On Thu, Jan 22, 2026 at 3:55 AM Steve Litt via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote: Thanks for that posting! But from 1998-2001, and again 2008-2015, I out-hopped any frog. Starting
with Redhat 5.1 in 1998, back when Redhat was an exemplary steward of Free Software, I then tried and failed with Debian, went with Caldara, then Corel Linux, and finally just after Y2K, Mandrake, which had everything I needed.
Ah, Corel Linux. I still have some swag for that. What a missed opportunity. After a brief stint with Slackware I became Caldera's first Canadian reseller ... but tinkered with a bunch of them. Distro hopping was encouraged, pre-2000s the most popular CD set (pictured below) had Slackware, RedHat and Debian. After Caldera withered away as a good distro (but before the SCO reverse-takeover debacle) I settled in with Mandrake; it and SuSE were the only ones going all-in with KDE from the early beginning. I had the opportunity to visit many of the early distro offices, and the Mandrake one in old Paris was a hoot. They never recovered from the forced merger with Connectiva, there was no chemistry. Not as bad a culture clash as SuSE/Novell, but it did tank the quality of the product. As a guy who has made his living repairing electronics and software, and as
a guy who bossed his computer rather than letting his computer boss him, I knew I couldn't have such monolithic entanglement on my computer,
I had a different perspective. To me the OS is a means to an end, not the end in itself. I want it to recognize and function smoothly with my hardware, efficiently launch the apps which use that hardware, offer me some decent management tools, and otherwise be invisible to me. When it came to the inner workings I just cared about what Just Worked. Most of my 2010s was with Kubuntu, but then they started taking the user base for granted and what we now call enshittification crept in as Canonical geared up to take on Red Hat in the corporate world. This is embodied by the use of snaps; a wheel-reinventing, proprietary, single point of failure that Canonical wanted and nobody else. My liking of KDE led me to Neon and eventually the rest of the path I have documented elsewhere. - Evan
