Another super important historic distribution that got forgotten over time was Mandrake Linux, which was the first distribution that targetted "ease of use" and "transitioning from windows" around the year 2000. It could have been Ubuntu before Ubuntu, but they got sued to the ground by the comic book company that owned Madrake the Magician, and it got forked into Mandriva, which then got forked into Mageïa, Rosa Linux and Open Mandriva, each time losing a chunk of its user base. I can't understate how important Mandrake was at the time for popularizing Linux. And I guess that the fact that there are still like 4 community-based derivates of Mandrake is a testament to that. Crunchbang was great for learning to use Linux. Simply the fact that it came with a standalone window manager and that all the configuration was done through links to the text files in the menu can - IMO - be credited with initiating a whole generation of Linux-tinkerers. If you remember the Crunchbang forums, there was A LOT happening there at the time.
And even earlier there was Caldera which was super important and disappeared. As a matter of fact Caldera, Mandrake and Suse even tried to create United Linux in the early 2000, anyone remembers that? It was an attempt to create their own common Linux base to be more independent from Red Hat which was engaging in commercially competitive behaviour against them.
My first Linux. Got the CD together with a PC-Magazin 🤗 I was so damn proud when i got 3D-Acceleration working and was surprised i could listen to MP3s just like with winamp on windows without any problem and i think at that time Windows Media Player could not do it 😂
Testify Brother!!! Being an Old Fart, I 100% agree Mandrake was the top-notch desktop Linux distro to beat back in the day. I've been running Linux Server since the early 1990's. I didn't start using Linux on the desktop until the early 2000's. Mandrake filled that roll fairly well until Linux Mint came along in the mid 2000's. IMO.... Mandrake was the 1st desktop distro that made the desktop experience super-nice. SUSE and Redhat had their own desktop flavors at that time. But... They were just soooo "Plain-Jane", boring and not optimized for an office work-flow.
I think foundational distributions will continue though - Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch. I think PopOS will continue since it has an OEM behind it.
Yes. As a designer, I count on 32-bit OpenArtiist 2009, but then my college gave me two dozen 32-bit IBM computers when they upgraded, so I always have a work environment.
Probably just living their normal lives. People move on. I'm sure you've worked on projects that consumed your life back in the day but you don't think about them now
@@cameronbosch1213 The lack of the Antergos installer is why I passed on Endeavor OS and went with Archcraft. It's installer works a lot like the Antergos installer in letting you create a totally custom Arch install in minutes.
@@error4159 I wouldn't call that a dealbreaker (then again I never used Antergos when it was active), because the EndeavourOS community otherwise picked up where Antergos left off.
No offense to Crunchbangs of this world (it did have neat Openbox UI, but it was still ultimately Debian), but the only truly big and important distro that died, as far as I can remember, was Mandrake/Mandriva. Strange that it wasn't mentioned.
@@leecowell8165 yeah, same. It was Mandrake Traktopel in around 2001-2003, but then I dropped Linux and went back to Windows after XP came out. Got back around to Linux in 2008 with Ubuntu Karmic Koala and went full Linux in 2010.
I saved so many ancient PCs among my friends and family with Crunchbang. That was a truly magnificent, minimalist distro, and once I hooked someone up with it, they stopped calling me for tech support and stopped whining about what new hardware they were going to buy.
I loved CrunchBang linux and actually still run BunsenLabs on one of my machines. :) DSL was actually specifically made to fit on a 80 mm 50 MB pocket/mini/bussiness card size CD. You made me feel so old after I realized how old these are. XD
As a noob, #! stopped my distro-hopping instantly. It had just the right mix of GUI and CLI to nudge me towards the latter, while the former got my back when I was getting lost in the weeds. The community was top-notch, too. I tried a lot to go with both Crunchbang++ and Bunsenlabs, but „the spark” wasn't there. I even took Sparky MinimalGUI (i.e. with Openbox) for a spin or two , but I must've lost my patience over time, because I finally settled for the ubiquitous Mint...
@@hugbearsx4 Yeah, the community was awesome. It knew that this distro is not easy by design, but welcomed new users. I was a noob, but never got a noob treatment. This is exactly what I feel the essence of open source community is.
28 Years of Linux, downloaded the first ver .9 kernel posted by Linus in the mid to early 90s from a dialup connection to a BBS. Amazing how it has evolved. love it
@@zellfaze I think availability of video and audio drivers was a big deal, as well as drivers for WiFi, network interfaces, video cameras etc. Back is the early days, it felt like you were waging a battle to make a Linux machine operational. My hats off to developers who kept at it and it is their efforts that have made modern Linux quite painless.
@@patriot0971 Video worked better on simple cards like S3 ViRGE, wifi was quite exotic stuff. I think problem was new audio cards, new network cards, printers. But your experience may vary. My first ever distro was Slackware in 1999 on Pentium 120 with WindowMaker. Everything else was too much with 16MB RAM on 2GB or so partition. It ate much more memory than Win95SE, but it did not crashed when I learned C. I guess the only other sane choice was Debian (RHEL and SUSE existed, but were not free). 2nd was Mandrake. If you miss this time, try FreeBSD on your PC. On mine I have to download and compile driver for Realtek 8125. Except no exfat formatted USB drive worked for me (maybe i have fiddle with some parameters and reload fuse module, no idea). On notebook everything worked except regulating fan speeds, hibernation and changing screen brightness. And it actually feels like using old Slackware. BSD is quite similar to old Linux. Actually 1999 Slackware and 2022 OpenSuse have almost nothing in common.
I remember DSL more as a concept of "how small can we make a working Linux?" rather than a fully-fledged distro for day-to-day life. And for the time this was very impressive.
Damn Small probably only existed because early PCs had limited memory and adding memory was expensive. A small distro had a big advantage over the larger ones.
DSL was the base for various live cds that allowed you partitioning, memory checks etc. So I would say most IT guys (even Windows domain admins haha) used DSL at least once in their lifetime.
Crunchbang was the distro that made me fall in love with openbox. It was also the first & only distro I tried that was a fork of a distro. Up until I tried crunchbang, I'd only ever used Debian or Fedora....
I tried Crunchbang yesterday, and BL the day before. BL seems a LOT more complicated than CB and a nicer darker theme.. I tried to change the keybindings on BL and gave up, they changed the OB configs with jgmenu.. I think I'm gonna use Sparky CLI with OB tho
This is exactly why I chose Debian: when I made the decision to dive into Linux head-first I insisted on an OS with staying power. At the time you'd see a lot of distros that were literally "here today, gone tomorrow." Also, Debian had one of the largest repositories around at the time.
they still have a huge repository... another thing. many companies are now supporting linux outside repositories and especially when it comes to the more popular distros like debian.
@@bigfennec Because Debian doesn't let them unless it's fully open source. You can get a Chome browser for Debian, but not in the repository. There they have the fully open sourced version called Chromium. It's a matter of principle for Debian: no "tainted" software in the repository - something Ubuntu solved with adding a "nonfree" repository. It can be annoying by times when you can't just install some piece of software without adding a third party repo, but that's good in my book - that way they don't have to maintain someone else's software.
Correct. Slackware started out as a set of patches for SLS before becoming independent of SLS and outliving it. Yggdrasil is currently being worked on again since mid 2022. Not sure of the progress, but it's interesting of course to see. Red Hat Linux was split into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora (then known as Fedora Core). Notably, the last versions of Red Hat Linux and the first versions of Fedora had GNOME 2 with a very different GNOME 1 / Windows layout, rather than the usual dual pane design we now associate GNOME 2 / MATE with or what was used on Ubuntu until 11.04 for example. I don't know much about Caldera OpenLinux or Corel LinuxOS other than that they exist. Mandrake was a sad tale of an easy to use distro that preceded Ubuntu but made a sad end as a company. Thankfully, the community continued it to this day via forks.
@@cameronbosch1213 I tried to use Mandriva maybe 7 years ago: too small package repository. But unlike kubuntu or fedora kde, this one was stable and I learned that KDE is not trash, but kubuntu and fedore kde were some unwanted bastard child of Gnome oriented distros. And I ditched Ubuntu and Fedora because of it and moved to Manjaro (which has nothing common with Mandriva or Mandrake, despite similar name)
@@cameronbosch1213 OpenSuse and Manjaro are my favorite. They just work and do not have major flaws. Well, Leap is a bit outdated. But I haven't tried many other distros or did not like them.
