Review: Our favourite projects of all time (UPDATED)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 02, 2023,
updated Jan 02, 2023

Leading up to this week, and its 1,000th edition of DistroWatch Weekly, we wanted to mark the occasion by having our contributors talk about Linux distributions which were special to them in some way. It could be a favourite distribution, it could be their first, or even one they don't currently use but which encapsulates something special.

I've been using Linux for over 20 years and writing for DistroWatch for over 12. I have probably test driven an average of two distributions per week during my time with this publication, which means I've used in the range of 1,200 versions of Linux distributions for over a day. I'd also estimate that, including brief first-look experiences, I've probably run over 500 distinct Linux projects over the past decade, between writing reviews, evaluating projects on the waiting list, and gathering information for the DistroWatch database.

Narrowing this collection of experiences enough to focus on just one project that would stand out as being special to me was going to be difficult.

I thought about revisiting my first Linux distribution, a long since extinct, minimal flavour of Slackware called Pygmy Linux. Armed with no compiler, desktop, or package manager its claim to fame was it could be run from a DOS/Windows partition and fit on about five floppy disks. I was looking for a free flavour of Unix I could run at home (and download over a dial-up connection) with minimal destruction to my existing system. Pygmy Linux, with its extremely limited, bare bones approach, proved to be a worthwhile learning tool for someone trying to wrap his head around shell scripting and Linux internals.

I could talk about my first full-time Linux distro, the one which made me believe Linux could replace Windows on my computer eventually: Phat Linux. Phat was much larger than Pygmy, featured the KDE 2 desktop, and was based on Mandrake Linux. It, like its parent, is long since gone, but it got me using Linux as my primary desktop operating system.

Read on

UPDATE

• 20 Years of DistroWatch [LWN.net]

  DistroWatch Weekly celebrates its 1000th issue and 20 years of publication.