5 pioneering Linux distros that quietly faded into history

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Merlynabcd123@reddit

I downloaded the floppy disk images for SLS in 1992 from a local BBS in Minneapolis. It took me 10 days to load the data since the BBS only allowed me to pull 2 or 3 images a day.

I remember loading them up and seeing a Unix-like system pop up, with functioning X. I was shocked that it worked.

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dave_two_point_oh@reddit

Softlanding was my first Linux experience as well, although not until 1994.

I actually ordered it on something approaching fifty 5 1/4" floppies IIRC (despite what the article seems to indicate about it not being purchasable on floppy, plus only being around 30 floppies' worth). I don't recall what I paid for it, but apparently it must have been worth it to me to save the hassle of downloading at 1994 speeds, BBS limits, call waiting interruptions, extracting to my own blank floppies, redownloading corrupted images, etc.

Call me crazy, but I miss those days of dialing into BBSes with their ANSI graphics, USENET newsgroups, SMLR, Computer Shopper, and all that. (Well, sometimes, anyway.)

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kudlitan@reddit

Distro Astro converted my astronomy class to Linux

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edgarisdrunk@reddit

Crunchbang will always have a place in my heart. I threw that on my CR-48 and it was just… perfect.

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XOmniverse@reddit

Bunsen Labs is basically the same thing though right?

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edgarisdrunk@reddit

It’s a derivative, but #! was special.

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smithincanton@reddit

I was really bummed when it was shut down.

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Man-In-His-30s@reddit

Oh man I miss that was perfect for my old laptop back as a uni student

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TheDreadPirateJeff@reddit

I ran CrunchBang for years on a little Lenovo IdeaPad. It was fantastic on small devices.

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SparkyBangBang432@reddit

Manchester Computing Centre (MCC). Fit on two 5.25” floppies, a boot disk and a root disk. Pre Linux 1.0 (0.96c?)

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Leading-Plastic5771@reddit

Didn't mention Mandrake. A lot of of us started with Mandrake as it was the main distro aiming at ease of use before Ubuntu came along.

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GreatBigPig@reddit

I liked how Mandrake was optimized for Pentium chips.

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imacmadman22@reddit

Bingo.

I bought the retail package that was available at Best Buy, and it was pretty good for a beginner and not too expensive as I recall. I think it was $29.99 which was so much easier than trying to download it on dial-up.

I was pretty bummed when it folded, I tried the replacement “Mageia” but I didn’t really care for it. I thought the went overboard with the graphics and colors and it was buggy. I switched to SuSE shortly afterwards and then Red Hat. A bit later I found Mint and the rest is history.

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LostGeezer2025@reddit

There seem to be a bunch of us, WinME lunched all my hard drive data for the second time and I was done, Mandrake was an obvious move and all seemed well at first.

RPM dependency hell was especially irksome for this newbie on dialup and I jumped ship to assorted Debian flavors after the honeymoon, but Mandrake was my first 'daily driver' Linux :)

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imacmadman22@reddit

Initially I ran it on a dual-boot Win 98 system and it worked fine, when I was able to get a second computer to run Linux on was when I started trying other distros.

I was lucky enough to hear how bad Windows ME was from friends before installing it, so I just stayed away. We broadband internet by the time I got the second computer so that hassle was gone.

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northrupthebandgeek@reddit

My uncle was a computer tech by trade, so instead of ever having to use Windows ME I ended up with one of his Windows 2000 CDs (one of the 3-in-1s with Professional / Server / Advanced Server). Loved it. If Microsoft had just iterated on Windows 2000 forever instead of developing XP and beyond, I'd probably never have switched to Linux as a daily driver.

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imacmadman22@reddit

And to that end, Windows XP was probably one of the best operating systems Microsoft ever produced with the exception of Windows 7. If they had stayed in that realm I imagine they wouldn’t be losing users to Linux and MacOS like they are. I know I’d probably be still using Windows if they hadn’t gone all in on the OS as spyware/adware nonsense.