I just experienced that with my beloved Gallium OS. I was really happy with the way Gallium OS performed on my old Chromebooks. Now I migrated to Lubuntu and it runs even better than Gallium OS on old Chromebooks. Great video. 👍🏽
The first distro I tried was Red Hat 3 (not to be confused with RHEL 3). Technically discontinued, though Red Hat are still around. Then SuSE, can't remember the version number, but that was the first one I was able to get running as a daily driver. Then Mandrake from when it first released (now discontinued) Then I switched to PC-BSD in 2010 (not a linux distro, now discontinued) In about 2014, I switched to Free-BSD
Slackware to learn C without rebooting Win95 (FreeBSD at university servers) -> Mandrake -> basically nothing for several years -> CentOS (as admin) -> nothing -> Manjaro (vbox, old notebook) -> Manjaro+OpenSUSE Leap (wsl, sbc). I'd like to use FreeBSD as it's more simple, straightforward, stable in time, relatively well documented and easier to manage, but ... hardware support is way too far from perfect. Also docker is becoming popular today. But honestly I use Windows 98 ... percent of time. It's nice to hear that someone uses FreeBSD.
Awesome review!! This will probably trigger fond memories for a lot of people about how they started using Linux. I started out with Ubuntu 8 And then when Ubuntu 10 "Maverick" came out - it became my favorite. And I created my own home based repository for it - and tried to make it last as long as possible. Great video!! :-]
I started out on Mandrake Linux 7. Shortly thereafter I Mandrake 8 came out and I upgraded. I was working nite shift at the time. It is still a fond memory coming home at 1 in the morning, firing up Mandrake and hearing the KDE music as it booted. It was pretty cool that even back then you could switch between KDE and Gnome on the fly. Mandrake eventually became Mandriva which had it's last release in August of 2011. I still have my Mandrake 8 and 9 discs.
That's why I chose Debian years ago when I started using Linux. It's been so many years and I'm still on Debian, and I'm pretty sure that I will use Debian so many years more.
I came here to post EXACTLY this but you beat me to it. There are so many other distros that based themselves on Debian - that should tell you something right there.
Man, I still remember getting my hands on Mandriva back in 2007. There was something in its appearance that drove me there. Maybe it was the star logo for the menu or something, I don't know, but the distro had this "magical" feeling. Then again, I was 10 at that time, everything more complex than WinXP looked magical to me. :)
Enjoyed this look back. I'm a little before your time and remember another unique distro called "Morphix." I have fond memories of it because it was the first distro I was able to use wirelessly on my laptop with PCMCIA card. What a thrill that was! I'd enjoy a video on another of my old favorites, and it's still around... CRUX Linux. Thanks.
I actually use endeavouros for my pc and never knew that is a fork of antergos, I always wondered why the endeavouros logo looks kinda weird imo but seeing the endeavouros logo and the antergos logo next to eachother finally explains it, nice video
Archbang holds a special place in my heart first use of an archdisrto for me AND was my main distro in my last year of college. Thank You for reminding me of simpler times DT
A long time ago, someone made a Commodore Linux. I think it was based on Debian and came with C64 and Amiga emulators. The theme was really nice but it was sadly short lived.
I feel like Yellowdog was an important one. It was focused on the PPC, and was also the distro chosen for the PS3 when that was a thing. SuSE had a PPC version around this time but I don't remember liking it as much. The Yellowdog Updater (YUP) is still around as 'yum' on some rpm-based systems. Back in 2002, yup was the closest thing to apt on a rpm system. At one point I had a 1999 PowerBook with OS9, MacOS10.2, and YDL as a triple boot. Fun times.
@@aafjeyakubu5124 I wrote a how-to for their website, so they sent me a t-shirt for free. It was about using ssh to forward remote X apps to your window. It was ssh -X, which 20 years ago worked out of the box. Today, I think X-forwarding is either disabled by default or removed due to security reasons.
Knoppix was the first distro way back in 2001. I had the hardest time trying to figure out how to install it before I realized it was meant to run from a CD. That's how little I knew back then.
I've impressed some friends who had an HP all in one that stopped booting into Windows and the microsh*t product wasn't able to recover and didn't offer any tools to backup data. I booted into Knoppix, attached a USB hard drive, mounted the drive and told them to copy over whatever they wanted to keep. Some files still were unreadable, but still, they wanted to keep the stick. I had to turn down because it is my toolbox after all, but I noted down the website where they could get the image. I'm sure if Microsoft had no illicit contracts on hardware more people would be happy with linux, they just don't get to experience it and get what they see on offer.
NOT THE FIRST. THAT WOULD BE THE MCC INTERIM DISTRIBUTION. AT THE SAME MONTH WAS SLS - ON 40 1.5MB floppies. before the SLS distribution died it was forked to become Slackware, which is still going.
@@jessepollard7132 I didn't mean to say it was the first, rather the first I'd used. I just dropped a block of words. I do that typing on a phone sometimes.
I was a DSL Linux user and if I recall correctly it was produced by two people who had a falling out. One of them went on to create Tiny Core Linux, while the other limped along with DSL and then gave up. One reason I used it was for web surfing before browsers had an incognito mode.
I remember Mandrake Linux…was real slick for the day. Touted to be an “enterprise Linux”…. SCO was a big reason for both Mandrake and SCO not existing anymore!!!
i think i'm lucky on that account. the most of the distros i've chosen to use, aren't discontinued. i mostly used Slackware, SuSe (before openSuse), Red Hat (before it became RHEL), Mandrake, Arch over the years. Only Mandrake is discontinued (after infused and rebranded as mandriva). now i'm using Void and Gentoo beside my primary Arch system. i'm sure Gentoo will be fine for a very long time. and for Void, we'll see, i really like it, i hope it lasts very long.
Lindows would have been a great one to show. I used it back in the day before it was forced to be renamed to Linspire. It was so popular because it went up against Microsoft. Then Mandriva was what I moved to but that disappeared but I'm now rocking Open Mandriva rolling release and will not change any time soon because its brilliant 😊
I don't think your characterization of what happened to lindows is quite accurate. Microsoft's case for thrown out and they ended up paying $20M for the trademark for lindows. Sure, their car was frivolous, but they didn't win, which goes to show that our justice system has some amount of integrity.
LinuxFX is now the Windows Knockoff. Windows 12 was another but I think that district was a virus. Than again Windows 11 is malware if you think about it now
"KDE4 was an absolute train wreck" I even switched to Mac OS after that disaster came out, also, I also had fond memories of xandros, simplymepis, and madrake.
I go back to the mid 90's and there were two that we used and remember. The first was Redhat7 which was before the Redhat Enterprise Linux distro and Caldera Open Desktop which was before the SCO debacle. Both of these could run SCO binaries and were pretty solid versions for the time. Actually, some of those earlier versions seemed to run very reliably and we actually used them for customer multi-user systems. The only version that you discussed that I remember is Knoppix which also could run SCO binaries.
My first linux was RedHat 6.0. I was so sorry when Redhat decided to stop making it. Every time they released a new cdrom to the bookstores, I would buy a copy. I also used Corel Linux and loved WordPerfect on it. It disappeared after Microsoft made a loan to Corel. Corel was based on Debian Slink so I tried to get that on my computer but couldn't. When Debian Potato was released I found it easy to install so I stuck with Debian from Slink to Sarge. After Sarge, I couldn't install Debian Etch on my hardware so I kept using Sarge and waited for the next release which I hoped I would be able to put on my hardware. When Lenny came out, I couldn't get it to like my hardware either, so gave up on Linux until I was able to install Ubuntu's Bionic Beaver (which was the first version of Ubuntu I was able to install without trouble). Of course, I still like Debian so I've used Buster and Bullseye quite often. I'm still old school though and the best thing for me on Linux is the bash command line and a windows manager. Don't care for the Desktop environments.
Hey! Crunchbang right off the bat! I used it on my netbook and it was fantastic. It was my first non-Ubuntu, more advanced distro. Antergos was good too. I used it briefly around 2016 or so. Wasn’t really my thing, but I liked it.
LOL!! That was a fun look at some old and gone distros. One defunct distro that was so useful in it'sday was Tom's Root/Boot disk. It was all the Linux you could put on a 1.44 Meg floppy disk! I used to use itall the time to demo Linux to people, or recover machines, the like like.
I wasn't sure what I was getting into when I saw this video pop up, but let me tell you, when I saw "Hannah Montana Linux", I'm enjoying the watch. =) I was a little afraid at first you were going to mention old school distributions that seem to fall wayside because of more popular distributions, but are still very much active. I enjoyed the watch, I hadn't heard of some of these. I'm glad I did after watching this. =)
I was really hoping to see Cub Linux on here. It's really the only distro I've personally seen disappear that I wanted to see get fleshed out more. RIP
Ahhh nice one, love it. I discovered Linux by installing yellowdog on an iBook clamshell circa year 2000. Mind you those things have no bios so it wasn't ez pz. Tried gentoo briefly, meh, settled on debian testing and never looked back, now sysadmin and kernel contributor on spare time. Long live Linux!
