, I don't need a system for an 'updates-scenario' daily and brandnew kernels weekly. So I start building systems first with the Ubuntu mini.iso and than on debian and finally with debian and mx-sources.

I got my first computer in 2000. I came to Linux in 2010, I was growing tired of Windows Vista...

Following friend's advice, I started with Ubuntu 10.04 in dual-boot with Vista. But because my wife was often the first to turn it on (and because I was still a gamer at this time), our PC rarely booted on Ubuntu... My Linux partition slept until 2013.

Then I tried again end-2013, installing Ubuntu 12.04, still in dual-boot with Vista. With the Ubuntu 14.04 release wait, I prepared my mind to definitely leave Windows. The only software I needed for my work was working with WINE. So... Then, I deleted WIndows, installed Ubuntu 14.04, tried XFCE, KDE flavours...

Then I briefly tried a few rpm distros (OpenMandriva, ROSA...)

In 2015, I wanted to learn and understand Debian. I switched to Jessie, then Stretch... And I discovered (and installed) MX in April 2018.

I was using open source software like Firefox and OpenOffice with Windows XP, and that's when I found out about Linux. I picked up a cheap notebook with Linspire pre-installed, started playing around with that back in early 2005. Found Mepis about a year later, and the world changed. :)

At the time, I was attracted to Linux because it seemed very interesting, and because I saw that I could use it on old, used computers and avoid having to pay for Windows software. $$ was definitely a motivating factor. I was thrilled about being able to use a Mepis CD for installations on multiple computers at no extra cost to me.

I started out in Linux with Slackware in 1994 - Back then you installed it using about 30 floppy disks. I then went through a series of Distros stayed with Red Hat Until they split and Did Suse and Mandrake for awhile Used Mepis for awhile and finalluy settled on Debian /Ubuntu/Mint for many years. Thought I would give MX a try and it's working well for me. Always Liked Mepis but Was just distro hoping in those days. Hope I can be of help here from time to time. Linux of all flavors has come a long way since the early days. Can install and have a desktop up and running in about 15 to 20 Minutes now. Back then it took a week sometimes to get everything working right, maybe longer.

I first used Linux with the Dapper Drake release of Ubuntu, whenever that was, mid 2000's I think.
That was a bad experience & I ended up going back to XP for a while.
Then I tried Ubuntu again after getting some sort of rootkit/malware crud on XP I couldn't get rid of, 8.04 Hardy Heron this time, found it ok.
After that I went to 10.04 & really liked it until an upgrade to 12.04 forced/introduced me to Unity which I'll probably hate until the day I die.
Haven't touched Ubuntu since.
Distro hopped through a lot of Ubuntu based systems & stayed with Linux Lite for a while until one lot of updates broke my system & most of the dozen or so systems I was admining for aged pensioners at the time.
I decided then instead of using something based on Ubuntu, which was Debian based, I'd try using the base system of Debian itself.
Started with Debian 8 Jessie & Xfce it was ok, though I'm not a fan of Systemd so I looked around for a Debian based system that wasn't Ubuntu based & didn't have Systemd as the default init, found MX-14 & been using MX ever since.

from memory- it was Mandriva & it came on one of those UK based Linux-magazines.
& then I'd discovered SimplyMepis - - still got a copy of V3,3 - - must have an ISO, too, I'd assume.
- it was all downhill, after that.

I cannot remember when I started using Linux for the first time as I used AIX (IBM unix) even before. I definitely switched to linux in 2014 at home when support for Windows XP was dropped and (more importantly) I no longer needed special windows-only applications like lotus notes and others.

Back in 1998 a UK computer magazine was reviewing Windows 98 and said that Microsoft had now made networking so easy that if you had two machines it was pointless not connecting them.

So I did that. (Co-axial cable, t-pieces and terminators anyone)

Then I thought, two machines could be a special case and I wanted a third machine.

I had most of a computer in the spares box but didn't want to fork out for a copy of Windows.

About that time the same magazine carried a cover disk with a copy of SuSE on it. I think it was version 5.3.

The rest, as they say, is history.

2015. I got tired of having to reconfigure my settings after another large unplanned forced update. I started with Ubuntu 14 to get proof of concept with a liveCD. I set up Mint as a persistent liveUSB for several weeks. Finally, I installed it (dual boot). I have distro hopped, a lot. Rolling releases are great when your hardware is new and not yet well supported. I've even dabbled with kernel building to use unreleased hardware patches. But as the equipment ages, the appeal of a rolling distro fades. MX just seems more balanced. My actual computing needs are simple. But I like to decide when to update or upgrade my system or when to change the interface.

