Poll: Was gentoo your first taste of linux distro?

[rehanmomin]

The first time I touched linux was with Gentoo. Many people say that it is not a good idea for a newbie to start off with Gentoo. Of course I tried to install it several times using up several hours of precious sleep time several hours (many birthdays passed ) but I was tired of using windows and wanted change. I got gentoo working a while back, and I was surprised on how much I learned about linux overall just by installing linux. You don't learn anything about windows when installing, all you do is click next, next, next, and next and shocking a virus is aimed at windows and you have to format your fucking computer. Sorry getting emotional. But linux is a great experience. I would recommend it to people who really want to learn about linux.

I'd like to hear about your first time with linux and your experience. Sorry if this kind of poll has been made. Im at school speding hours reading forums on gentoo. I love this community!

[Retriever II]

I started with slackware (possibly against all advice to start off with something like Mandrake)

[X]

I started with Slackware too, somewhere around 98 or 99. Switched to gentoo in April 2002.

[Chadduss]

Started with Mandrake and then I tried RedHat but Gentoo is by far the best.

[supernovus]

Started with Slackware in 97, went on to Mandrake in 99, LFS in 2000 and finally Gentoo in late 2002. I'm not going back. The only other "distro" I would ever use again, and only for specialized devices where I want a completely customized and minimal build, is LFS (which I built using my own custom LFS Builder program). Other than that, it's Gentoo all the way!

[shift82]

Started with Red Hat but then my dependences all broke down (I didn't like RPM's at all). So then I do the intellegent thing and switch to another RPM based system: Mandrake. Mandrake was ugly. And I didn't like it still. I switch back to Red Hat again only to have my system break down again. I switch to Gentoo and fall in love with Portage. It's so easy and I can leave it on compiling overnight! It took me a few times to install it but after I was done, not only did I end up with a kick ass system, I'd learned about Linux!

[Lovechild]

Started on RedHat 5.2 as a dualbooter back when I was in the first year of high school - 3 year I was 100% Linux, I've been so ever since my 18th birthday when I installed Debian... today about 4½ years later I have never looked back. I've been on Gentoo since pre 1.0, switched from LFS.

[PowerFactor]

Started redhat 5.0. Only played with it a little, didn't have it installed for long. But I did install it again play with it some more later. Messed with various distros since then, including lfs and later versions of redhat. but I was still primarily using windows. Then I found out about gentoo. About the time 1.0_rc6 came out I decided to give it a try because I wanted to see what kde3 was like. Yep you heard me right, that was the main thing that got me to try gentoo initially. Not optimization, not cause it was source based, it was kde3. I didn't want to wait another six months for it to be included in mandrake and I felt like compiling it by hand was beyond me. I fully expected gentoo to be too much work and I would drop it soon, but I wanted to see kde3. Heh, strange to think about it now.

[gsfgf]

i started with FreeBSD, so i gues gentoo was my fisrt LINUX.

[wdreinhart]

No, I started with Slackware 3.3 in 1997. It took weeks to get all my hardware working.

[Naughtyus]

I think I started with Debian, but since I couldn't get very far with the package selection during install, that didn't last long. I think my first real install was Mandrake 6.0

[ShockValue]

Was fully in M$ land until about 2 years ago. Decided to give linux a try.
The scenerio was usally get the distro-of the month installed mostly, run into something I couldn't figure out how to fix, and then sulk back to Windows.

It even happened with Gentoo about 6 months ago. After failing to get through the install about 3 times, I gave up and went back to Windows.


THIS time I made it work! And I've been a happy Gentoo user for about a month now. Lots of work has went into the system to make it work as well as it does now. And I still have quite a bit of tweaking to go to get it to what I would call "Image Ready", but the cool part is that it is FUN. I actually look forward to my computer projects now (getting radeon running, alsa setup, samba shares, etc..)

So.. to answer your question. Kinda... It wasn't the first distro I tried.. But it was the first one that I made WORK!

[AlphaChild]

i am very much in the same boat as ShockValue. i started off in the days of Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.2, learning my F7 and F8 keyboard shortcuts. i used NT4 after that, and am still using Windows 2000. i first used Linux about four or five years ago (i could have started back in the days of Redhat 4, but i didn't know what Linux was back then). i used Mandrake 7 first of all, and then did a 180 and started using FreeBSD from 4.3-STABLE up to 4.7-RELEASE

i came onto Gentoo because i needed Linux compatability and better nvidia drivers (mainly for Softimage|XSI), and i heard of a BSD-like distro called Gentoo. it was very easy to get hooked on, and although it was a bit of a pain to set up at first, i do enjoy it a lot now. it is not for the faint of heart, but to those who give it a go and endure the initial pain... the rest is history

kudos to the Gentoo teams

*gets back to setting up XFCE4*

[Barkotron]

I was using Windows up until about 2/3 months ago (mainly xp, booting into 2k for testing/work stuff etc).

I fancied having a go at Linux, and liked the idea of just being able to install everything off of a net connection (well, nearly everything!), read up a wee bit on Gentoo then decided to try an install on my old p2 333 I use as backup storage (carefully removing the hd with the backups on, natch ).