Interestingly, I have never heard of most of the distros you cited, even though I have been using Linux almost exclusively (at home) since 1995 or 1996. The first distro I ever used was called Caldera openLinux and that one has been dead since before most of the ones you cited were even released. I then moved to Slackware Linux which I absolutely fell in love with. I used that for many years up until 2009 or so after which I spent a few years distro hopping all over the place, Fedora, Ubuntu, openSuse, etc. Mainly I watched this video because I am back to Slackware, have been for some time. I was kind of watching out of pre-nostalgia as I have an uneasy feeling that Slackware is heading the way of Caldera, and that worries me a bit. Not too much, since I if it does die I will likely switch to Debian or perhaps Garuda Linux which I have played with and like just fine. But I haven't yet found a distro which I love as much as Slackware. Perhaps I should give Gentoo a try, as I have no problem compiling software from source. When I started with Linux, most, if not all distros had to be compiled from source anyway. Of the distro you covered here I had heard only of Damn Small Linux and Hannah Montana Linux although I have never used either one. BTW, I noticed I seem to have fallen down a notch from Producer to all the others. Have you raised the bar for producer? If so, no prob, just wondering.
DSL was more of a technical masterpiece than anything. It was amazing what they managed to fit into 50 MB. I have been using Debian for over ten years. I highly recommend it.
Damn Small Linux was the first Linux distro I ever ran on actual hardware. Around 2009, I used it to extract some data from an old Dell laptop with a faulty OS installation of Windows 2000.
I was part of the RebornOS team in 2019, i called the shoot that there was a possibility Antergos would go under 2 weeks prior it happening, so the dev made the RebornOS iso not relying anymore on Antergos (since it's a distros based on antergos with 15 DE option known has Deepin Antergos before), the day prior to Antergos shutting down was when we finally fixed the iso to not rely on Antergos's repo. I probably was able to save the project and helped a tons of people when it happened with my guts feeling and foresight. Antergos was a 2 dev team, one burned out, i knew the other one would not be able to handle 2 dev's work for too long. I am surprise it did not happen yet with slackware.
@@pigletshut Slackware has a 20 members strong dev team behind it, as well as a dynamic user base. The team has also set a full-blown continuity plan up... No worries, then. It's not my favorite distro anymore, but I don't think it will ever die, contrary to what the apparences would have us believe.
Old Network/System Admin here.... IMO.... These days, dead distros are not a problem. It's easy to switch to another as long as the New-Distro has the same Base as the Old-Distro. Back in the day (2+ decades ago), dead distros were a HUGE problem to new and seasoned Linux users. For old farts like me... Installing a distro and getting it setup the way you liked took great effort and time years ago. No automatic GUI installers, Repos were not very plentiful (had to compile a lot of software yourself) and getting X11 to behave would/could drive you to drink! It wasn't until the late 1990's and yearly 2000's when nice and pre-customized distros came onto the scene like... Mandrake, SUSE, RedHat and even Ubuntu. These days.... We just take it for granted that a distro will be easy to install and everything will run OK (more or less). I really didn't use Linux on the desktop until the early 2000's. I stuck with Mandrake/Mandriva until Linux Mint came out in the mid-2000's.
#! (crunchbang) was one of my favorite distros! Customizing your openbox/conky config and sharing with the community on IRC and the forums was half the fun.
From the moment I understood the weakness of Linux, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of BSD. I aspired to the purity of the Berkeley Software Distribution. Your kind cling to your Linux as if it will not decay and fail you. one day, the crude software that you call a "OS" will wither and you will beg my kind to save you; but I am already saved, for the OpenBSD is immortal. Even in death, it will serve
Really nostalgic distros. I've been using Slackware since V 3.3 (97 or 98) when it was very evident that's OS/2 Warp was dying a slow death. I am on V 15 and very happy. I've recently installed Kubuntu on a newer PC for my aunt and it is very pretty.
Good to hear. I have been using Slackware since the release right before Slackware 96. I remember ordering from Walnut Creek. I have several machines running Slackware64 15 and "Current" before 15 was released on AWS.
wow OS/2 Warp. yep. is it along with the HPFS still around? I was using it through the 90's after CP/M went south. my last Kubuntu incarnation was 14.04 but I still like KDE over gnome in some respects.
@@leecowell8165 well ArcaOS still has the HPFS and also JFS. I have a dedicated SSD with it for my REXX jobs and projects. It runs on modern hardware and I also occasionally run DOS stuff on it.
I bought Mandrake in shrink wrap at Walmart back in 2000 (slow dial up internet is all I had at the time). It came in 1.4mb 3.5 inch floppies with real dead tree books in the box. I stayed with it through the name change (not a fork) to Mandriva due to the suit from Mandrake the Magician comics. I forget the name of the company that was behind it, it was based in France. Anyway they started getting weird and I moved on to the new kid on the block, Ubuntu. Fast forward to now and I'm using Arco Linux which is basically Arch with Calamares installer and some added utilities and themes. If Eric decides to stop Arco I can just live on with Arch as Arco's base uses the Arch repositories.
I didn't know that Knoppix is still around! While I didn't know anybody who used it as a working environment, in the early 2000s it was the first popular tool that allowed running an OS from CD, pre-dating even WinPE. Many bootable utilities were based on it.
I used Vector Linux for a few years. It's Slackware-based, but had handy config scripts (gui/tui), and their repos had better compression. Just Slackware, but nicer to use. All I could ask for.
Ubuntu Christian Edition is actually back under active development. I take interest in this one as a Christian, although to be completely honest, I don't really see why it needs to exist. In general, I tend to avoid distributions that could be just a base Ubuntu install (or whatever bistro) and then run a customization script. Also, no mention of Rebecca Black OS? ;)
DistroWatch says that Rebecca Black OS is still active. It does apparently have the distinction of being the first distro to use Wayland throughout, though I don't know anyone who's using it! 🙂
I have been using Linux for 24 years and I settled early on with Red Hat or SuSE so no, I have never had my distro die. Also as a 23 year KDE user I can attest to just how bad KDE 4.0 was. It truly was a train wreak. It was so bad that I actually went over to Gnome 2.0 and only moved back when Gnome Shell became the default.
Hi, I started using GNU Linix more than 20 yers ago. I started with Slackware distro and still using it on my Thinkpad laptop. In earliy years of using GNU Linux, I also created my own single purpose small distro similar to Damn Small Linux distro which fit in 1.44 MB floppy disk, for on demand PPPD dialup NAT gateway. What a wonderful years.. ) Thank you.
@@zellfaze It was stripped version of Damn Small Linux distro. It based on dietlibc or uclibc, That time, Linux kernel 2.x with minimal options was about 300kB. Root fs was about 1 MB compressed cpio image. I 'dd'ed kernel and rootfs images directlu to floppy disc. I already configured the pppd options to start pppd on-demand and the serial modem starts to dial up. When there are no outgoing traffic to Internet for certain period, it disconnected automatically. For NAT, I configured ipchains for the purpose, yes, it was befor netfilter/iptables. Everything loaded into RAM, very lean and fast. Any i80386 or better PC with minimal hardware cand be used as the Internet gateway. Using similar steps, my friend made single floppy media player distro. It uses VESA/VGA console for video playback with basic AC97 audio codec for audio and MPlayer for media playback. Media files were in NFS server. I also made single floppy MySQL server distro. Yes, those days, programs were small and fun to play with. Thank you for asking.
That was when I dumped Ubuntu with the Gnome 3/Unity rubbish. I migrated to Mint, a Ubuntu fork that kept Gnome 2 and a standard desktop metaphor. Only now am I looking at other options. I will say the different Mint releases have been trouble-free for all these years. I have no complaints. I just want to get away from systemd. Devuan is looking really good right now.
Super interesting to learn about CinArch->AnterGhost->EndeavorOS. Aside from just KNOWING, how would one track or learn about what forks took over older projects? Thanks - this one was fun.
@0:33 Then you might consider backing up your home directory, make a list of your ppas, flatpaks, snaps, important settings like a chronjob for TRIM and move on.
I still have fond memories of Crunchbang. They had the best user forum I have ever been to. The mention of CB will always warm my heart. The time I spent with Crunchbang was a magical time in my life.
Like others here I have a few memories of playing around with Mandrake/Mandriva along with Security Tools Distribution of Knoppix before it died as well.
I had a professor talk about DSL in class just last week. He's a real old school Unix guy back before Linux existed and all the goofy distros confused and amused him so much.
I came from a UNIX background (AT&T System V release 2), and found SLS to be equivalent, and then moved to Slakware as it was a fork of SLS just before it quit (same distribution philosophy, same install) MUCH smaller than DSL for a minimal system - a 1.5MB boot floppy and a 1.5MB root floppy total for a system. still had the 40 distribution package floppies up until a new job relocation and lost them.
