Lindows was my first Linux distro c. 1999. It was my first year at college, majoring in Business Administration, living on campus with internet speeds above 56kbps for the first time. Trawling through the internet at that time, I stumbled on a (likely bootleg) Lindows installer somewhere and fell down the rabbit hole.
Looking back, I realize now I’d been a self-denying computer geek before then but for whatever reason Lindows, it’s wacky installer, dual boot support, and fortunate hardware compatibility gave me the right nudge at the right time to send me on a lifetime of hacking.
Almost 25 years later, most as a professional software engineer, I have a completely biased affection for this strange OS.
Even though it became Lindpire, the spiritual successor to lightweight and windows like was LXDE and Lubuntu.
It was Slackware that pioneered the loadlin boot loader installed on a dos partition that I think li does/linspire picked-up. This was all gradually killed off by ntfs and windows 2k
It was a magical time for Linux with konqueror as a viable desktop browser and galeon as the best browser available until IBM started sponsoring the project to make it like epiphany. Eventually konqueror was absorbed into WebKit for safari, proprietary flash made browsing on Linux unnecessary difficult (gnash came later), and Microsoft lawsuits were customary towards all friendly UX not on a Mac.
Like 20 years ago I was obsessed with getting MythTV running with a TV tuner, but kept running into driver issues and low spec'd hardware. It was still magical to me, though.
TVtime worked faster but if didn't have LIRC support, I can't remember. If it did, it was to setup, much more lightweight but without recording support.
Very fond of lubuntu, which I managed to get installed on NTFS in a directory on my C:drive allowing switching back-and-forth between it and my Windows install, and really wish that that was still a thing.
Mine was DamnSmallLinux and Slax. I wasn't allowed to install Linux on my family's computer of course, so live CD's were my go-to. Though once I scrounged up enough spare parts from family friends to build a PC, I then got to learn how to force Slax to "install" to a hard drive, which was quite a challenge for me, as it really didn't want to be run off non-live-install media haha
My first distro was Ubuntu 8.04 Server. Kind of funny because I was in high school back then and decided to install Ubuntu on my machine, coming from the Windows world, I thought that it would be cool to run the server version, thinking it would be like Windows Server 2008 (with a desktop). After installing I was shocked to find out that I had no desktop to work with, spent the next 3 days figuring out how to connect my machine to the internet and then eventually downloaded Gnome. Now almost 15 years later I still use Ubuntu as my daily driver, typing this on 22.04
Many here share that journey. For me, it was printing out the Gentoo "hard mode" installation guide where you compiled _everything_ from scratch, including the kernel.
Didn't make it but it taught me the terminal and some foundational concepts in an OS. Set me down the path of linux (ubuntu - bit easier to install) and hacking.
With my limited exposure to linux when I was a kid, I didn't understand why I needed to or what those `configure; make; make install` commands did. It was until very later when I knew what compiling was or that make is actually a tool to run arbitrary commands.
oh gods, the many many hours I "wasted" recompiling my gentoo installation trying to squeeze more performance out of my gaming machine and prove to all my gaming naysaying friends that linux is no good for gaming.
This was back in the VoodooFX days...
My first mentor in Linux was a sysadmin at the hometown ISP, and my initiation was compiling Gentoo from Stage 1 (the "hard mode" install) on a dual socket P3 700mHz system. I've never done it ever again, but that foundational experience helped me immensely.
Oh shit, I remember the stages now, not much about them though. Did you really install Gentoo if you didn't compile the compiler you used to compile the rest of the system from the ground up though?
I'm not sure if this is possible anymore, but for a while, there was a way to copy over the compiled base system from the disk instead of compiling it all from scratch. Running your first emerge -vaDu world might end up recompiling everything anyway, depending on the age of the ISO, but you didn't have to do any compiling to get a base system deployed.
Looking back, I realize now I’d been a self-denying computer geek before then but for whatever reason Lindows, it’s wacky installer, dual boot support, and fortunate hardware compatibility gave me the right nudge at the right time to send me on a lifetime of hacking.
Almost 25 years later, most as a professional software engineer, I have a completely biased affection for this strange OS.
Thanks for sharing!