I tired Linux a few times in the past, but didn’t really start using seriously until 2019. I love poking around old OSs and distros, and I want to spin a few up in some VMs my next free evening.

Any suggestions? Open to any distro (or let’s be honest, DE). Any versions that holds a special place in your heart or that’s exceptionally novel? Really interested to see what’s out there!

  • Notorious@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    10 months ago

    I booted a VM with BeOS for nostalgia a couple months ago. Remember booting that as a kid and drooling over how fast it was.

    • ace_garp@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Yeah, Knoppix was kind of a ‘Tucows vibe’ distro. Pretty approachable.

      Zen Linux was another short-lived 2005 liveDistro, which had a nice feel and Art.

      Also, installing all https://trisquel.info/ versions side-by-side and doing a 17 year fast-forward would be cool.

  • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
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    10 months ago

    Just for curiosity, where do you get these old distributions?

    I might try the Ubuntu version which got me into Linux one of these days😇

  • Flaky@lemmy.zipEnglish
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    10 months ago

    Ubuntu in the early 2010s, with GNOME 2 and Compiz. The Compiz era of desktops was real fun and I’d love for that to come back with a vengeance. MATE is working on Wayland support with Wayfire (essentially like Compiz but for Wayland) as the compositor AFAIK, so it might very well come back and be improved (apparently the Compiz codebase is… not great?)

  • Sinirlan@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Gentus Linux comes to mind, obscure distro based on Red Hat (not RHEL mind You) released by now forgotten ABIT, a motherboard manufacturer. I was daily driving it as teenager back in 2001 for couple of weeks until I learned by trial and error how to get windows 98 installed back. Another one would be Mandrake Linux which I was dual booting couple years later.

    • 0x0@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      I read gentoo instead of gentus, found it awkward that someone would call gentoo obscure, did a websearch, came back to the post with gentus as a reply, re-read the post.

  • MessyEh@lemmy.ca
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    10 months ago

    Mandrake 6.0 was my first distro in '98-'99. Mandrake hasn’t existed for a long time now; I have no idea if you can still find an old iso of it. It used KDE 1.1.1 as it’s DE, and to this day, KDE has remained my preferred DE.

  • dallen@programming.dev
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    10 months ago

    Crungbang linux breathed live into some very wimpy hardware I’ve had in the past.

    Loved the minimalism.