Everyone here chiming in about their Linux journey. I did a lot of distro hopping back around 1997 or so. I tried Red Hat, Debian, SUSE, and Slackware. I remember when they all came on multiple 3.5 inch floppy images. I downloaded mostly from a 56K modem connected on Mindspring and Earthlink. I think the first derivative distro I tried was Mandrake, I paid 10 bucks to Walnut Creek for the CD. I kept a copy of Knoppix and some other 'forensic' type Linux that's now dead on CD's to help friends recover files off their Win2K machine. After I went to windows for a good long while, I found Mandrake went to paid-only as Mandriva, so I bounced around with Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Red Hat. Now I use EndeavourOS on one machine and ZorinOS on another.
I used to play with lots of distributions back in the day. And one of the great ones that i remember is PCLinuxOS (PCLOS). The website is a little dull, but they have their monthly magazine which is a great read and the distribution itself is definitely a great one. Give it a try for those who never heard of it.
DSL saved my caboose as a teenager. I had a computer that needed to have the monitor replaced -- sadly, the replacement was old and it didn't work with WinXP. (I found VESA mode later...) So I needed a way to get the computer up to a usable state for school. My nearest internet connection was my grandmother's house, which I visited twice a month. She had a dialup connection. So, a large ISO was out of the question. DSL came to the rescue! I was able to get the computer up and running, creating basic word documents suitable for schoolwork. Thankfully, I was already used to just simple text editors so it wasn't that big of a deal not having Microsoft Word.
SLS. The first distribution, inspired both Debian and RedHat. It was distributed on a bundle of thirty plus floppy disks. (You could do either 5 1/4 or 3.5!) It inspired other distributions b/c it simultaneously showed how amazing Linux could be AND had no package manager and no supported upgrade path. If you tried to upgrade it manually, you quickly got into a Linux version of DLL hell.
DSL, is the only distro that has no other replacement even to these modern days. It's basically, a portable os, you can run it anywhere, and you can download portable apps from the website. Yes, package is not installed, it's downloaded and run like in windows and it just works. You don't have to worry about your system messed up,
Ah, just glad to know people remembered Antergos. (I always pronounced it as Ahn-TEHR-ghos though, never found out what the etymology was if any) I've yet to try Endeavor though.
Also, huh, Antergos was from a project to get Cinnamon to run on Arch? Hell, I started on Antergos to get MATE to run on Arch (among other things to even just try Arch-like stuff). I was one of those people who quit Ubuntu over the Unity/GNOME3 crap and I was trying to run MATE on all sorts of stuff. Oddly enough that also meant in the end running on Ubuntu MATE for a bit. And now I'm on Mint MATE on machines I use for work purposes, which is why I don't try anything more complicated lately.
I started with Slackware, back when you downloaded several floppies over 14.4 modem... and later could buy CD-rom 4pak sets. Don't forget Tom's root-boot (even smaller than Tiny Linux or DSL) that would boot & run txt-only Linux from only one 3.5 floppy, but included a very good set of base tools including fdisk, mount ext3 fs, ash, top, vi, sed, awk and more! Later used Mandrake, Mint and Fedora at home, while working with SuSe, RHEL, and commercial Unix like Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, or EP/IX for corp jobs.
I recall trying to use Crunchbang and LOVED how it looked, but I didn't have the focus to read the menu to navigate! I bet I would have loved it, so I hope to take a look at CrunchBang++ on my next distrohop. Love your videos, and I almost had a spit-take at the final words on this video, HAH What a great play on words that! Thanks again for the smiles and laughs!
_“Have you considering the Linux distribution you’re currently using probably won’t exist in 5, 10, 20 years?”_ I mean, I learned Linux in the 90s on Slackware, then I switched to Debian for a decade, and now I’ve used Arch about a decade- those are all alive and still receiving updates, so I think I’m okay.
Semplice Linux! Debian Unstable and Stable versions using Openbox. That distro had some amazing tools (its own menu, an incredible app launcher, installer, etc...) which were developed by the main developer...g7. That guy is sadly missed.
Caldera Linux was a GREAT distro. Had it not disappeared, I might have switched sooner. But it died and all of the support for it went belly up as well so... No more Caldera on MY machine (or anyone elses for that matter)...
I really liked ArchBang, it was perfect for small VMs or older hardware as it had a 32-bit version. But the distro I miss the most is Sabayon (based on Gentoo), because sometimes I could be just too lazy to compile everything ;)
Wow. I didn't realize that Knoppix was gone. I made disks for several people and they actually used them. Either DSL or Puppy were small enough to run on a floppy long after most of us stopped using them. :
These comments about previously influential and fondly remembered distros are pretty illuminating and interesting. Might be worth another video in their own right
Yeap. I started with RedHat Linux 5, used Mandrake Linux for a long time until it become something else. I used Slackware briefly - but I think they are in their "we're not dead yet" phase.
Another super important historic distribution that got forgotten over time was Mandrake Linux, which was the first distribution that targetted "ease of use" and "transitioning from windows" around the year 2000. It could have been Ubuntu before Ubuntu, but they got sued to the ground by the comic book company that owned Madrake the Magician, and it got forked into Mandriva, which then got forked into Mageïa, Rosa Linux and Open Mandriva, each time losing a chunk of its user base.
I can't understate how important Mandrake was at the time for popularizing Linux. And I guess that the fact that there are still like 4 community-based derivates of Mandrake is a testament to that.
Crunchbang was great for learning to use Linux. Simply the fact that it came with a standalone window manager and that all the configuration was done through links to the text files in the menu can - IMO - be credited with initiating a whole generation of Linux-tinkerers. If you remember the Crunchbang forums, there was A LOT happening there at the time.
And even earlier there was Caldera which was super important and disappeared. As a matter of fact Caldera, Mandrake and Suse even tried to create United Linux in the early 2000, anyone remembers that? It was an attempt to create their own common Linux base to be more independent from Red Hat which was engaging in commercially competitive behaviour against them.
I started my Linux journey on Mandriva back in 2004! With compiz… it looked so futuristic compered to Windows!
My first Linux. Got the CD together with a PC-Magazin 🤗 I was so damn proud when i got 3D-Acceleration working and was surprised i could listen to MP3s just like with winamp on windows without any problem and i think at that time Windows Media Player could not do it 😂
Testify Brother!!! Being an Old Fart, I 100% agree Mandrake was the top-notch desktop Linux distro to beat back in the day. I've been running Linux Server since the early 1990's. I didn't start using Linux on the desktop until the early 2000's. Mandrake filled that roll fairly well until Linux Mint came along in the mid 2000's. IMO.... Mandrake was the 1st desktop distro that made the desktop experience super-nice. SUSE and Redhat had their own desktop flavors at that time. But... They were just soooo "Plain-Jane", boring and not optimized for an office work-flow.
I remeber them, didn't know that was the reason they died
I think foundational distributions will continue though - Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch. I think PopOS will continue since it has an OEM behind it.
Fedora is Redhat based in don’t think Redhat would backstab there upstream base of rhel
Edit base not based
@@Ghfvhvfg Especially since IBM is backing RedHat. They've pretty much dropped their own UNIX flavors in favour of RHEL.
Mandrake.
RedHat as well
EDIT: already mentioned
We need a "Where are they now?" video series of these former Linux distro devs.
Excellent Idea I loved!!!
Yes. As a designer, I count on 32-bit OpenArtiist 2009, but then my college gave me two dozen 32-bit IBM computers when they upgraded, so I always have a work environment.
Probably just living their normal lives. People move on. I'm sure you've worked on projects that consumed your life back in the day but you don't think about them now
@@parallel4 Oh yeah, lots of stuff! .
Man, I loved Antergos back in the day. It had the best installer in the business.
I think EndeavourOS was supposed to use Antergos's installer, but they couldn't get it to work with EndeavourOS, so they went with Calamares instead.
@@cameronbosch1213 The lack of the Antergos installer is why I passed on Endeavor OS and went with Archcraft. It's installer works a lot like the Antergos installer in letting you create a totally custom Arch install in minutes.
@@error4159 I wouldn't call that a dealbreaker (then again I never used Antergos when it was active), because the EndeavourOS community otherwise picked up where Antergos left off.
Antergos was the bomb! What did you move to after it got discontinued?
@@davemichael1859 ...EndeavourOS
No offense to Crunchbangs of this world (it did have neat Openbox UI, but it was still ultimately Debian), but the only truly big and important distro that died, as far as I can remember, was Mandrake/Mandriva. Strange that it wasn't mentioned.
yeah I hear you many of us got started on that distro (I was one of them).
