Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, to my pleasant surprise, I discovered that I started using Fedora personally with Fedora Core 4, and not 5 like I had previously thought. This makes me feel better as I’m glad I started using Fedora earlier, because I like to think I recognized the importance of a completely (or as close as possible) free operating system (free here means freedom, not just free of cost).
At the time, I was content running it as a dual-boot system and just playing around with it. By the time Fedora Core 5 came around, though, I was giving serious thought to using Fedora (Core, at the time) as my primary OS. The complete transition happened, I believe, with Fedora 7 (which is also the year that Fedora Core & Fedora Extras combined, creating…Fedora!), where I relegated Windows XP to just being a spare OS for the very few things it does that I am unable to do with a completely free operating system (yet).
My experience with Fedora Core 4 was overwhelmingly positive. I am sure I was impressed by the sheer amount of Free Software that was available for it as well as the elegance of a system that was not originated in Redmond. I was and still am very pleased with the way Gnome works, and that was a big factor for me at the time as it is now. I do wonder, though, if I downloaded & installed Fedora Core 4 today, what my experience would be link….hmm…
I remember seeing Fedora first in use as Fedora Core 2, when I was surprised someone was using it, as the name “Fedora Core” made me think it was the core of an operating system, but not the complete one. I don’t know how or why I picked that up, but it is likely related to the perception that Fedora is not really meant to be used, and it is just a development platform (a blatantly false accusation). I do know that I heard of Fedora Core when it came out, but again, my perception was likely incorrect at the time, thus causing me to adopt using it until quite late. I had been using different GNU/Linux distributions since I was a freshman in college (can anyone say 1999?). At the time, I recall trying “Corel Linux” – yes, I…don’t know what I was thinking. I do remember it being based on Debian, though. I also remember it significantly for a large amount of disk activity. I don’t remember much else other than me deleting it shortly afterward. 😉 Other flavors of GNU/Linux I tried were Red Hat, and that’s about all I can remember now.
So, anyway, this might be a good idea for a meme. My first Fedora. Talk about when you first started using it, why you did, and how the experience was.