Somewhere around 2000 or 2001. I’ve been a power user of computers since starting with CP/M and then moved on to DOS and DR-DOS, then Windows. I was a hold-out for years and did not see the point of a “gui” for well into the Windows era. But I was always reading magazines and books that focused on business use of computers. Things like operating systems, file management, databases, spreadsheets, word processing, etc.

I had interest in companies that were crossing over into Linux such as Caldera, Corel, Borland, IBM, and Oracle. I was browsing in a bookstore and decided to buy a book that included a CD, it was for Slackware, around version 7. I started reading and trying it out on one of my “old” computers, a 486dx/66, that had been replaced by our “new” computer, a Pentium-III running Win98SE. At the time I was more comfortable at the command line and in the file system using something like Midnight Commander. I ended up learning how to set up Xfree and the X windowing system.

My next book with CD was on Red Hat 8, then I bought a software package for SuSE 8 and installed it with KDE. I thought that was cool and I found it a lot easier than Slackware or Red Hat. Eventually I found Vector Linux since I had some “old” computers and Vector made them useful again and by this time Windows XP was locked down by an activation scheme. The internet and viruses were the big things at the time and I had heard that Linux did not have viruses. So I learned to hack config files and scripts to get all sorts of modems and NIC’s to work with Vector. I used Vector Linux the most for such things as browsing the internet (not just the web) and research and that led to lots of downloads and burning CD’s. I would install Slackware and Vector and try to learn Linux.

I tried Knoppix, Simply Mepis, and Puppy. But I continued to find most success with Vector. But after awhile I started running into trouble when I started wanting to use more software packages beyond networking and browsing. I still found Slackware too hard to figure out anytime a software package was not in the default repositories or if it need dependencies that were not installed with the distro version I had installed.

By this time broadband internet was available and I had learned to set up a LAN behind a NAT router. I also started accumulating a lot of old computers from the dump, friends, and our business cast-offs. The computers I had were now either Pentium-III or P4 with 1GB Ram. I started dabbling with Ubuntu.

This eventually led to Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Lubuntu. Then Peppermint and LXLE. I also used some Turnkey systems based on Ubuntu as servers in the business. I found Xubuntu to be the easiest for me to setup and I became a fan of Xfce, I still use some Xubuntu in my business and in some of my home computers.

As I became better at package management I started looking at Debian, I liked that I could use the apt program from the command line. At the same time I was looking for other Linux distros that worked well on old machines, especially Pentiums 2, 3, and 4 with between 128 Mb and 1024 Mb of RAM, I had success with Puppy but didn’t like the packaging or the documentation. I tried Lubuntu, LXLE, Elementary, Crunchgbang! And WattOS. In my search for a lightweight Linux that was easy to install and modify I came across antiX, probably on Distrowatch.

antiX was a lot like Vector but instead of Slackware it was based on Debian. I liked that I could easily install packages with apt or synaptic. I soon replaced all my Vector and Lubuntu installs with antiX-14/15. I’ve been using antiX as my “old computer” distro ever since.

On some of my systems I had a little more power and more Ram so I took a look at MX-14. It wasn’t quite as nice as Xubuntu back then so I didn’t use it as much as Xubuntu. But I soon got more familiar with antiX and Debian and eventually I landed on MX-17 to replace most of my Xubuntu installs. MX is now my “go to” distro for all computers with more than 1 Gb RAM.

I’m still a power user and comfortable at the command line but I’m not a developer. I like what antiX and MX offers to make Debian easier and to set themselves apart from other distros. MX is very usable without being too complicated. And antiX is the best low-memory Linux out there, hands down.

Seaken64

This is a fast moving thread. In 1984 we bought a C-64 "for the family" and the same year I was given an account on a PDP-11(??) running Unix accessed by dial-up. I've been hooked ever since. In 1994 (I think) I downloaded 24 720K disks worth of Slackware after it was announced on UseNet, and used that to develop shell programming scripts to use at work under Unix. On my regular desktop I held out with the Commodore systems then DOS and OS/2, while we were having to run Windows 95 (which has always been a pain) on the desktop at work (Wright Patterson AFB). About 2001 I started using Linux on my main desktop, Slackware, Red Hat, Mandrake, and then about 2004 put Gentoo on the desktop and never looked back. I've never been a paid system administrator, but do maintain Linux systems remotely for my church and its school. The school has been using Gentoo on the desktop for 7-8 years, and we're in the middle over setting up new hardware with Mint XFCE on the desktop, but next time it will most likely be MX. We move slowly and favor stability over bleeding edge. Friends shouldn't let friends do Windows.