@@leecowell8165 yeah, same. It was Mandrake Traktopel in around 2001-2003, but then I dropped Linux and went back to Windows after XP came out. Got back around to Linux in 2008 with Ubuntu Karmic Koala and went full Linux in 2010.
@@leecowell8165 Same here. Mandriva 2010 on a Pentium 4 3GHz/7600 GT combo... good times.
Well you are 2 years late : ruclips.net/video/ixmU64AAhFU/видео.html
Although I will say there were a few more big and important ones that died, like Yggdrasil and Softlanding.
I saved so many ancient PCs among my friends and family with Crunchbang. That was a truly magnificent, minimalist distro, and once I hooked someone up with it, they stopped calling me for tech support and stopped whining about what new hardware they were going to buy.
I loved CrunchBang linux and actually still run BunsenLabs on one of my machines. :)
DSL was actually specifically made to fit on a 80 mm 50 MB pocket/mini/bussiness card size CD.
You made me feel so old after I realized how old these are. XD
As a noob, #! stopped my distro-hopping instantly. It had just the right mix of GUI and CLI to nudge me towards the latter, while the former got my back when I was getting lost in the weeds. The community was top-notch, too.
I tried a lot to go with both Crunchbang++ and Bunsenlabs, but „the spark” wasn't there. I even took Sparky MinimalGUI (i.e. with Openbox) for a spin or two , but I must've lost my patience over time, because I finally settled for the ubiquitous Mint...
@@hugbearsx4 Yeah, the community was awesome. It knew that this distro is not easy by design, but welcomed new users. I was a noob, but never got a noob treatment. This is exactly what I feel the essence of open source community is.
dsl yey!
28 Years of Linux, downloaded the first ver .9 kernel posted by Linus in the mid to early 90s from a dialup connection to a BBS. Amazing how it has evolved. love it
You have ten years on me. I started with Fedora Core 3. It really is amazing how far we have come. Here's to another 20 more! 🍷
@@zellfaze I think availability of video and audio drivers was a big deal, as well as drivers for WiFi, network interfaces, video cameras etc. Back is the early days, it felt like you were waging a battle to make a Linux machine operational. My hats off to developers who kept at it and it is their efforts that have made modern Linux quite painless.
@@patriot0971 Video worked better on simple cards like S3 ViRGE, wifi was quite exotic stuff. I think problem was new audio cards, new network cards, printers. But your experience may vary. My first ever distro was Slackware in 1999 on Pentium 120 with WindowMaker. Everything else was too much with 16MB RAM on 2GB or so partition. It ate much more memory than Win95SE, but it did not crashed when I learned C. I guess the only other sane choice was Debian (RHEL and SUSE existed, but were not free). 2nd was Mandrake.
If you miss this time, try FreeBSD on your PC. On mine I have to download and compile driver for Realtek 8125. Except no exfat formatted USB drive worked for me (maybe i have fiddle with some parameters and reload fuse module, no idea). On notebook everything worked except regulating fan speeds, hibernation and changing screen brightness. And it actually feels like using old Slackware. BSD is quite similar to old Linux. Actually 1999 Slackware and 2022 OpenSuse have almost nothing in common.
I remember DSL more as a concept of "how small can we make a working Linux?" rather than a fully-fledged distro for day-to-day life. And for the time this was very impressive.
Damn shame it died off.
DSL was cool. Puppy was also cool. I used both off and on for years.
@@richardsteiner8992 agreed. As a broke student years ago, these two distros brought life to my potato PC.
Damn Small probably only existed because early PCs had limited memory and adding memory was expensive. A small distro had a big advantage over the larger ones.
DSL was the base for various live cds that allowed you partitioning, memory checks etc. So I would say most IT guys (even Windows domain admins haha) used DSL at least once in their lifetime.
Crunchbang was the distro that made me fall in love with openbox. It was also the first & only distro I tried that was a fork of a distro. Up until I tried crunchbang, I'd only ever used Debian or Fedora....
Crunchbang was Debian and it still exists as Crunchbangplusplus and is still Debian.
I tried Crunchbang yesterday, and BL the day before. BL seems a LOT more complicated than CB and a nicer darker theme.. I tried to change the keybindings on BL and gave up, they changed the OB configs with jgmenu.. I think I'm gonna use Sparky CLI with OB tho
This is exactly why I chose Debian: when I made the decision to dive into Linux head-first I insisted on an OS with staying power. At the time you'd see a lot of distros that were literally "here today, gone tomorrow." Also, Debian had one of the largest repositories around at the time.
Debian stable with nixpkgs unstable is the perfect development environment imo
@@jenreiss3107 I...
Have to try this one day!!!!
they still have a huge repository... another thing. many companies are now supporting linux outside repositories and especially when it comes to the more popular distros like debian.
Good choice
@@bigfennec Because Debian doesn't let them unless it's fully open source. You can get a Chome browser for Debian, but not in the repository. There they have the fully open sourced version called Chromium. It's a matter of principle for Debian: no "tainted" software in the repository - something Ubuntu solved with adding a "nonfree" repository. It can be annoying by times when you can't just install some piece of software without adding a third party repo, but that's good in my book - that way they don't have to maintain someone else's software.
My -five- six picks would be: Softlanding Linux System, Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X, Redhat Linux, Caldera OpenLinux, Corel LinuxOS, Mandrake.
SLS begets Slackware. Someone is trying to revive Yggdrasil. Redhat you can buy RHEL or use Fedora. The rest can RIP.
Correct. Slackware started out as a set of patches for SLS before becoming independent of SLS and outliving it.
Yggdrasil is currently being worked on again since mid 2022. Not sure of the progress, but it's interesting of course to see.
Red Hat Linux was split into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora (then known as Fedora Core). Notably, the last versions of Red Hat Linux and the first versions of Fedora had GNOME 2 with a very different GNOME 1 / Windows layout, rather than the usual dual pane design we now associate GNOME 2 / MATE with or what was used on Ubuntu until 11.04 for example.
I don't know much about Caldera OpenLinux or Corel LinuxOS other than that they exist.
Mandrake was a sad tale of an easy to use distro that preceded Ubuntu but made a sad end as a company. Thankfully, the community continued it to this day via forks.
@@cameronbosch1213 I tried to use Mandriva maybe 7 years ago: too small package repository. But unlike kubuntu or fedora kde, this one was stable and I learned that KDE is not trash, but kubuntu and fedore kde were some unwanted bastard child of Gnome oriented distros. And I ditched Ubuntu and Fedora because of it and moved to Manjaro (which has nothing common with Mandriva or Mandrake, despite similar name)
@@pavelperina7629 Too bad there's no good KDE distro apart from Arch or Gentoo...
@@cameronbosch1213 OpenSuse and Manjaro are my favorite. They just work and do not have major flaws. Well, Leap is a bit outdated. But I haven't tried many other distros or did not like them.
I just experienced that with my beloved Gallium OS. I was really happy with the way Gallium OS performed on my old Chromebooks. Now I migrated to Lubuntu and it runs even better than Gallium OS on old Chromebooks. Great video. 👍🏽
The first distro I tried was Red Hat 3 (not to be confused with RHEL 3). Technically discontinued, though Red Hat are still around.
Then SuSE, can't remember the version number, but that was the first one I was able to get running as a daily driver.
Then Mandrake from when it first released (now discontinued)
Then I switched to PC-BSD in 2010 (not a linux distro, now discontinued)
In about 2014, I switched to Free-BSD
cuck license
Slackware to learn C without rebooting Win95 (FreeBSD at university servers) -> Mandrake -> basically nothing for several years -> CentOS (as admin) -> nothing -> Manjaro (vbox, old notebook) -> Manjaro+OpenSUSE Leap (wsl, sbc).
I'd like to use FreeBSD as it's more simple, straightforward, stable in time, relatively well documented and easier to manage, but ... hardware support is way too far from perfect. Also docker is becoming popular today. But honestly I use Windows 98 ... percent of time. It's nice to hear that someone uses FreeBSD.
@@pavelperina7629 cuck license
Awesome review!! This will probably trigger fond memories for a lot of people about how they started using Linux.
I started out with Ubuntu 8 And then when Ubuntu 10 "Maverick" came out - it became my favorite. And I created my own home based repository for it - and tried to make it last as long as possible. Great video!! :-]
I remember DSL and Knoppix in particular - Knoppix was my very first exposure to Linux ,and may still be live.
I started out on Mandrake Linux 7. Shortly thereafter I Mandrake 8 came out and I upgraded. I was working nite shift at the time. It is still a fond memory coming home at 1 in the morning, firing up Mandrake and hearing the KDE music as it booted. It was pretty cool that even back then you could switch between KDE and Gnome on the fly. Mandrake eventually became Mandriva which had it's last release in August of 2011. I still have my Mandrake 8 and 9 discs.
