I prefered slackware over red hat from near the beginning. Debian was so fringe that no one I know had heard of it until around 2000. It was one of many roll your own versions that people played with. It eventually caught on but at the beginning there was only slackware and red hat in the main stream. They were so close together at the time that at the dial up ISP I worked for somone unziped a slackware etc directory over the top of a red hat installation and it booted and worked. Not that it didn’t have some really bizzare log files.
After a run of
RedHat - Fedora - OpenBSD - OSX to about 2007, I gave Debian more of a try in the form of #! Linux. That was a great minimalist distro. Ever since then it’s just one Debian variant or another. It does the job with minimal fuss.
It really helps that I don’t push the hardware with shiny new equipment or need much in 3D drivers. Linux Mint on desktops, Debian servers, Ubuntu only for driver issues, Raspian/Armbian on SBCs.
Same. There’s a lot of options in open source software, and so I try different applications until I figure out which I like best. Then apt sorts out how to make it all work.
The hardest core version I saw someone do that was long ago. My best friend and I were using OpenBSD back in early 2000’s. He installed a minimal install. From there he pulled the source tree makefiles. Then he started running make on Mozilla (pre firefox days). He just kept building, patching, fixing, and hammering away. Eventually he built the whole GUI environment, dependencies, and Mozilla which took that computer months to complete it all.
Today, he’s the lead engineer for a massive tech company.
Then what makes Debian its only a month younger than Slackware?
I prefered slackware over red hat from near the beginning. Debian was so fringe that no one I know had heard of it until around 2000. It was one of many roll your own versions that people played with. It eventually caught on but at the beginning there was only slackware and red hat in the main stream. They were so close together at the time that at the dial up ISP I worked for somone unziped a slackware etc directory over the top of a red hat installation and it booted and worked. Not that it didn’t have some really bizzare log files.
Maybe the only time the words Dick and Dyke appear together.
The annoying younger sibling?
After a run of RedHat - Fedora - OpenBSD - OSX to about 2007, I gave Debian more of a try in the form of #! Linux. That was a great minimalist distro. Ever since then it’s just one Debian variant or another. It does the job with minimal fuss.
It really helps that I don’t push the hardware with shiny new equipment or need much in 3D drivers. Linux Mint on desktops, Debian servers, Ubuntu only for driver issues, Raspian/Armbian on SBCs.
I’m partial to installing vanilla, headless Debian and then frankensteining everything together myself from there.
Same. There’s a lot of options in open source software, and so I try different applications until I figure out which I like best. Then apt sorts out how to make it all work.
Nothing but the basics that way!
The hardest core version I saw someone do that was long ago. My best friend and I were using OpenBSD back in early 2000’s. He installed a minimal install. From there he pulled the source tree makefiles. Then he started running make on Mozilla (pre firefox days). He just kept building, patching, fixing, and hammering away. Eventually he built the whole GUI environment, dependencies, and Mozilla which took that computer months to complete it all.
Today, he’s the lead engineer for a massive tech company.