[Intro]
Hello!
On August 25, 1991, a Unix-like kernel called Linux appeared, which was created by a programmer and hacker, and at that time an ordinary student, Linus Torvalds.
Yes, the one who dared to publicly show the middle finger of nVidia, which does not want to open the source code of its Linux drivers.
It all started with the book "Operating systems: Design and implementation" by Andrew Tanenbaum, in which the author talked about his own Minix, which was created for teaching Unix students and could run without problems on very weak computers of that time.
But, Linus didn’t like how Minix worked - the system had its own bugs and some shortcomings. And later he decided to write his system from scratch. More details are written in his author's book - "Just for fun". Quite a cool book, I read and advise you.
And on September 17, 1991, the Linux source code was released. Linus did not want to name the system after himself, at first he named the system as "Freax", but the teacher of the institute did not like this, who hosted the OS on the institute file server, where Linus studied
And the teacher just created a folder called "Linux".
As I already said, the OS itself is absolutely open in terms of source code and absolutely everyone can look at its code or build their own distribution.
Thanks to the Linux kernel, many popular distributions appeared, the Android system appeared and, in fact, influenced the smartphone market as a whole, the system became the basis for supercomputers and servers. Also, the distribution of the system, albeit small of course, was also received by the personal computer market.
And so, 30 years have passed since the creation of this kernel, and I had an idea why not look at the first versions of four different distributions: Ubuntu, Mint, Mandriva and Manjaro.
I understand that there are a huge number of different distributions, be it Fedora, Arch, and so on, but I decided to consider them. Therefore, I ask you to forgive me if that :)
The first distribution will be Ubuntu 4.10. The first version of Ubuntu was released in October 2004 under the codename Warty Warthog
Initially, this OS was just an add-on over another popular distribution kit of those years - Debian. The first version of Ubuntu is numbered not as 1.0, as you might think, but immediately 4.10.
The first number before the dot indicates the year the system was released, and the second its month - that is, 4.10 is the version made in October 2004. This version numbering method is still used today.
The releases of this system are released every six months - in April and October.
The installer here is a standard, pseudo-graphic format. To install the distribution kit, I chose English, since when choosing Russian, the system starts to "talk" in "strange characters" and may not work correctly in some places
After installation, we are greeted by the GNOME desktop environment version 2.8. The system itself does not contain as many applications as it does now, but there is a full-fledged office suite OpenOffice, a graphical editor GIMP, a standard set of games for the GNOME environment, Firefox version 0.9, an IRC client, a file manager Nautilus, an Internet messenger Gaim, Evolution mail viewer and Totem video player.
There are also several standard themes from the GNOME shell and two almost identical desktop backgrounds with the Ubuntu logo.
In 2010, Ubuntu acquired its own shell - Unity, but in 2016 its development stops and the system switches back to the GNOME shell.
What does Ubuntu look like now?
Ubuntu is still in production in 2021 and still runs on GNOME, with its own package repository and long-life versions of the system. Version 21.10 LTS is coming soon
The next distribution is Linux Mint. The first beta version appeared in May 2006 under the code name "Ada". The goal of the project is to provide "a modern, elegant and user-friendly operating system that is both powerful and easy to use."
This distribution is based on Ubuntu and Debian, as the logo in the bootloader and the word "ubuntu" in the username tells us a little about.
After inserting the image, not the installer is loaded, but immediately the system itself, that is, the LiveCD.
And the LiveCD already has an installer, which looks quite simple - you just tell the installer the paths for installing the system and configuring the bootloader.
The shell of this system is KDE version 3.5.4, which, with the help of an unusual theme, is slightly similar to Windows - in terms of windows, so exactly.
The set of graphic editors contains the same GIMP, but it already has the Krita program from KDE, there is also the Amarok music player, KMPlayer and Firefox version 1.5.0. However, there is a lot of proprietary software from KDE for various occasions, whether it is writing a document and viewing PDF or executing commands in the terminal and reading Email.
KDE has a simple interface and is easy to customize, which is pretty cool in principle.
What does Linux Mint look like now?
In 2021, Linux Mint has its own Cinnamon shell, which continues the GNOME 2 project, a huge number of fans and entire communities of enthusiasts in various countries, now Linux Mint provides full support for a variety of multimedia formats, includes some proprietary programs and comes bundled with an extensive set open source applications.