One week later, when kde finally finished compiling, I liked it so much I now run all my boxes on Gentoo with testing/work being done in vmware installs of windows (oh how joyful the geek whose employer will pay for a vmware licence !). I still unfortunately have to keep an xp install so I can play Homeworld 2 (and hl2, if it ever makes it to release ), but that's a small price to pay really, and I don't mind it (once more, hooray for employers who provide you with licences for outrageously-priced pieces of software ).

This isn't to say I haven't had any problems with it - I had a horrendous time breaking my RAID arrays with grub, but everything works now (more or less), and I wouldn't be without it.

[asph]

i tried a lot of distro's before gentoo.. redhat, slackware, suse, debian, some mini-distro's, caldera.. and openbsd/freebsd, beos, windows, qnx too

but when i tried gentoo on an early 1.2 version, i just loved it! So now i just use gentoo on my pc, familiar for my ipaq and will install gentoo on my laptop as soon as i buy it

[d3c3it]

nope mandrake in 99, really didnt make me want to have anything to do with linux it crashed so much :/ then tried it again, failed. then redhat in 02 then suse then gentoo since april, not looked back at all.

[Viha]

Yes. Gentoo user since the first week of September.

[Gemini]

Another naysayer

I started out with Mandrake 8.0 in late 99 and continued to use Mandrake until June this year where I tried Gentoo for the first time. About a month ago Mandrake was wiped from my hd, and hey presto, new 15 GB mount point for my /usr in Gentoo

[neenee]

i started with lindows, lycoris and xandros, switching from
one to the other within a week. then i tried redhat and man-
drake; i switched between those about ten times within two
weeks. also, i tried debian and suse and even gentoo. but
at the time i did not have enough experience to get that
working (i got stuck and i tried using #gentoo, but it was
kindof overwhelming and people did not seem to respond).

then i tried slackware, and stuck to it for a few months,
after which i wanted to try gentoo again when it version
1.4 final was released. but i did not do it right away. first
i tried archlinux, which was nice, for a day or so.

finally i switched to gentoo. it took me a few days to setup,
but finally i had it working. woo. and here i am.

[Yak]

My linux history, for a chuckle.

Tried Redhat (4?). Got confused by disk druid and wiped out windows partition.

Tried Mandrake (7?). Persevered through several install attempts plagued with lockups and video resolution problems. Really hard to click on 'ok' when it's off the bottom of screen. Finally got it installed, then couldn't install anything else because I couldn't track down all the libraries and stuff. I did use it as a samba server for awhile.

Installed Smoothwall on a p233 for a firewall. Later decided the pentium was overkill and put it on a 486 overclocked to 80 Mhz. Later switched to ipcop. It's still running 24/7.

Tried slackware (7?) on the p233. Had to make 7 floppies to start install from. Package menus took forever, but other than that it was sort of fun. No gui, used it as a samba/nfs server only.

Tried gentoo. It was easier to install than Mandrake, and heck maybe didn't even take that much longer! Plus gentoo is the easiest linux I have seen for installing and configuring programs. Note easy != simple in my vocabulary, more like easy=it made sense to me.

Almost wish I had tried gentoo first.. all I can say is gentoo is the first one where I actually used the gui desktop.

[sean_m]

slackware with kernel 2.0.29 was my first linux distribution (early 1997 i think). i must have spent like a month trying to get xfree to run. the modem took twice as long. i guess i was sort of clueless then (obscure hardware didn't help either!).

i've since used several of the major distributions, but none of them compare to gentoo. i've been running gentoo since last fall. i always felt like i was missing something with the other distributions, but i've got no complaints with gentoo. you made the right choice.. now i wish it had been around when i first learned about linux.

[Lews_Therin]

Gentoo is my first taste of Linux. Only other time was a Red Hat machine where I couldn't figure out grub.

[ectospasm]

I started with Slackware in 1997, and installing it was a requirement for the class I was taking. Tried Red Hat, didn't like it all the times I tried it. Tried LFS but gave up after it didn't even have a semblance of a working installation. Toyed with Mandrake, but that's it. I've also toyed with FreeBSD, but nothing major.

I chose Gentoo because it seemed to give me all the freedom of LFS without all the hassle and headaches. So far it has lived up to that.


[EDIT]
Note that I didn't switch my main desktop to Gentoo until sometime late June. I was, unfortunately, running WinXP on the box before. It's still on there, but I think I've only booted into it maybe twice since then. My laptop is still WinXP because I need to have a decent windows machine for school, but it's running as many OSS apps as possible (e.g. OpenOffice, gAIM, Mozilla, etc.).
[/EDIT]

[Kodama]

Used Mandrake for about 2 month, then broke it when doing some rpm --force involving with upgrading glibc, sad story

Tried installing Slackware and later Debian, could not get anything to work, also I wiped out my Windows partition. (My fault because of inpatience and not following the install docs)

Then Gentoo, this time I took time reading the install docs carefully, so I managed to install it after 4 tries. Now I am in Linux heaven

[st. anger]

I first installed linux back in '98 or '99 I think, with Caldera OpenLinux 2.2. looking back, it was a pretty decent distro, one of the cool things was that they bundled a version of partition magic with it to make it easy for windows lamers like me to dual boot.
Then I went with slackware for the next couple of years until Gentoo about a year ago.