I had a WindowsXP machine, new and powerful with a 14.4 baud dialup modem, Celeron processor and 512 megabytes of RAM. I had no idea if that was a lot, but the word "mega" sounds like a lot, and more than 500 of them sounded like a huge amount. That's a lot of mega-somethings, right?

That machine is probably close to 20 years old now, and still runs fast and nimble with AntiX! It's used for schoolwork, email, and web surfing. I don't multi-task anyway (even on my newer 4-GIG machine), so Antix has kept that ancient relic out of the landfill for almost 2 decades!

When WinXP suffered "Windows rot," which is the name some people made up to describe how Windows gets slower and sslllowwwwwerr with time and the cure - at least back then - was to reinstall it. But I didn't have the old WinXP installation disk. Omygosh, now what? I searched for help on my poor old crippled computer for some alternative after learning the price of a new Mac was ridiculous. I ended up taking a "distro chooser quiz" from some web site to help me find a Linux that would work for a technophobic student with "just okay" hardware. The "distro chooser" directed me to Ubuntu, and ordered a LiveCD from a vendor. It arrived in a week, which even now is pretty darn quick. Ubu 8.04. Ugly dirt brown by default, but it did everything I needed, so I installed it, giving it the entire disk. Bye bye Windows!

I played with all of the 'buntu flavors (LXDE wasn't around yet) and chose Xubuntu because it was a whole bunch easier and faster, and had all kindsa options! So I became an Xfce fanboy. Ubuntu is [in]famous for being bricked by updates, though, so I wanted something NOT Ubuntu-based and visited independent PCLinuxOS (Xfce edition), Slackware-based SalixOS, which I still think is awesome, Linux Mint Xfce because it has that cool updater that helps technophobes and newbies avoid those dangerous and deadly upstream updates, and Linux Lite. They're all great! But not on that aging Dell anymore. Not even Linux Lite was light enough, and sure enough, an upstream update (why do updates to a distro intended for novices include Beta software?! Unforgivable!) borked it and sent me off the Ubuntu-based train for good. Heard about MX and how it's the heir of an older distro that did what Ubuntu was supposed to do - make Linux usable by ordinary mortals and casual computer users. Only built on Debian Stable rather than the experimental stuff. MX-18 now runs sweetly and swiftly on my newer machine, and AntiX keeps the old ancient Dell humming along like new.

There is a similar previous thread: what was the first linux distro you used

About in late 2012. After windows 7. First i was totally mad with the stability of windows. It was very common thing to reinstall windows every few months due to malwares or blue screens. It was also time for me to buy a laptop and i bought a Dell inspiron 3537 with Ubuntu and not windows 8 that every new laptop had upon this new release from microsoft,
After that i never installed windows in my machines. The difference was huge and it was a very pleasant experience. Never had issues with malwares and malicious stuff, also Linux (after few months i started distrohopping) in general was stable not like windows and it was breaking only when i was doing something without knowing what i'm doing with my system. The big difference was this, customization was big thing too, but using an operating system that sparks your curiosity to learn about it, how it works, how it spins...etc it was and still is a really fun thing.
The only drawback for me in the beginning at least was games of course. But now with proton from Valve, has made wine a pain-free process and it looks like that hole "gaming" nagging thing about Linux is not an issue any more.

Also MX finally stopped me from distrohopping all these years. Thank you MX team.

Back when I was in college, there was an elective class on Linux. I think the distro they had us use was Red Hat. The university was Windows heavy and being able to use something else was a refreshing change. Since I was a gamer I stuck with Windows for many years after. However, I always kept at least one book on Linux on my bookshelf since I took that class. I always had a curiosity about Linux. I experimented with a few different distros PC Linux OS, Ubuntu Studio to name a few. However, somewhere around the release of Windows 7 I started getting tired of using Windows. The release of Windows 10 was the jumping off point for me. MX Linux is my daily driver at home that I use full time now. I have one program I use Windows for at home. Unfortunately my company uses Windows and that will not change. A work day without a computer issue, glitch, crash, etc. is almost non-existent at my workplace. Firing up MX Linux at home is a feeling of zen. Using MX Linux just plain works - that is why I use it today.
Even though I have dabbled in Linux for years, I am still a newbie. I learn new concepts as needed because I no longer have the time as I once did due to other life responsibilities.
Thank you for everyone involved MX Linux's success - and thank you for this forum.