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RealModeX86@reddit

Mandrake 6.0 was the first distro I installed, I got a copy bundled with a magazine at the time called Maximum Linux, in the first issue

'99 or so I think?

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georgehank2nd@reddit

Mandrake didn't fade away, it merged with Conectiva to form Mandriva. Discontinued in 2011-ish, it got revived as OpenMandriva, which still exists.

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Johnginji009@reddit

isnt pclinux is also based on. or offshoot of mandrake

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grem75@reddit

It started as Mandrake with apt-rpm taken from Conectiva. Still uses apt-rpm as far as I know.

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Ezmiller_2@reddit

I think I remember reading that they are switching to a regular rpm next release. Their icons remind me of Mandriva a lot.

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grem75@reddit

Rpm itself has always been normal, but apt-rpm is used instead of dnf or similar.

It was created before Yellow Dog created yum, basically just modifying apt to work with rpm instead of dpkg.

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VoidDuck@reddit

The real successor of Mandriva is Mageia (where most former Mandriva devs went), not OpenMandriva.

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bl0nd3pr0gramm3r@reddit

I remember buying mandrake in 1999 boxed and was so excited to try it. I wrote blogs for one of the (at the time) popular Linux forums comparing the distros. Mandrake was my favorite until Ubuntu came along, only because it was the easiest to install. I’d admin’ed solaris and irix, couldn’t figure why the early Linux distros struggled so much with a smooth install.

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tumbleweed_enjoyer@reddit

I've clicked on link just to see a mandrake mention. It made me switch to Linux firstly back in the day. Today Mageia is more look alike of Mandrake (Mandriva).

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MsInput@reddit

What I remember is mandrake being the distro optimized for "pentium" which not all distros were at the time?

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kx233@reddit

It was my first distro as well. I think the CDs came with a PC magazine in Romania. It wasn't a particularly pleasant experience. I remember my modem didn't work, so I had to keep rebooting into windows to go online to read about how to get the modem working, then reboot into linux to try again.

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edparadox@reddit

Yup, I confirm, I started with Mandrake.

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xoteonlinux@reddit

French Police?

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redarrowdriver@reddit

I thought for sure that elementary would have been on there.

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CeleryShoddy3951@reddit

Mepis and Vector come to mind as does Sabayon.

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jnd-cz@reddit

I used Vector for a while. In the irc channel on freenode I met a guy which then lead to me to Arch and rest is history.

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Ezmiller_2@reddit

Mepis still lives on as MX, much the same minus Warren.

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LostGeezer2025@reddit

Mepis was useful straight out of the gate, and I was an advocate until Warren abandoned it to go patent trolling :(

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Baigeorgi@reddit

Knoppix was legendary and it's unofficially dead. It was the first live distro that booted on my ancient PC with AMD Athlon XP 2000+, 384MB DDR RAM and Nvidia GeForce 4 AGP 8x

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jnd-cz@reddit

First Knoppix, then I tried Slax which I think felt more modern and you could customize the modules. Slackware seem kinda dead to me too, haven't heard about it in a long time.

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bobsnopes@reddit

My first foray into Linux after it was shown on the Screensavers on TechTV.

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northrupthebandgeek@reddit

I miss TechTV. I still dream of building a Yoshi's Box of my own.

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ThoriumOverlord@reddit

Knoppix was a lifesaver for me on several "dead" systems back in the day that nobody else could get up and running. They'll have have my thanks.

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dot_aitch@reddit

Knoppix was the first distro I ever tried in the 2000s, around 2003 or 2004. There was a conference at my school about linux and open source and they gave me a cd for attending. I had such initial difficulties installing lol. When I finally installed on my machine, everytime I started my system many error messages appeared on boot before loggin in, but once everything was loaded, everything worked fine.

Total newbie and didn't know what I was doing lol had to go back to windows because i remember at the time office documents didn't play too nice and I really needed the compatbility because of schoolwork.

Great times though.

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Skaarj@reddit

Knoppix was legendary and it's unofficially dead.

