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!
Hanna Montana Linux, just for giggles
AmogOS too
Gonna recommend this to all my co workers.
It is not vulnerable to Windows viruses.
:-)
Slackware like 7-12.
Basically until they pulled fortunemod.
Corel Linux
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.
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😇
https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/
At least Ubuntu makes it easy to roam through their archives. Have fun :)
Thanks I’ll check it out👍
Wao, Mandriva and DamnSmallLinux 🤣🤣🤣
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
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, :)
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.
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. 😥
I’m nostalgic for Ubuntu when it still had Unity as default, and Linux mint around 2014. That’s when I began coding, and that’s the time I liked the look of them more than the current modern offerings. Plus there was more ease of customization it felt like
Conectiva Linux in late nineties came with Window Maker as default. That’s old school as they come.
Tom’s Root Boot.
One floppy disk, one Linux machine!
The distro used by the one laptop per child project. Fascinating GUI
Idk about nostalgic but north korea makes their own linux distro, that’s gotta rank high on the interesting list
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.
If you want to experience travelling back in time with an operating system then OpenBSD feels like a time capsule, albeit one which is still being maintained. I realise it is not linux but using it is very similar to what linux was like before 2010.