Way back when desktops were the only affordable system: Slackware 3.0 (mid 90's?) quickly followed by 3.1; Tried Debian (6 floppys to install - try that without an error); Redhat (hated it); Suse - it was great until it sold out; Ubuntu until they destroyed the desktop (Unity); Then a long period of Windoze - dropped my P4 for an i5 laptop: started experimenting again with Linux after using Raspbian; tried Linux Lite, Mint Cinnamon, Manjaro Cinnamon (I like the last two - amazing how good Linux is these days); was passed an old desktop cast-off so the obvious thing was to install Linux; (XFCE didn't seem to like my laptop); currently loving MX xfce with a backup install of Mint xfce (dual booting off separate SSDs). I still have Win10 on a laptop for when nothing else works. However booting Windows after not using it for a while seems to kill the machine until it's done updating and allows you to use the OS you've paid for.
But despite all this I'm still a novice!
Forgot the why: Back when I started dabbling with Linux MS owned the personal computer. Linux put an end to that. It smelt of freedom and given that it was also free in monetary terms it was simply too amazing to ignore.

In 1996 I found one CD in my office (Nairobi). One friend of mine working in the same office, brought it from Singapore. Got curious, did an install and started using Linux from that day onward. Same as Linus Torvald, I am also born in Helsinki. I didn't know him but I simply started to dislike Windows. Learned to use Linux on my own until I joined Arch Linux in 2002, where I learned the in and outs of Linux.

Sometime in the early 2000s.
I was fed up with many things about Windows (98). Privacy concerns, security concerns, their whole business model, to be honest.
Since then I've always had a Linux only system. It has always more than sufficed for the things I do.
I used Ubuntu, then tried Red Hat just before it discontinued the free version.
I went back to Ubuntu, but at some point went to Linux Mint for quite a while.
Finally made the switch to MX at the beginning of 2017.
The incredible freedom linux gives the user has been worth all the (not so) tough times it took to learn it.

I was mentored on linux my Mike Furlotti, linux advocate, software genius, and all round smart guy. He showed me the power, the security, when in parallel I saw windows. So I bought a Suse DVD (or was it CD?) based set for fifty bucks, big thick books came with it, must have been version 7 or 8 maybe2001-2002? It had kde desktop. It worked kind of. It was Germanic. Everything had green lizards on it and began with a k.

Then I heard about Mepis in 2007, and it worked. I was converted to Warren's polishing of debian. And From that we went to antiX and MX, where I learned and tried different DEs, now an xfce daily driver, with some lighter experiments within antiX.

I would say out of curiosity. I got a Knoppix Live CD from a magazine some time in 2005, and by the summer of 2006 Fedora Core was my main distro. Fedora was my main OS until a few months ago, apart from about a year when Win8 came out and until it was replaced by 8.1 (this was also when I switched from KDE, first to XFCE, and then Gnome). I have also used Knoppix, Knoppel, Slax, Mandrake, Mandriva, Mageia, Gentoo, DSL, and more recently PCLinuxOS.

In the late 1990's a friend told me about a "totally free" computer Operating System, and I was fascinated, and started digging through bookstore computer book shelves looking for anything that mentioned GNU or Linux. I found I could get some old computers running on it and settled on SuSE pretty quickly as my distro of choice (after RedHat started demanding significant amounts of money for free software updates). I stayed with SuSE or openSUSE primarily until a couple years ago when I tried Debian and really liked it. Then I tried antiX and loved it, and this past fall I decided to give MX19 a try and am completely satisfied with it, especially with a KDE desktop.