You still have OpenMandriva that is well and alive 👍🏻
wow! yeah I eventually discarded those CD's. maybe I shouldn't have?
That's why I chose Debian years ago when I started using Linux. It's been so many years and I'm still on Debian, and I'm pretty sure that I will use Debian so many years more.
I came here to post EXACTLY this but you beat me to it. There are so many other distros that based themselves on Debian - that should tell you something right there.
if you don't need support for new things, sure, it's fine.
Dont be so sure
Man, I still remember getting my hands on Mandriva back in 2007. There was something in its appearance that drove me there. Maybe it was the star logo for the menu or something, I don't know, but the distro had this "magical" feeling.
Then again, I was 10 at that time, everything more complex than WinXP looked magical to me. :)
I'm really missing mandriva :(
Mandrake /Mandriva was may favorite distro
@@tibssy1982 yeah I had a love affair with Mandrake
I heard about it back in the days when trying out Slack (v6 i believe)
I really liked PinguyOS back in the day. 12.04 and 14.04 were both really good.
Thanks Sir
I used to like Antergos and didn't know it had a different name before.
Enjoyed this look back. I'm a little before your time and remember another unique distro called "Morphix." I have fond memories of it because it was the first distro I was able to use wirelessly on my laptop with PCMCIA card. What a thrill that was! I'd enjoy a video on another of my old favorites, and it's still around... CRUX Linux. Thanks.
Crux Linux lives on in its distinctive desktop theme that is included as an option (more often than not) in many many other distros
i have fond memories of Knoppix, my first linux.
I actually use endeavouros for my pc and never knew that is a fork of antergos, I always wondered why the endeavouros logo looks kinda weird imo but seeing the endeavouros logo and the antergos logo next to eachother finally explains it, nice video
Archbang holds a special place in my heart
first use of an archdisrto for me AND was my main distro in my last year of college.
Thank You for reminding me of simpler times DT
A long time ago, someone made a Commodore Linux. I think it was based on Debian and came with C64 and Amiga emulators. The theme was really nice but it was sadly short lived.
I have many fond memories of waiting for the 64 tape drive to load up.
I feel like Yellowdog was an important one. It was focused on the PPC, and was also the distro chosen for the PS3 when that was a thing. SuSE had a PPC version around this time but I don't remember liking it as much.
The Yellowdog Updater (YUP) is still around as 'yum' on some rpm-based systems. Back in 2002, yup was the closest thing to apt on a rpm system. At one point I had a 1999 PowerBook with OS9, MacOS10.2, and YDL as a triple boot. Fun times.
I ran Yellow dog on a PPC. I even bought the shirt! I absolutely loved it.
Oh I forgot all about this! He should have mentioned this.
@@aafjeyakubu5124 I wrote a how-to for their website, so they sent me a t-shirt for free.
It was about using ssh to forward remote X apps to your window. It was ssh -X, which 20 years ago worked out of the box. Today, I think X-forwarding is either disabled by default or removed due to security reasons.
I don't see Mandrake / Mandriva and Chakra Linux. But really miss Crunchbang. Thanks for the nostalgic video.
Knoppix was the first distro way back in 2001. I had the hardest time trying to figure out how to install it before I realized it was meant to run from a CD. That's how little I knew back then.
I've impressed some friends who had an HP all in one that stopped booting into Windows and the microsh*t product wasn't able to recover and didn't offer any tools to backup data. I booted into Knoppix, attached a USB hard drive, mounted the drive and told them to copy over whatever they wanted to keep. Some files still were unreadable, but still, they wanted to keep the stick. I had to turn down because it is my toolbox after all, but I noted down the website where they could get the image. I'm sure if Microsoft had no illicit contracts on hardware more people would be happy with linux, they just don't get to experience it and get what they see on offer.
NOT THE FIRST. THAT WOULD BE THE MCC INTERIM DISTRIBUTION. AT THE SAME MONTH WAS SLS - ON 40 1.5MB floppies.
before the SLS distribution died it was forked to become Slackware, which is still going.
@@jessepollard7132 I didn't mean to say it was the first, rather the first I'd used. I just dropped a block of words. I do that typing on a phone sometimes.
I was a DSL Linux user and if I recall correctly it was produced by two people who had a falling out. One of them went on to create Tiny Core Linux, while the other limped along with DSL and then gave up. One reason I used it was for web surfing before browsers had an incognito mode.
This is why after a long time away, and back then not being a Debian guy, I'm a Debian guy now.
I remember Mandrake Linux…was real slick for the day. Touted to be an “enterprise Linux”…. SCO was a big reason for both Mandrake and SCO not existing anymore!!!
CrunchBang, Cinnarch, and Antergos (Gnome spin) were wonderful flashes in the pan back in the day. Thanks for the nostalgia trip
i think i'm lucky on that account. the most of the distros i've chosen to use, aren't discontinued.
i mostly used Slackware, SuSe (before openSuse), Red Hat (before it became RHEL), Mandrake, Arch over the years. Only Mandrake is discontinued (after infused and rebranded as mandriva).
now i'm using Void and Gentoo beside my primary Arch system. i'm sure Gentoo will be fine for a very long time. and for Void, we'll see, i really like it, i hope it lasts very long.
I actually like the idea behind Gentoo; besides, I am a notorious tinkerer, so Gentoo should be right up my alley. I'm surprised I never tried it.
Lindows would have been a great one to show. I used it back in the day before it was forced to be renamed to Linspire. It was so popular because it went up against Microsoft. Then Mandriva was what I moved to but that disappeared but I'm now rocking Open Mandriva rolling release and will not change any time soon because its brilliant 😊
Man I loved Mandrake when it was new and fresh, it was amazing in its time
I don't think your characterization of what happened to lindows is quite accurate. Microsoft's case for thrown out and they ended up paying $20M for the trademark for lindows. Sure, their car was frivolous, but they didn't win, which goes to show that our justice system has some amount of integrity.
LinuxFX is now the Windows Knockoff. Windows 12 was another but I think that district was a virus. Than again Windows 11 is malware if you think about it now
@@gamezoid1234 Anyone else attend the "Desktop Linux Summit" hosted by Lindows in San Diego in.. 2002 (? iirc)
@@Collaborologist lol, I was 3 maybe 4 in 02.
I hope Arch never dies
"KDE4 was an absolute train wreck"
I even switched to Mac OS after that disaster came out, also, I also had fond memories of xandros, simplymepis, and madrake.
I go back to the mid 90's and there were two that we used and remember. The first was Redhat7 which was before the Redhat Enterprise Linux distro and Caldera Open Desktop which was before the SCO debacle. Both of these could run SCO binaries and were pretty solid versions for the time. Actually, some of those earlier versions seemed to run very reliably and we actually used them for customer multi-user systems. The only version that you discussed that I remember is Knoppix which also could run SCO binaries.
My first linux was RedHat 6.0. I was so sorry when Redhat decided to stop making it. Every time they released a new cdrom to the bookstores, I would buy a copy. I also used Corel Linux and loved WordPerfect on it. It disappeared after Microsoft made a loan to Corel. Corel was based on Debian Slink so I tried to get that on my computer but couldn't. When Debian Potato was released I found it easy to install so I stuck with Debian from Slink to Sarge. After Sarge, I couldn't install Debian Etch on my hardware so I kept using Sarge and waited for the next release which I hoped I would be able to put on my hardware. When Lenny came out, I couldn't get it to like my hardware either, so gave up on Linux until I was able to install Ubuntu's Bionic Beaver (which was the first version of Ubuntu I was able to install without trouble). Of course, I still like Debian so I've used Buster and Bullseye quite often. I'm still old school though and the best thing for me on Linux is the bash command line and a windows manager. Don't care for the Desktop environments.
Hey! Crunchbang right off the bat! I used it on my netbook and it was fantastic. It was my first non-Ubuntu, more advanced distro. Antergos was good too. I used it briefly around 2016 or so. Wasn’t really my thing, but I liked it.
So glad you covered DSL. It was the first distro that came to mind when I saw the title.
LOL!! That was a fun look at some old and gone distros. One defunct distro that was so useful in it'sday was Tom's Root/Boot disk. It was all the Linux you could put on a 1.44 Meg floppy disk! I used to use itall the time to demo Linux to people, or recover machines, the like like.
