• teft@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Slackware was my first as well. You really learned Linux using it. I probably rebuilt that drive a dozen times because I’d bork something and it was easier to reinstall than it was to figure out how I broke it in some new novel way.

    Also not having a phone to look stuff up and having to rely on looking stuff up in books was hell now that I think of it.

    • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
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      4 days ago

      Having the phone these days for reference is huge. When I did my current arch install a few years back, I realized how clutch it was having that option because it definitely wasn’t a thing even back in the mid aughts. Sifting through even the console manual was tedious as opposed to just searching for a solution, it makes one grateful for the current state of things.

      • aard@kyu.de
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        4 days ago

        That was a reason back then to pay for a distribution box - it came with a very good printed manual. Which had beginner friendly sections like “now that you have a running system let’s configure and build a kernel matching your hardware”.

    • Supervisor194@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Same, Slackware, went over to Red Hate for a while then Debian - am using Ubuntu now. I’ll never forget (in 1998) setting up Slackware as a server on an old spare 486 the company I worked for had laying around. It had a SCSI hard drive. Oh the pain. USENET was the only good reference, and you’d sometimes have to post and wait a day for a response if you just couldn’t figure it out.

      Got that server running and saved the company hundreds of dollars a month - they had been paying egregious fees to host brochureware. They thought I was Superman.

    • Serinus@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      it was easier to reinstall than it was to figure out how I broke it in some new novel way.

      I came to the same conclusion. But I couldn’t get it to reinstall. It kept wanting to use the old partition. (2001, maybe Ubuntu?)

      So I knew how to solve that. If the linux installation is wiped, then it’ll surely allow me to reinstall fresh. So,

      rm -rf /
      

      Begins deleting files…

      “Wait, my Windows partition is under that, isn’t it.” Ctrl+C frantically, it won’t stop. Pull the plug.

      I did get my files back. Just, you know, without file paths or file names. Do you know how many DLLs and worthless text files there are, by the way?

    • treadful@lemmy.zip
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      4 days ago

      Also not having a phone to look stuff up and having to rely on looking stuff up in books was hell now that I think of it.

      Oh man, not having a second device to look things up and fucking up your NIC modem drivers. Impossible situation for a noob, but somehow I kept going.