20 Years of GNU/Linux

20 years ago today, Friday, 13 February 2004, I finally installed Mandrake Linux 9.2 successfully after various failed attempts within the previous few months (I burned the CDs in late 2003).

I dual-booted between it and an illegitimate Windows XP Professional installation (with a certain infamous volume licensing key), which I was using previously. For the desktop environment, I used the default KDE 3.1. I initially expected it to be difficult to connect to the Internet, but it detected my Ethernet card’s settings automatically. (I initially (falsely) believed it had detected the settings from the Windows XP installation.) Hardware at this time consisted of a 400 MHz Celeron Mendocino (cf Pentium II) and 128 or 256 MB (I forget which) of RAM, the same PC I had been using since circa 2002.

I have run various other GNU/Linux distributions since then, off-and-on with the BSDs (specifically OpenBSD and FreeBSD) starting in 2013. Those distributions included Fedora (then known as Fedora Core), Ubuntu (including Kubuntu and Xubuntu), Gentoo, Arch, and Slackware. I am currently a Debian user, having switched back to GNU/Linux from the BSDs because of hardware and software compatibility issues.