In the early 2000s, I was running FreeBSD on a surplus Compaq tower and playing with picoBSD (it ran off a floppy!),
when I needed a laptop for my consulting business. I ended up getting a LC2430 from LinuxCertified that came with
Debian 3.0 (Woody). Around the time I was upgrading the 40GB hard drive to a 60GB hard drive, I heard about
SimplyMEPIS 3.3 and decided to give it shot. The CD install on the new disk was a piece of cake and MEPIS ran great
on the laptop (Pentium 4 2.80GHz, 1.0 GB Memory, ATI RV250/M9 1400x1050 screen). I still have it, and just recently
booted MX-19_386 on it, even got the the PCMCIA wireless card running after hunting down some prism54 firmware.
I upgraded my Dell desktop to MEPIS 3.3 and haven't done Windows since. I sat out the Ubuntu-based SimplyMEPIS 6.x
detour, and didn't upgrade until SimplyMEPIS 8.0. I eventually ended up running SimplyMEPIS 11.0 and needing an upgrade made the switch to MX-Linux.

Been very happy with MX-Linux 18.3 & 19 on my desktop and 3 laptops.

The Raspberry Pi 1b runs Raspbian 10, so it's Buster based like MX-19, but uses systemd (that's another story).

It's been a hoot trying MX-Linux LiveUSBs (x64 and i386) on various systems including my Mom's MacBookAir.

Love digging into some of the issues that come up the MX forums.

I think I already answered this when I introduced myself upon joining the forum, but I was working as a sysadmin for a server app that was running on Unix (System V release 3.2 IIRC) in around 1990-91 and wanted a Unix of my own to run on my home PC, a 386, so I could learn more about it, and Minix was out of my budget. This was in the days before such things as distros or even a graphical desktop (Xwindows.) I found a way to get 2400-baud Internet connectivity at work and spent about six or seven weeks downloading GNU/Linux .tar files from an FTP site and saving them to 1.44MB floppies to take home and set everything up manually. I could get one tarball during the day and left my computer on downloading another one overnight. By setting up manually I mean creating the entire *nix directory structure myself: /dev, /etc and all that including subdirectories then untarring and copy-pasting everything where it needed to go. I don't even remember how I obtained a bootable kernel or installed whatever the bootloader was back then, it was so long ago.

My first actual distro on a single CD was SLS (Soft Landing Software) 1.0. I got the disk for free when the company that was selling it (Morse) was about to release discs with a newer version and decided that in the spirit of free/open source software they'd just give away their remaining few 1.0 discs to whoever asked for one, first-come first-served, until they were gone. Installing from a CD was way better than 40 or so floppies, I can tell you. It may have even come with XFree86 on it but I don't remember.

The idea of desktop environments and window managers was still in the future. IIRC the first two DEs were Gnome and KDE. I prferred KDE of the two as it was more Windows-like and Gnome was more like MacOS, and I was more used to Windows (95) even though there was some controversy at the time because KDE was partially built with a non-free/open source toolkit of some sort and Gnome was all F/OSS including its build tools.

A "friend" tricked me into installing Xubuntu 13.10 and then I accidentally deleted Windows with those wonderfully confusing partitioning tools so now I'm stuck. I miss Windows :-(

I began using Linux in 2008 after fighting Windoze Vista for a year...it got to the point where upon boot it
immediately went to the dreaded blue screen of death...I installed Ubuntu and have never looked back.
Over the years I have tried various distros...Ubuntu, Mint,Debian, Fedora, etc...I have now finally settled
on just 2...ARCH & MX...they are my daily drivers now

tommy

Head_on_a_Stick wrote: Sun Jan 26, 2020 8:07 am A "friend" tricked me into installing Xubuntu 13.10 and then I accidentally deleted Windows with those wonderfully confusing partitioning tools so now I'm stuck. I miss Windows :-(

Early on I had a dual boot of Win98 and SuSE, and I started happily accessing the Win98 partition and pointing at program folders and Win98 system files from within SuSE in an effort to try to get programs running under wine. I thought I was very, very smart. After a few months I needed to boot Win98 again for some reason, and found I had completely obliterated it. Good times.

Bought my first Dell in 1995(cost as much as a pickup truck) with Wundermus Windoze 95. Got notified shortly it was time for the "incredible new" 1998. Reboot 20 times a day until notification of " Gift from Gawd" second edition !Reboot 19X a day ! YAY....Learn partitions/dual boot Debian.
Find Xandros and Win 2000.Looking better ! Learned to hack registry with the boyz doing 2000 Lite. Getting real good !
Informed of XP. End of Windows for me. Met Ian Murdock and learned....lets say..."Debian from scratch" while adding the Stormix package management.Toyed with them all from Ubuntwho? to Clems mint( still have LMDE.) Ran the most excellent Saline for a while,Linux Lite is a champ too. Been an almost Deb purist since. MX is the best wrap in a long time and I remain an XFCE fanboi....for now. Chromium is beginning to piss me off lately so I'm learning to Brave as I post this.I have had a couple Mactops over the years. Steve was right. Microsoft has no soul....LOL

In 2006 a friend gave me an IBM ThinkPad with Windows 2000 on it, it worked okay for a while but then after a failed update it never booted into Windows again. Messed around with Knoppix for a bit, tried Ubuntu, settled on Xubuntu as a base with Xfce replaced with Fluxbox for a while, then found CrunchBang Xfce which started me on Debian based distros or Debian itself sometimes.