I looked into this recently for another thread:

https://www.knopper.net/knoppix/knoppix910.html seems to be the most recent one online.

https://www.knopper.net/knoppix/knoppix920.html suggest you can get a newer one if you buy a German Linux magazine.

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Silver_Signature_750@reddit

Loved Knoppix, still have disks of it laying around. Used Knoppix to retrieve files from hard drives on borked windows systems.

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inn0cent-bystander@reddit

I had to use it to install Gentoo on my ancient laptop.

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CaptainObvious110@reddit

Wow

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XOmniverse@reddit

Seeing CentOS on here makes me sad

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BradGunnerSGT@reddit

I was surprised to learn that Slackware was still in active use and that Patrick Volkerding was still at the helm. I hadn’t even thought about Slackware in decades. I remember installing Slackware as my first Linux experience from a set of floppy disks back in 1995.

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TheDreadPirateJeff@reddit

Shit. You too? A set of floppy images I painstaking downloaded over the course of a week from a BBS with Usenet access using, at the time either a 9600 or 14.4k bps modem.

What fun times.

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pdp10@reddit

I made a 40-floppy Slackware install set (with X11) with the floppy drive on my SPARCstation 10/51. I had to suffer with 1.544 megabits of download.

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deja_geek@reddit

And then you get half way through the install and find out you have a bad disk.

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theaveragemillenial@reddit

Clear Linux?

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s0f4r@reddit

Project cancelled, entirely.

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rarsamx@reddit

A common thread on all of these is "commercial Linux".

There have been many efforts to do consumer level commercial Linux and all have died or dwindled.

I think that distros like Zorin will follow the same fate once funding dries up.

Though it was fun to run Yellow dog under the PS3 even if it was barely usable as a daily driver but great for schentific software which leveraged the GPUs.

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SEI_JAKU@reddit

This isn't a "common thread" at all. A great deal of Linux used to be commercial for a very long time, Linux was even sold boxed with no irony at all. Obviously, a lot of the great old distros are going to be commercial in such an environment. The situation today is fairly different.

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rarsamx@reddit

There is a difference between charging for the CDs and the shipping and a commercial distro.

I'm not throwing shade on commercial distros. It's just that at the end user level it's hard to make money.

For server side, Centos didn't die, it was killed because it prevented Redhat from making money. But we still have Rocky and Alma so 🤷 did it die or just the branding?

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rarsamx@reddit

There is a difference between charging for the CDs and the shipping and a commercial distro.

I'm not throwing shade on commercial distros. It's just that at the end user level it's hard to make money.

For server side, Centos didn't die, it was killed because it prevented Redhat from making money. But we still have Rocky and Alma so 🤷 did it die or just the branding?

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ThoriumOverlord@reddit

Probably nowhere close to pioneering in the grand scheme of Linux history, but as silly as it sounds, Hannah Montana Linux did help a friend's kid get into using computers. I heard of it a few weeks before we were talking and the topic came up about how she was apprehensive about using any kind of computer even Windows. Threw it on an older laptop that actually wound up helping her better than we thought with school because she happened to like the show and it help her get familiar with stuff easier until she grew out of it. Obviously an extremely niche case but there it is.

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budroid@reddit

Yellow Dog ... on playstation 2 ... damn good fun/experience installing it, but really useless as I didn't know linux and what to use it for. :>

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wintrmt3@reddit

Yellow dog never ran on the playstation 2, it was a powerpc distro and the ps2 was a mips.

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BortGreen@reddit

Were you actually able to run more distros on ps2 than the classic one?

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Mediocre-Struggle641@reddit

Genuine Linux user experience.

I think a lot of us tried it before we had a use for it.

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endoparasite@reddit

Yellow Dog Linux lives in dnf. Their yup was rewritten to yum and then transformed to dnf. But it was something great for rpm based distros. So it is not gone, exactly.

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hadrabap@reddit

Fortunately, RedHat/IBM is rewriting it in a programming language so there's a chance it will be usable. It's amazing how long we users tolerated using a product in a proof of concept stage.

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AirTuna@reddit

Python isn't classified as a programming language?

