linuxmemes

Oooh yeah, baby, let's debug the networking stack together!

She went for him in late 1993:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds

Linus Torvalds is married to Tove Torvalds (née Monni), a six-time Finnish national karate champion, whom he met in late 1993. He was running introductory computer laboratory exercises for students and instructed the course attendees to send him an e-mail as a test, to which Tove responded with an e-mail asking for a date.

Fedora won't have been around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_Linux

Fedora Linux[10] is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. It was originally developed in 2003 as a continuation of the Red Hat Linux project.

It looks like there were Linux distributions at the time, but they were very early:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution

Early distributions included:

• Torvalds' "Boot-Root" images, from v0.95a onwards "Root" was maintained by Jim Winstead Jr., the aforementioned disk image pair with the kernel and the absolute minimal tools to get started (0.10: 4 November 1991)[12][13][14][15]

• MCC Interim Linux (3 March 1992)[16]

• TAMU Linux, based on MCC with simpler installation and X11 (14 July 1992)[17]

• Softlanding Linux System (SLS) which included the X Window System and was the most comprehensive distribution for a short time (15 August 1992)[18]

• H.J. Lu's "bootable rootdisks" (23 September 1992),[19][20] and "Linux Base System" (5 October 1992)[21][22]

• Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X, a commercial distribution (alpha: 8 December 1992)

• The two oldest, still active distribution projects started in 1993. The SLS distribution was not well maintained, so in July 1993 a new SLS-based distribution, Slackware, was released by Patrick Volkerding.[23] Also dissatisfied with SLS, Ian Murdock set to create a free distribution by founding Debian in August 1993, with first public BETA released in January 1994 and first stable version in June 1996.[24][25]

I think that there are two possible takeaways from this:

• Not clear what distro was used

if any

but if it was, it won't have been a presently existing one. It's possible that he was just rolling his own setup, not using a distro at all.

• Linus's date with Tove derived from an email exchange. What ninja chicks look for in a guy is possibly an email client, not a Linux distribution at all. It sounds like Linus was probably using Pine at the time (though someone could go dig up mail headers from old emails to check).