I wasn't sure what I was getting into when I saw this video pop up, but let me tell you, when I saw "Hannah Montana Linux", I'm enjoying the watch. =)
I was a little afraid at first you were going to mention old school distributions that seem to fall wayside because of more popular distributions, but are still very much active. I enjoyed the watch, I hadn't heard of some of these. I'm glad I did after watching this. =)
It's Hannah Montana! 😳
I was really hoping to see Cub Linux on here. It's really the only distro I've personally seen disappear that I wanted to see get fleshed out more. RIP
Thank you! Only distro I personally miss, only watched to see if it was on the list, this guy...
Ahhh nice one, love it. I discovered Linux by installing yellowdog on an iBook clamshell circa year 2000. Mind you those things have no bios so it wasn't ez pz. Tried gentoo briefly, meh, settled on debian testing and never looked back, now sysadmin and kernel contributor on spare time. Long live Linux!
Let’s gooo!! Just in time with my fresh install of DTOS!
Interestingly, I have never heard of most of the distros you cited, even though I have been using Linux almost exclusively (at home) since 1995 or 1996. The first distro I ever used was called Caldera openLinux and that one has been dead since before most of the ones you cited were even released. I then moved to Slackware Linux which I absolutely fell in love with. I used that for many years up until 2009 or so after which I spent a few years distro hopping all over the place, Fedora, Ubuntu, openSuse, etc. Mainly I watched this video because I am back to Slackware, have been for some time. I was kind of watching out of pre-nostalgia as I have an uneasy feeling that Slackware is heading the way of Caldera, and that worries me a bit. Not too much, since I if it does die I will likely switch to Debian or perhaps Garuda Linux which I have played with and like just fine. But I haven't yet found a distro which I love as much as Slackware. Perhaps I should give Gentoo a try, as I have no problem compiling software from source. When I started with Linux, most, if not all distros had to be compiled from source anyway.
Of the distro you covered here I had heard only of Damn Small Linux and Hannah Montana Linux although I have never used either one.
BTW, I noticed I seem to have fallen down a notch from Producer to all the others. Have you raised the bar for producer? If so, no prob, just wondering.
yep I forgot about Caldera!
DSL was more of a technical masterpiece than anything. It was amazing what they managed to fit into 50 MB.
I have been using Debian for over ten years. I highly recommend it.
Damn Small Linux was the first Linux distro I ever ran on actual hardware. Around 2009, I used it to extract some data from an old Dell laptop with a faulty OS installation of Windows 2000.
Same here. What was hilarious to me was that I had NO IDEA of what I was doing (or what this OS was) at the time (which was long ago).
I was part of the RebornOS team in 2019, i called the shoot that there was a possibility Antergos would go under 2 weeks prior it happening, so the dev made the RebornOS iso not relying anymore on Antergos (since it's a distros based on antergos with 15 DE option known has Deepin Antergos before), the day prior to Antergos shutting down was when we finally fixed the iso to not rely on Antergos's repo. I probably was able to save the project and helped a tons of people when it happened with my guts feeling and foresight. Antergos was a 2 dev team, one burned out, i knew the other one would not be able to handle 2 dev's work for too long. I am surprise it did not happen yet with slackware.
Probably because Patrick was (true to his distro's name) slacking it. It took 6 years until Slackware 15 was finally out.
@@pigletshut Slackware has a 20 members strong dev team behind it, as well as a dynamic user base. The team has also set a full-blown continuity plan up... No worries, then. It's not my favorite distro anymore, but I don't think it will ever die, contrary to what the apparences would have us believe.
Old Network/System Admin here.... IMO.... These days, dead distros are not a problem. It's easy to switch to another as long as the New-Distro has the same Base as the Old-Distro. Back in the day (2+ decades ago), dead distros were a HUGE problem to new and seasoned Linux users. For old farts like me... Installing a distro and getting it setup the way you liked took great effort and time years ago. No automatic GUI installers, Repos were not very plentiful (had to compile a lot of software yourself) and getting X11 to behave would/could drive you to drink! It wasn't until the late 1990's and yearly 2000's when nice and pre-customized distros came onto the scene like... Mandrake, SUSE, RedHat and even Ubuntu. These days.... We just take it for granted that a distro will be easy to install and everything will run OK (more or less). I really didn't use Linux on the desktop until the early 2000's. I stuck with Mandrake/Mandriva until Linux Mint came out in the mid-2000's.
#! (crunchbang) was one of my favorite distros! Customizing your openbox/conky config and sharing with the community on IRC and the forums was half the fun.
I remember all of these distros. I miss Crunchbang the most, that one was very influential.
It still exists as crunchbangplusplus #!++ using Debian 11.
@@folksurvival Yes, I am aware. It isnt the same as before with the forums and excitement it once had but it's still very usable.
Mine is already dead, it was forked and is now community maintained though. (KISS linux)
From the moment I understood the weakness of Linux, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of BSD. I aspired to the purity of the Berkeley Software Distribution. Your kind cling to your Linux as if it will not decay and fail you. one day, the crude software that you call a "OS" will wither and you will beg my kind to save you; but I am already saved, for the OpenBSD is immortal. Even in death, it will serve
... I had installed DSL on P4 Sys. It was only 16 M at that time. And the performance was like Rocket.
Really nostalgic distros. I've been using Slackware since V 3.3 (97 or 98) when it was very evident that's OS/2 Warp was dying a slow death. I am on V 15 and very happy. I've recently installed Kubuntu on a newer PC for my aunt and it is very pretty.
Now that's dedication. 😁
Good to hear. I have been using Slackware since the release right before Slackware 96. I remember ordering from Walnut Creek. I have several machines running Slackware64 15 and "Current" before 15 was released on AWS.
@@adancalderon8915 that's were I bought mine! I used to buy all sorts of OS/2 stuff (still have them) from them.
wow OS/2 Warp. yep. is it along with the HPFS still around? I was using it through the 90's after CP/M went south. my last Kubuntu incarnation was 14.04 but I still like KDE over gnome in some respects.
@@leecowell8165 well ArcaOS still has the HPFS and also JFS. I have a dedicated SSD with it for my REXX jobs and projects. It runs on modern hardware and I also occasionally run DOS stuff on it.
I bought Mandrake in shrink wrap at Walmart back in 2000 (slow dial up internet is all I had at the time). It came in 1.4mb 3.5 inch floppies with real dead tree books in the box. I stayed with it through the name change (not a fork) to Mandriva due to the suit from Mandrake the Magician comics. I forget the name of the company that was behind it, it was based in France. Anyway they started getting weird and I moved on to the new kid on the block, Ubuntu.
Fast forward to now and I'm using Arco Linux which is basically Arch with Calamares installer and some added utilities and themes. If Eric decides to stop Arco I can just live on with Arch as Arco's base uses the Arch repositories.
I didn't know that Knoppix is still around! While I didn't know anybody who used it as a working environment, in the early 2000s it was the first popular tool that allowed running an OS from CD, pre-dating even WinPE. Many bootable utilities were based on it.
I used Vector Linux for a few years. It's Slackware-based, but had handy config scripts (gui/tui), and their repos had better compression. Just Slackware, but nicer to use. All I could ask for.
Ubuntu Christian Edition is actually back under active development. I take interest in this one as a Christian, although to be completely honest, I don't really see why it needs to exist. In general, I tend to avoid distributions that could be just a base Ubuntu install (or whatever bistro) and then run a customization script.
Also, no mention of Rebecca Black OS? ;)
DistroWatch says that Rebecca Black OS is still active. It does apparently have the distinction of being the first distro to use Wayland throughout, though I don't know anyone who's using it! 🙂
That's so cool. That's the diversity of Linux. 🙏🙏🙏 Btw, you forgot to mention Mandriva Linux.
Where is Solus?
too forgotten to be forgotten
Still alive
It's still alive, hopefully will recover but it might not be
@@necromancygood
Not the website though...
@@MartinVonReichenberg I hope the website is eventually fixed.
I have been using Linux for 24 years and I settled early on with Red Hat or SuSE so no, I have never had my distro die. Also as a 23 year KDE user I can attest to just how bad KDE 4.0 was. It truly was a train wreak. It was so bad that I actually went over to Gnome 2.0 and only moved back when Gnome Shell became the default.
I’m using Archlinux and base distros don’t die
Yeah, 2011 was a BAD year for the Linux desktop.
Hi,
I started using GNU Linix more than 20 yers ago. I started with Slackware distro and still using it on my Thinkpad laptop. In earliy years of using GNU Linux, I also created my own single purpose small distro similar to Damn Small Linux distro which fit in 1.44 MB floppy disk, for on demand PPPD dialup NAT gateway. What a wonderful years.. )
Thank you.
Can you talk more about the distro you created? That sounds like it was a very fun and challenging project.
@@zellfaze
It was stripped version of Damn Small Linux distro. It based on dietlibc or uclibc, That time, Linux kernel 2.x with minimal options was about 300kB. Root fs was about 1 MB compressed cpio image.