In Nov 2019 my Win 10 hard drive failed.
After installing a new drive, I ran my Win10 recovery USB and tried to restore a 3-month old system image..it totally failed. This was the first and only time I had to use the Win 10 recovery drive and was extremely disappointed it didn't work given the many hours I spent doing Win10 system image backups since Win10 first appeared in 2015...so I decided it was time to dump Windows.

After many web searches, I decided to give MX a try even though I had no prior Linux OS experience ... best move I ever made.
About 95% of everything I did on Windows, I can now do on MX.. The other 5% I can't do in MX (even with Wine) so I'm not completely Win10 free.

I trying to learn as much as I can about MX and Linux as I can, and find the MX forum a great asset, but I badly need a good Linux reference book focused on major Linux system apps, as opposed to shell/script programming

Head_on_a_Stick wrote: Sun Jan 26, 2020 8:07 am A "friend" tricked me into installing Xubuntu 13.10 and then I accidentally deleted Windows with those wonderfully confusing partitioning tools so now I'm stuck. I miss Windows :-(

15 minutes on a tube vid and that never would have happend

Fits and starts when Ubuntu first came out just trying to relive my MS-DOS days but quickly found the CLI to be a bit more complicated, which is why it was fits and starts.

Anyway, I've noticed more and more clunkiness with Windows 10, ended up getting a Raspberry Pi 4 to do some ham radio digital modes and viola! LINUX again! So, once bitten again with the power of that small device being driven by linux, I tried a few distros on my my laptop and ended up shrinking my main Desktop's Win 10 partition down to half the Terrabyte drive and dual booting MX Linux about a week ago. I rarely boot back into Win 10 now!

Bonzoo2525 wrote: Sun Jan 26, 2020 11:53 am

Head_on_a_Stick wrote: Sun Jan 26, 2020 8:07 am A "friend" tricked me into installing Xubuntu 13.10 and then I accidentally deleted Windows with those wonderfully confusing partitioning tools so now I'm stuck. I miss Windows :-(

15 minutes on a tube vid and that never would have happend

There are YouTube videos warning about the dangers of installing Linux? Damn, I wish I had seen those before burning that Xubuntu installation disk...

I started using Linux full time in 2016 when I had a Windows 7 to 10 upgrade fiasco because the hardware wouldn't work properly with 10.

Before that I dual booted Linux and Win 7 for several years and I had played with Linux occasionally since about the late 1990s when somebody gave me a Knoppix live CD (or something similar) that only booted to a command prompt.

Recently I bought a new PC that came with Windows 10 and the first thing I did was erase the SSD and install Linux on it.

Head_on_a_Stick wrote: Sun Jan 26, 2020 8:07 am A "friend" tricked me into installing Xubuntu 13.10 and then I accidentally deleted Windows with those wonderfully confusing partitioning tools so now I'm stuck. I miss Windows :-(

I laughed out loud! Of course I don't think you're being serious!

Seaken64

I had been using Linux in VMs while having Windows on bare metal for many years back in the 2000's. At some point, a particular Windows Update came in that totally bricked my laptop. I don't remember the year, better that I don't. Fortunately, I had sufficient experience with Linux in VMs to make the transition on bare metal smoothly. I was able to get that same laptop back into shape running a variety of Debian-based distros - and it is still running perfectly well now on MX (now with an SSD replacing its aged HD). To me, the most important difference is that Microsoft treats its customer base as if they were sheep, while every Linux I've used (well, maybe not Ubuntu when it insisted on its Unity crapware) treats its users like actual people. I had at one point also used Macs, very early in their history. Remember that small screen and the bomb error message? But I didn't (still don't) like the idea of paying a not-that-small fortune for very pretty but not more practical hardware, most of which went into assisting Steve Jobs to spread his jerkdom around instead of going to the devs that deserved it.

