10 Year Gentoo Census

[nikolis]

And it came with printed manuals as well inside the box.

And 7 CD’s, 2 DVD’s.

[Syl20]

my first attempt was with Mandrake

Ouch. My first linux experience too. Mandrake 5.3, precisely. Supplied with some obscure computers magazine, of course.

[wuzzerd]

First distro? Redhat circa 1994.

[NeddySeagoon]

Team,

At the half way point we have 79 votes.

[pjp]

Among the world's 123-140 year olds, apparently two of them use Gentoo in some capacity.

[Section_8]

My thoughts are based on the fact that older you get more simple you want things to be to handle them. Gentoo is not a simple clics distribution so, I think that young people constitute the majority of Gentoo users.

For me - nearing retirement, but gentoo is the only distro I've used for almost 20 years - switching distos, even to an "easy" one - would still be hard. There would be a learning curve. So I stick with gentoo because it is easier for me than the alternatives.

[Hu]

Among the world's 123-140 year olds, apparently two of them use Gentoo in some capacity.

Perhaps the key to their longevity is the ongoing mental challenge provided by maintaining such a customizable system.

[AJM]

This actually has me thinking, to the people on here who tried linux in the 90s, what was the first distro you tried?

SuSE 5.2 from a magazine cover CD in 1998. From SuSE's wiki:

Some packages included with SuSE Linux 5.2 were:
KDE beta3
Linux kernel 2.0.33
Netscape Communicator 4.04

I bought an extra HDD to dual-boot with my existing Win95 (the original release, no USB or IE). I must have reinstalled from that CD about ten times before I got X working! Anyway, once I did get it all up and running I never looked back; Windows finally blew itself up completely about six months later and that was me a full time Linux user. Still here, a quarter of a century on, having migrated from SuSE to Red Hat to Mandrake, brief interlude with FreeBSD then onto Gentoo where I've stayed ever since (for my main desktop PC anyway.) I use Alpine, Debian and CentOS on servers in order of preference and Void on my laptop.

[gtwrek]

This actually has me thinking, to the people on here who tried linux in the 90s, what was the first distro you tried?

I know Slackware was my first Linux install. I can't recall exactly when - 94 or 95 maybe? I'm fairly certain too, that it was on a bunch of 3.5" floppies too. I may be misremembering that last part, but I'm pretty sure that was the case.

[proteusx]

1997 Slackware from magazine CD.
1998 SUSE from boxed 6 CD package (version 5.3, I think). Had lots of software including the sources.
2003 Gentoo. (I had ADSL connection by then). Stayed with Gentoo ever since.

Never posted anything in the forum for 5 years.

[NeddySeagoon]

Team,

Only 5 voting days left, in my timezone anyway.

Don't be shy.

[GFCCAE6xF]

According to https://www.thecalculator.co/personalit ... r-206.html , I am a "Generation Y – Millennials" which has thoroughly ruined my day

[stefan11111]

According to https://www.thecalculator.co/personalit ... r-206.html, I am a "Generation Y – Millennials" which has thoroughly ruined my day

Needs javascript to work.

[m.s.w]

Team,

Only 5 voting days left, in my timezone anyway.

Don't be shy.

Well, probably I am dinosaur with bad eyes but see no voting options.

First install was RedHat, but was completely unaware of what is it. Stared for an hour at the blank screen (text console) with no clue what to do.
First serious attempt was Madrake back to 2000.
I even bough a book, went through not so easy process of international money transfer at that time (I am from Poland).
So, Mandriva and rpm-hell was my first experience.
After that I went to Gentoo. And I am using it up to this day.
To be honest : with a 8 years break because I had to get married and make and rise a little bit two children.
Since I don't care anymore about them I started playing around with Gentoo again.


PS. For the sensitive ones: It was a joke that I don't care about my family. They just don't need as much my attention as they did when they were little.

[NeddySeagoon]

m.s.w,

Unless you have already voted, the poll should be at the top of every page.
I thought I was the dinosaur here too. :)

[m.s.w]

m.s.w,

Unless you have already voted, the poll should be at the top of every page.
I thought I was the dinosaur here too.

Well, then probably I am dinosaur not with bad eyes but with bad memory...
Probably already voted...

[NeddySeagoon]

Team,

The results are in. The poll shows that me have 89 active users over the last 30 days, most of whom claim to be younger than me. :)

[skellr]

Team,

The results are in. The poll shows that me have 89 active users over the last 30 days, most of whom claim to be younger than me.

It was a long 30 days,
Looking back now, it don't seem that it was so long.

[yagami]

just missed it... missing vote for GenX

[mistah_monocle]

Kind of interesting that it appears to be normally distributed about the median, gen X. I wonder what is the significance that Gentoo was created when most of you were about in your 30s?

[yagami]

Kind of interesting that it appears to be normally distributed about the median, gen X. I wonder what is the significance that Gentoo was created when most of you were about in your 30s?

well ... if my memory and math isn't failing, i was around 22 when I started on gentoo.

[duane]

Kind of interesting that it appears to be normally distributed about the median, gen X. I wonder what is the significance that Gentoo was created when most of you were about in your 30s?

"Generation X" grew up with the personal computer, but not the smart phone. Might have something to do with it.

[psycho]

Yeah I agree with Duane. It's not just that we (Gen X) were young adults when Gentoo started, it's that we were the generation for whom personal computers and computer programming were the cool new thing when we were kids... we had all those beautiful diverse home computers (Amstrad, Apple, Atari, BBC, Commodore, Sinclair, Radio Shack and all the rest) and the very first IBM PC clones coming into our schools just as "War Games" and other geeky films were in the cinemas... computer programming looked more exciting than nuclear physics, and personal computers were the gadgets to do it on... then we grew up and discovered how much better UNIX was (at work/college/whatever) than the Windows crap that Microsoft's illegal (today) practices were forcing onto most of the folks around us, and just around the time we were thinking "I want to use the Linux kernel, but damn, BSD's ports system is cool", drobbins started portage and Gentoo quickly gained a reputation as the most configurable (and in those days often fastest) distro, so what else were we going to use? Gentoo was clearly the best operating system for people who'd grown up thinking it would be cool to almost accidentally start a world war through an acoustic coupler.

[mid-kid]

I think it's worth pointing out, as someone on the older scale of gen Z, I know that a lot of my peers never bothered with learning how to use forum software. While we (certainly I) did experience the latter part of the growth of the internet, we quickly flocked to "platforms" and social medias when they started becoming commonplace.
I know plenty of people around my age that are really technologically proficient, unlike the people whose first computer was a phone, but as I rarely bother checking out forums, and prefer sticking to IRC, Matrix and the like, I figure many people like me simply missed this poll.

[psycho]

Yeah, that's probably another factor. I've never tweeted, have no Instagram account, was an early adopter of Facebook but don't think I've posted anything there in at least ten years... all these platforms seem to appeal more to the phone generation than the desktop PC generation. I much prefer forums, mailing lists and plain old emails to all that social media stuff. So with Gentoo's having excellent forums I guess it appeals to old folk like me.