The distribution kit is still being updated and the latest version was released at the time of the video shooting quite recently, in July 2021.
The next distribution is called Linux Mandriva, previously called Linux Mandrake. Here we will consider two versions - the very first version, which is numbered 5.1 and version 9.2.
Version 5.1 was released on July 23, 1998 and it is considered the very first version of this distribution, despite its unusual numbering.
This distribution is based on Red Hat.
Well, we boot from disk and see this boot menu, which contains many answer options. In our case, we are installing the system from scratch, so just I press Enter and wait for the kernel to load.
We are greeted by a pseudo-graphic installer. The installation is almost standard: the choice of language, disk partition, selection of the installation source, partitioning and formatting of the disk.
And after that, as for me, the most interesting thing begins - the choice of components. After selecting the components, there is a normal copying of files and setting up packages. After that, there is a setting for the mouse, video adapter and various devices. Personally, I love that kind of attention to detail.
After such a long installation, we are greeted from the side by an ASCII art of a penguin on a blue background, an ASCII inscription LINUX and a terminal - that's all.
The system comes with the first version of KDE, but unfortunately it does not start for me. Like on VirtualBox, like on VMware, like on 86Box, the result is the same - doesn't start and just displays a black screen.
Now it's time to move on to version 9.2, which was released in October 2003. Everything is much more beautiful here.
The entire installation is done entirely in graphical mode. On the left is the number of steps you will go through before and after installation.
The stages themselves have hardly changed: the choice of the type of mouse, keyboard layout, language. But to them were added such steps as the choice of a combination of switching keyboard layouts, setting the security level in the system.
The stage of selecting components has changed, it has become clearer, and when you hover over any item in the list, the system begins to describe the list of programs of that component.
After that comes the stage of copying files, which are accompanied by various advertising messages.
Almost at the end of the installation, a summary of the settings appears, which helps to check if you specified everything correctly, and if something is wrong, then try to change it
The installer does the final step... and hurray - you can reboot!
After restarting, we are greeted by the First Start Wizard, which allows us to prepare the computer for a new user: customize the KDE shell theme and the operation of the email client.
And after that, we are finally greeted by a desktop. In English, but as for me, there is nothing wrong with that.
KDE here is version 3.1.3. The standard set of programs here is very boring, there is not even an office suite. But on the other hand, it is possible to deeply customize both the shell and the system.
What does Linux Mandriva look like now?
No way..
The development of the distribution was discontinued in 2012, and the owner company itself was declared bankrupt and closed in May 2015.
However, some former employees created a fork of Mandriva called Mageia in 2010, and since 2013 a caring community has been developing the OpenMandriva Lx project, and this project has quietly survived to this day.
Also, on the basis of Linux Mandriva, Russian developers have made their own distribution kit called ROSA Linux.
In addition to the usual version of the distribution, there was also a corporate version - Mandriva Linux Powerpack, which included commercial programs and modules, but was available only for a certain pay.
Finally, the last distribution is Linux Manjaro. The first release took place on July 10, 2011. This distribution is based on Arch Linux, but has its own set of repositories.
The goal of creating a distribution is to be inexperienced user-friendly while maintaining the power of Arch as a foundation, Pacman's package manager, and compatibility with the original Arch User Repository's directory.
The desktop for this distribution here is Xfce 4.8.0. In standard included the GNOME video player, the AbiWord word processor, the Firefox 5.0 browser, the GIMP editor, the file manager and other small applications from different shells and from different developers are immediately included.
The system installer here works in my case in an extremely strange way - after choosing a language and pressing the "Next" button, it crashes.
What does Linux Manjaro look like now?
10 years after the release of the first version, the distribution kit is distributed not only with the XFCE desktop, but also with GNOME and KDE Plasma. There is an official edition without a graphical environment.
The community also supports various builds of the system that contain a different graphical shell.
The official latest version at the time of this video was released on July 14, 2021.
As a result, I can say that, there is no ideal Linux distribution.
Everyone chooses for himself the distribution kit that he likes the most and generally to his liking: even if someone builds Arch or Gentoo on their own, and someone just takes Linux Mint for use and he will be quite happy.
Here the choice is only yours.
And various battles like "which distribution is better", as for me, do not make sense - you will only spend time on clarifying this issue, and maybe in addition to this, you will spend your nerves.
That's all. Thanks for watching, I hope you were interested! Subscribe to the channel so as not to miss new videos, see you soon!