greetings

I know there are some members here who had used linux way back in the day and still continue on using linux today. Instead of asking a repetitive question you see in many forums like what is your favorite linux distro, I want to ask what linux distribution did you like using in the past that unfortunately became discontinued?

For me I liked using caldera edesktop and lycoris linux. If you don't have an oldie distro to post, perhaps there is a linux distribution you liked that unfortunately became forked.

I'm not a distro-hooper in that I am strongly committed to and dearly love Slackware since way back in the day at v7 but to this day I like to try out other distros with different goals, niches, and end users in mind. I often find this instructive, helpful and interesting in understanding a wider vision of what is Linux and what is possible and at what cost. In the early days I read/heard about Corel Linux for easy Windows migration. I heard it was a well designed system, largely based on Debian but claiming compatibility with RPMs so I tried it out.

It was quite good (despite the condescending hatred it engendered from my leet friends) and I learned a lot from it after I stopped trying to turn it into Slackware and just take it for what it was. I think it was in it's third iteration when it was bought out by Xandros. It was good enough that I paid for 3 versions of it, by this time largely as something to gain converts from Windows as I was "evangelical" in those days and it was a hand-holder distro - not something I could or wished to use for my main but a valid Linux distro with decent support.... that is until they "got in bed" with Microsoft and made a bid to "go Enterprise". They basically dropped the ball on SOHO and shortly after apparently failed to meet Enterprise requirements as they went out of business.

I'm glad I tried it and don't even mind the expenditure since I learned what the tradeoffs generally are when Linux "goes automatic" and heads toward "free or cheaper windows land", solidifying my growing appreciation for what Slackware offers. I suppose I could have done similarly with Mac but OSX didn't show up until years later and cost a lot more. I still try out new distros to keep my hand in play, see what's shaking, and to be able to talk about them from my own experience rather than adopting blindly someone elses.

There were quite a few which were good and are probably missed by many. Fuduntu and SalineOS I both rated 8/10 and recommended to beginners, Saluki was a very nice Puppy derivative, and Swift was a worthy competitor to AntiX in the small but perfectly formed category. Wolvix was a Slackware derivative which I hardly remember, but I know it was quite popular.

None of these were ever regulars of mine: Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS on the desktop, and Salix on the little laptop have always been good enough for me. I did use Debian for all of three weeks between Fedora and CentOS: not a happy experience.

I had a boxset of the very first version of Mandrake, which IIRC had the first release of KDE. I had a good time playing DOOM on it, setting anime wallpaper, and checking out the GUI configuration tools.

I loved the lightness and portability of DSL and Feather, but both are dead now (or so I think).

I enjoyed mandrake in the beginning as well, the later versions not so much. I switched to gentoo for a while after that.

I've purchased a box set of xandros for $29 at my computer store. I think it supported more hardware and multimedia codecs than the typical linux distros at that time.

I became interested in Fuduntu in their last days when they were discussing forking Opensuse. I had high hopes since one of Fuduntu's goals was to avoid Systemd. That would have been a very interesting fork since Systemd is close to mandatory in Opensuse now.
By far though, my favorite distro that has dies is SolusOS. Ikey and the community had high hopes and real enthusiasm for the distro. Consort desktop environment, moving to pisi package manager, recreating Debian Wheezy's package tree into pisi.
I never used version 1; but i had extremely high hopes for version 2. I was (and still am) using Slackware. I was waiting for the release, and considering a distro move. Alas, it never happened.
Consort was released though, so it wasn't all for naught. I tried to find out if Consort is still being worked on not long ago, but as far as i can tell, it isn't wich is a real shame.

First distro I ever tried was a version of Lycoris. I couldn't get my modem to work with it so I eventually gave up and went back to windows. I then used a late version of RedHat (version 9 I think?) which I played with for a while on a spare PC. I then used ubuntu when it came out much later because they offered free shipping on CDs which was great because at the time I was on dial up and I wouldn't have been able to download it in any decent amount of time. Obviously ubuntu is still around, but I do miss the early ubuntu releases as they have a real different feel than the ones from the last few years.

So yeah, Lycoris is the only one that is not around anymore but I did like it. A few months ago I got inquisitive enough to find an ISO of it and was quite happy to see its old face again

YOPER...

http://www.linuxscreenshots.org/?release=Yoper%202010

KONGONI...

http://www.linuxscreenshots.org/?rel...i%202011%20RC2

love it !!!

I had tried Yoper 3.0 a while ago. It seemed like a decent distro. I still have a couple releases on my hard drive.

Caldera's OpenLinux.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldera_OpenLinux

Crux !

Crux isn't discontinued is it?

Why? It is still alive. Or am I making a mistake?