If you want to look at the history of Linux, you can hardly escape talking about Debian. Debian has played a major role as part of the Linux ecosystem, and it'd be hard to imagine what the world would look like without it. But it wasn't always a major player — in fact, Debian wasn't even the first Linux distribution. But Debian founder Ian Murdock did things a bit differently, and that has made all the difference.

When talking about Linux, users often think about the distributions they use — Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, openSUSE, and so on. But in the beginning, there were no Linux distributions — users had to go through quite a bit of fuss to have a working Linux-based system. The first distributions haven't survived the test of time, but one of the earliest — Slackware Linux — is still going strong after nearly 18 years.