I 'dd'ed kernel and rootfs images directlu to floppy disc. I already configured the pppd options to start pppd on-demand and the serial modem starts to dial up. When there are no outgoing traffic to Internet for certain period, it disconnected automatically. For NAT, I configured ipchains for the purpose, yes, it was befor netfilter/iptables. Everything loaded into RAM, very lean and fast. Any i80386 or better PC with minimal hardware cand be used as the Internet gateway.
Using similar steps, my friend made single floppy media player distro. It uses VESA/VGA console for video playback with basic AC97 audio codec for audio and MPlayer for media playback. Media files were in NFS server.
I also made single floppy MySQL server distro. Yes, those days, programs were small and fun to play with. Thank you for asking.
The move from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 was about the same time as the move from KDE 3 to Plasma 4. Good times, good times. Things were so bad.
That was when I dumped Ubuntu with the Gnome 3/Unity rubbish. I migrated to Mint, a Ubuntu fork that kept Gnome 2 and a standard desktop metaphor.
Only now am I looking at other options. I will say the different Mint releases have been trouble-free for all these years. I have no complaints. I just want to get away from systemd. Devuan is looking really good right now.
By the time Gnome 3 was moving into stable distros, KDE4 was already late in life and had become very usable. Not good like Plasma 5, but very usable.
Super interesting to learn about CinArch->AnterGhost->EndeavorOS. Aside from just KNOWING, how would one track or learn about what forks took over older projects? Thanks - this one was fun.
@0:33 Then you might consider backing up your home directory, make a list of your ppas, flatpaks, snaps, important settings like a chronjob for TRIM and move on.
I still have fond memories of Crunchbang. They had the best user forum I have ever been to. The mention of CB will always warm my heart. The time I spent with Crunchbang was a magical time in my life.
DSL is what got me into Linux
Like others here I have a few memories of playing around with Mandrake/Mandriva along with Security Tools Distribution of Knoppix before it died as well.
I had a professor talk about DSL in class just last week. He's a real old school Unix guy back before Linux existed and all the goofy distros confused and amused him so much.
I came from a UNIX background (AT&T System V release 2), and found SLS to be equivalent, and then moved to Slakware as it was a fork of SLS just before it quit (same distribution philosophy, same install) MUCH smaller than DSL for a minimal system - a 1.5MB boot floppy and a 1.5MB root floppy total for a system. still had the 40 distribution package floppies up until a new job relocation and lost them.
Everyone here chiming in about their Linux journey. I did a lot of distro hopping back around 1997 or so. I tried Red Hat, Debian, SUSE, and Slackware. I remember when they all came on multiple 3.5 inch floppy images. I downloaded mostly from a 56K modem connected on Mindspring and Earthlink. I think the first derivative distro I tried was Mandrake, I paid 10 bucks to Walnut Creek for the CD. I kept a copy of Knoppix and some other 'forensic' type Linux that's now dead on CD's to help friends recover files off their Win2K machine. After I went to windows for a good long while, I found Mandrake went to paid-only as Mandriva, so I bounced around with Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Red Hat. Now I use EndeavourOS on one machine and ZorinOS on another.
I was allowed to download at work and then transfer them to a floppy - much faster....
Corel Linux was the distribution that made me get into the Linux world. 🪦RIP🪦
I used to play with lots of distributions back in the day. And one of the great ones that i remember is PCLinuxOS (PCLOS). The website is a little dull, but they have their monthly magazine which is a great read and the distribution itself is definitely a great one. Give it a try for those who never heard of it.
DSL saved my caboose as a teenager. I had a computer that needed to have the monitor replaced -- sadly, the replacement was old and it didn't work with WinXP. (I found VESA mode later...) So I needed a way to get the computer up to a usable state for school. My nearest internet connection was my grandmother's house, which I visited twice a month. She had a dialup connection. So, a large ISO was out of the question. DSL came to the rescue! I was able to get the computer up and running, creating basic word documents suitable for schoolwork. Thankfully, I was already used to just simple text editors so it wasn't that big of a deal not having Microsoft Word.
SLS. The first distribution, inspired both Debian and RedHat. It was distributed on a bundle of thirty plus floppy disks. (You could do either 5 1/4 or 3.5!)
It inspired other distributions b/c it simultaneously showed how amazing Linux could be AND had no package manager and no supported upgrade path. If you tried to upgrade it manually, you quickly got into a Linux version of DLL hell.
DSL, is the only distro that has no other replacement even to these modern days.
It's basically, a portable os, you can run it anywhere, and you can download portable apps from the website.
Yes, package is not installed, it's downloaded and run like in windows and it just works. You don't have to worry about your system messed up,
I'll bet that someone with a lot of time on his hands could use LFS to roll his own mini-distro and do the same thing for x64 machines.
iirc Puppy Linux is a decent alternative that's more modern.
@@TheExileFox is it still alive ? I though it was Dead
😱 you actually mentioned Hannah Montana linux
It's Hannah Montana! 😳
Archbang, made and maintained by mr Green, is very well alive and kicking. It is certainly not gone and still a very lean and mean Arch distro ;-)
MX Linux is amazing, customizable in every way, transparency enabled, running windows programs like it's nothing, we are getting somewhere now!🤩
Ah, just glad to know people remembered Antergos. (I always pronounced it as Ahn-TEHR-ghos though, never found out what the etymology was if any)
I've yet to try Endeavor though.
Also, huh, Antergos was from a project to get Cinnamon to run on Arch? Hell, I started on Antergos to get MATE to run on Arch (among other things to even just try Arch-like stuff). I was one of those people who quit Ubuntu over the Unity/GNOME3 crap and I was trying to run MATE on all sorts of stuff. Oddly enough that also meant in the end running on Ubuntu MATE for a bit. And now I'm on Mint MATE on machines I use for work purposes, which is why I don't try anything more complicated lately.
I started with Slackware, back when you downloaded several floppies over 14.4 modem... and later could buy CD-rom 4pak sets.
Don't forget Tom's root-boot (even smaller than Tiny Linux or DSL) that would boot & run txt-only Linux from only one 3.5 floppy, but included a very good set of base tools including fdisk, mount ext3 fs, ash, top, vi, sed, awk and more!
Later used Mandrake, Mint and Fedora at home, while working with SuSe, RHEL, and commercial Unix like Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, or EP/IX for corp jobs.
I used DSL A LOT. Loved this thing.
I recall trying to use Crunchbang and LOVED how it looked, but I didn't have the focus to read the menu to navigate! I bet I would have loved it, so I hope to take a look at CrunchBang++ on my next distrohop.
Love your videos, and I almost had a spit-take at the final words on this video, HAH What a great play on words that! Thanks again for the smiles and laughs!
Damn small was my very first linux!! The one that started it all for me.
_“Have you considering the Linux distribution you’re currently using probably won’t exist in 5, 10, 20 years?”_ I mean, I learned Linux in the 90s on Slackware, then I switched to Debian for a decade, and now I’ve used Arch about a decade- those are all alive and still receiving updates, so I think I’m okay.
the first time I came across Linux as a child was a paid Suse at a classmate's house (in the 90's), but _my_ first distro was Mandrake.
I loved Damn Small Linux and Knoppix. My kids would pop it into my laptop and play Tux Games.
Linux will always exist. I like EndeavourOS, if my distribution dies then there clearly must be something better.
Semplice Linux! Debian Unstable and Stable versions using Openbox. That distro had some amazing tools (its own menu, an incredible app launcher, installer, etc...) which were developed by the main developer...g7. That guy is sadly missed.
Caldera Linux was a GREAT distro. Had it not disappeared, I might have switched sooner. But it died and all of the support for it went belly up as well so... No more Caldera on MY machine (or anyone elses for that matter)...
I loved Crunchbang. It made my netbook a lot more usable. I still use Bunsenlabs on a newer laptop.
CrunchBang was fun to explore. It taught me things about Linux I would have never learned on a more mainstream distro!.
Rip Mandrake/Mandriva linux 😵.
I loved #! (crunch bang) , it was one of my first!
I really liked ArchBang, it was perfect for small VMs or older hardware as it had a 32-bit version. But the distro I miss the most is Sabayon (based on Gentoo), because sometimes I could be just too lazy to compile everything ;)
Wow. I didn't realize that Knoppix was gone. I made disks for several people and they actually used them. Either DSL or Puppy were small enough to run on a floppy long after most of us stopped using them. :
I miss college linux.
Slackware: I am not dead yet!
These comments about previously influential and fondly remembered distros are pretty illuminating and interesting. Might be worth another video in their own right
Yeap. I started with RedHat Linux 5, used Mandrake Linux for a long time until it become something else. I used Slackware briefly - but I think they are in their "we're not dead yet" phase.