KX5JT wrote: Sun Jan 26, 2020 12:01 pm Fits and starts when Ubuntu first came out just trying to relive my MS-DOS days but quickly found the CLI to be a bit more complicated

it took at 5-10 years of using it before i liked it more than dos.

i got that it had more features, but dos was easier to use. of course the hardware support in gnu/linux rivaled dos even when puppy still used to 2.x kernel. i was looking for usb drives that the kernel could support-- knowing that xubuntus support was better.

Head_on_a_Stick wrote: Sun Jan 26, 2020 12:04 pm

Bonzoo2525 wrote: Sun Jan 26, 2020 11:53 am

Head_on_a_Stick wrote: Sun Jan 26, 2020 8:07 am A "friend" tricked me into installing Xubuntu 13.10 and then I accidentally deleted Windows with those wonderfully confusing partitioning tools so now I'm stuck. I miss Windows :-(

15 minutes on a tube vid and that never would have happend

There are YouTube videos warning about the dangers of installing Linux? Damn, I wish I had seen those before burning that Xubuntu installation disk...

No danger of....simplistic instructions How To. A fourth grader can install most distros these years and put the check on " install along side"

Trust me no one cares when & why I chose Linux... probably not even me. :lipsrsealed:

But it was some 20+ years ago.

I didn't take Linux seriously until closer to the end of Windows 7 support because there are hundreds of distros, and didn't have the patience to figure out which ones were usable. Then a comment somewhere on YouTube mentioned MX Linux, which I thought was designed for DJs. I was curious as to what a DJ-oriented distro might entail, so I gave it a whirl, and turns out it had nothing to do with DJs, but was a pleasure to use. I would highly recommend it to the aspiring DJ.

The installer was OK and not full of eye-candy, but there were some minor annoyances. However the installer seemed simple enough that I thought I can just submit a patch or two to make it that much better, so that's what I did. Almost one year later...

Bonzoo2525 wrote: Sun Jan 26, 2020 6:20 pm

Head_on_a_Stick wrote: Sun Jan 26, 2020 12:04 pm

Bonzoo2525 wrote: Sun Jan 26, 2020 11:53 am
15 minutes on a tube vid and that never would have happend

There are YouTube videos warning about the dangers of installing Linux? Damn, I wish I had seen those before burning that Xubuntu installation disk...

No danger of....simplistic instructions How To. A fourth grader can install most distros these years and put the check on " install along side"

Yes, you're probably right. I've never been very good with technical stuff

@seaken64, shhh...

Bill Gates is a disgrace, a fraud - he had zilch when the IBM suits came to visit him
Steve Jobs was the man - the only thing that MSFT has that worked was their EULA

Started with Mandrake, Mandriva, PCLOS + KDE 3.5, with locked-down XP as backup.
MX is by far the best O/S out there, and will be for a long, long while - providing we
dont lose our way, get caught-up in that 'shiny-new-toy-syndrome' that pervades all

Have W7 on another mosheen, spanning 3x partitions, about 30Gig, sitting there, doing
nothing - believe I have to return to college if I ever want to build another spreadsheet

Developers - Keep up the good work ...

Regards

Jack

Debian Wheezy was my first Linux experience back in 2014 prior to Windows XP EOL.

I acquired a bootable usb flash drive with Debian Wheezy and installed Debian Wheezy onto a spare computer I had setting around.

Confused and lost with a willingness to learn Linux I discovered Linux to be easy to navigate and use and a few weeks later I wasn't so confused or lost.

I've tried several Linux distros and have my favorites although seem to prefer the Debian based / built Linux distros.

2008 : ubuntu's hardy heron ... used ubuntu for about 4 years but never really understood what i was doing and the forums scared me

i was (and sort of still am) clueless and broke linux regularly .... buying new laptops with windows pre-installed always pushed me back to microsoft until it started to get on my nerves too much ... up to a year in some cases ... used a number of distributions in that time but nothing stuck until now

only started using MX about 6 months ago and am absolutely, definitely free of windows now ... i also have KDE Neon installed on a partition of one laptop ... not entirely sure why ... i prefer KDE with the MX touch

same here, 2008 ubunto 8.04 LTS... had a windows vista laptop which shut down when becoming too hot, so tried a lot of distro's... mepis, mint, ubuntu, openSuse, elive, ultimate,... 12 years later now trying the KDE of MX... and it's going steady