Source & Independents
1996-2002. Gentoo compiles from source. Arch ships rolling-release before that was a category. Mandrake puts KDE on the desktop. The Linux landscape fragments productively.
8 moments in this segment.
- - Mandrake / Mandriva. Founder: Gaël Duval · First release: 1998 Gaël Duval forked Red Hat 5.1 in July 1998 to add KDE as the default desktop, a heretical move at the time. Mandrake quickly became the friendliest distro for new users in the late-90s/early-2000s; renamed Mandriva in 2005 after a trademark spat. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2015; the OpenMandriva community fork continues.
- - Gentoo. Founder: Daniel Robbins · First release: 1999 Daniel Robbins shipped Gentoo 1.0 in March 2002 (the 1999 "Enoch Linux" prototype was its precursor). Every package built from source via Portage, inherited from the FreeBSD ports tree, so the user controls every USE flag. Compilation takes hours but the binary fits the hardware perfectly. The "I use Gentoo" Reddit copypasta started here.
- - Knoppix. Founder: Klaus Knopper · First release: 2000 Klaus Knopper's 2000 release of the first usable live-CD Linux, boot a fully-functional desktop from a CD-ROM, no install. Knoppix popularised the live-medium pattern that every major distro adopted within five years.
- - Damn Small Linux. Founder: John Andrews · Robert Shingledecker · First release: 2001 A complete graphical Linux distribution that fit on a 50MB business-card CD. Could run from a USB stick or a Pendrive in 16MB of RAM. The favorite distro of mid-2000s Linux gift-giving.
- - Arch Linux. Founder: Judd Vinet · First release: 2002 Judd Vinet released Arch 0.1 in March 2002, inspired by CRUX. Rolling-release from day one, no point releases, just `pacman -Syu` for the rest of time. The Arch Wiki becomes the unofficial Linux documentation. Arch users were the first to make "btw I use Arch" a personality trait.
- - CRUX. Founder: Per Lidén · First release: 2002 Per Lidén's 2002 minimalist source-based distribution that directly inspired Arch. BSD-style init, tar.gz-based ports system, no glibc bloat. Still maintained; remains the textbook example of "as simple as possible."
- - PCLinuxOS. Founder: Bill Reynolds (Texstar) · Based on: Mandrake · First release: 2003 Texstar's 2003 fork of Mandrake, added the KDE-first polish that mainstream Mandrake was already losing. For a 2007 window, the most-downloaded distribution on DistroWatch.
- - Sabayon Linux. Founder: Fabio Erculiani · Based on: Gentoo · First release: 2005 Sabayon (named for the Italian dessert) wrapped Gentoo with a graphical installer and pre-built binary packages, the first easy way to use Gentoo without compiling everything yourself.
