This week the Slackware Linux project is celebrating its 30th anniversary. It is the oldest Linux distribution that is still in active maintenance and development.
This week the Slackware Linux project is celebrating its 30th anniversary. It is the oldest Linux distribution that is still in active maintenance and development.
I mean the BSDs have been around since what? The late 80s? With the more “mainstream” distros (Free and Net) since the early 90s… The 80s if you count NextSTEP and SunOS!
But I get what you mean, there’s a reason Bell was forced to relinquish it’s code with anti-trust laws!
I think it was around '99 that I got into this. The internet was quickly building momentum, I finally had DSL available, and I happened to run across a reference to linux. I had been searching for an alternative to Windows for awhile already (I still have a CD with OS2/Warp on it) so the idea that not only could I replace my desktop, but I could also run free servers??? My mind was blown. It took me another six years to get my desktop to where I could truly ditch Windows completely but I’ve never looked back.
I was a mac guy in the 90s, which was rather unpopular. I started just experimenting with stuff to expand my horizons. In ~97 I started playing with BeOS, and NetBSD. The latter was pretty much the only thing that had a native boot loader for the OpenFirmware. Played a bit with Yellow Dog Linux and MKLinux after that, but NetBSD remained my go to. I almost fully switched in the early 00s but OSX came out and being Unix system I stuck around. By the mid 00s I was using a mix of NetBSD and Debian/Ubuntu for servers, and a couple years later fully switched to Debian to have one single OS that I could use everywhere.
Never looked back!
Had to reply because this is kind of the opposite of my story.
I grew up in the 90’s using Windows at home and pre-UNIX Macs at school. The Macs were trash and I was totally pro-Windows back then.
Then Mac OS X came out at school and damn, that UNIX goodness brought a ton to the table.
But being a kid, I couldn’t afford a Mac so around the Windows XP era I started getting into Linux. Unfortunately none of the distros worked great on my Dell (which my parents totally shocked me by buying one Christmas) so I was stuck installing on some ancient IBM ThinkPad built for Windows 3.1 but capable of running Windows 2000.
I spent my most of my mid- to late teens on Red Hat Linux and later Ubuntu (like the first release though).
Once I was 18 I saved up and bought my first MacBook Pro.
So these days I use macOS as an everyday desktop OS but run Alpine Linux on a Raspberry Pi (and any Docker image I create) as well as FreeBSD for any VPS I might need. I prefer the BSD’s to UNIX (especially FreeBSD) but unfortunately do rely on Docker for development work.