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loozerr@reddit

How's yum/dnf in poc stage? Just because your don't like the language?

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VoidDuck@reddit

Few people know where these acronyms actually come from:

YUM = Yellowdog Updater Modified

DNF = Dandified YUM

... funnily unserious for RHEL enterprise-grade software!

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endoparasite@reddit

Now some more people know. ;)

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Tall-Introduction414@reddit

I used to run Yellow Dog Linux (with mklinux) on a 68030 Macintosh Performa 550.

I massively regret giving away that machine. It was a gem.

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Admirable_Swimmer_97@reddit

Kurumin Linux save for Brazilian Linux.

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TalesM@reddit

Yes! It was my first experience with Linux. It had great live cd experience and I frequently used It to fiz/recover badly damaged windows installs.

Unfortunately every time I actually installed on my hd it just randomly borked the graphical mode after 1-2 weeks for no reason and I was too inexperienced to fix it through the command line by myself then.

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Oricol@reddit

Centos Stream is not a rolling release distro. How long are we going to push this bs?

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Big_Trash7976@reddit

Yes it is.

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grem75@reddit

It really isn't, it is just poor wording on Red Hat's part.

You can't just start on CentOS Stream 10 and end up on 11 without a deliberate upgrade when that is released.

Basically what it means is there is no CentOS Stream 10.1, 10.2 and so on, it is all just CentOS Stream 10. With RHEL you can force it to stay on a minor release like 10.1 and get only get critical security updates for that minor release.

The CentOS Stream cycle isn't really different from Debian stable. They have minor release versions, but that is really just when they cut a new installer. If you apt upgrade on a Debian 13.1 system you'll end up on 13.2 and there is no way to stop that.

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ThinDrum@reddit

The CentOS Stream cycle isn't really different from Debian stable.

To extend that analogy, running CentOS Stream is like running Debian stable with the stable-proposed-updates repository enabled. But it's nothing like running Debian testing/unstable, which is what "rolling release" would imply.

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grem75@reddit

You saw that quick, I deleted that last bit because I wasn't quite sure it was a perfect analogy.

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ThinDrum@reddit

I thought it was a good one. :)

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Kelvin62@reddit

Caldera was great until the developers lost their minds.

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SufficientMap6190@reddit

What happened?

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Kelvin62@reddit

The great SCO linux lawsuits

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MsInput@reddit

Was just about to mention that. I went through every distro i could find and I remember that one being painful.

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Admirable_Swimmer_97@reddit

Slackware, I used it and loved it.

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Positive-Goose9096@reddit

That one from Intel is still alive? The thing was fast.

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ivosaurus@reddit

It got shanked, died an extremely quick death. Alive one day, abandonware the next.

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0riginal-Syn@reddit

Clear Linux is dead. It lives on in a way with Solus as Ikey worked on both, and they share the concepts of statelessness and uses the clr-boot-manager.

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kurdo_kolene@reddit

Clear Linux? Nah, they killed it recently, along with the layoffs. A lit of Open Source lrojects got left without a maintainer because of these layoffs.

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xoteonlinux@reddit

Hard to tell, but ArchlinuxARM looks pretty dead to me. Made raspberry pis very useable imo.

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CryoRenegade@reddit

Wasn't there a RFC (or the arch version of those) for build targets other than x86_64 to start being introduced?

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xoteonlinux@reddit

ArchlinuxARM we're perfect for my raspis. Small, fast. I had a cool bootstrapping ansible playbook. Unfortunately support for older raspberry pis were dropped, despite the the fact that the pi1 B+ is still produced until 2030.

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Erchevara@reddit

Raspberry Pi support is kinda funny.

They support their devices for decades, but software support doesn't care about that.

For example, Jellyfin dropped support for Raspberry Pi hardware encoding (that the 4 has) because the 5 doesn't have it anymore.

It's more about "we live in a society". You could release v1 of a product with 50 years of support, but if 5 years later a newer version comes out and doesn't use a feature from v1, that feature is dropped with 45 years left.

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