Linux

OG Suse 6 but quickly switched to Debian and never left.

Ubuntu, maybe version 5.10 or or 6.4.

Gentoo, to really learn the innards. The Gentoo Wiki was a great resource.

First Linux I ever tried was Corel Linux, booted from a gaming-magazine's CD. It worked, appart from the mouse cursor. It was there. I just couldn't see it.

Fedora core 2

Slackware 1.01

Must have been Suse 6 or 7 (I think 7.0) around 2000, as I got a physical copy as a prize on a lan party and I actually installed it...

But then I needed the space for something else, probably Counter-Strike and custom maps. :D

Early Mandriva with KDE 3.4 or 3.5 I think, but I can barely remember anything with clarity. It couldn't have been bad though, since I haven't used Windows on my own devices since 😉.

From my foggy memory, I think it was good for my then nocoder self, easy to use, stable, relatively lite, and had good looks.

I missed the Mandrake and pre-Fedora Red Hat era, but not by much.

Soft Landing Systems (SLS). So many disks!

Red hat (in '99). I chose it because it was included on the disc that came with an IT magazine I bought at the time

I moved to Linux From Scratch a few years later, then to Debian. I have been on Debian based OSes since then, I like Mint at the moment

Knoppix was my favourite recovery and rescue live CD

I think it was actually DBAN I dabbled with firstly, and then like you Knoppix. I played too much later with microkernel distros like DSL / Tinycore, then Debian / Ubuntu's etc.

RedHat 3.0, kernel 1.2, early 1996. I was a contract developer and took a job for a customer to update an in-house curses app on SCO Unix. Aside from a few lab uses in college, I had never used Unix before. I was like, welp, I'll just install RedHat, do the work there, and recompile the app at the customer's site on their SCO machine. Stupidly charged into a massive learning curve (unix vs linux, gmake vs make, gcc vs cc, ncurses vs curses, ... none of which I had any familiarity with), but, amazingly, I got the job done! Kept RedHat as a second boot option on my workstation, and continued to use it more and more... 30 years later, I'm typing this on a MacBook Air running NixOS.

Ubuntu 12.04. I really tried to use it as a daily but wine wasn't as good back then, a lot of apps I wanted to run were also platform specific. If a package wasn't in your distros repo you had to try and build it from source which was really difficult for someone just trying to start with Linux. I tried again with Ubuntu 16.04 and it was better but still wasn't quite there.

Fast forward to now and I'm actually dailying Bazzite 42. I'm not sure if wine has just improved a ton or proton has helped out a lot but windows compatibility has improved so much in the last decade. As much as everyone hates Electron for being heavier than native apps I would prefer an Electron app over no Linux version. Actually a lot of the apps I want to run now ship Linux versions so I don't even need wine for most things.

Flatpaks and appimages with Gear Lever have made installing apps on Linux as easy as Windows and MacOS. It might not seem like it but it's come a long way

Moblin 2.1 in live environment I think. Ubuntu 11.04 a bit later, which actually had WiFi drivers, but I needed to get them to a thumb drive, because they weren't shipped by default.

Then random Ubuntu variants (including Linux Mint) before getting back to Windows (8.1 and then 10), but I am back to Linux with Debian 12, and now 13.

Yellow Dog Linux

Manjaro. And even though I left it for good a while ago, I still sometimes wake up in cold sweat remembering these dark times.

Not sure, I installed a distro on my laptop when I was like 11 but I don't remember which one it was.

Tried Ubuntu 20.04 in a VM, then screwed around with a couple other distros in Vbox. Eventually dailied Ubuntu MATE, then Mint after my MATE install borked. Got a new laptop, installed FerenOS, installed ZorinOS after I couldn't figure out how to bind the start menu to Meta (for some reason it was unbound), then eventually moved to EndeavourOS (where I am now). Might try Aurora on my main laptop eventually.

I installed Ubuntu decades ago, then moved and never used it again. The first distro I actually used was Peppermint. Loved it.

Downloading a kernel source tarball, compiling it on Minix and writing a Lilo boot sector. Sort of an early LFS.

Red Hat, at Uni.

Caldera. I don't know why I picked that. Later I went SuSE.

I've been running Debian for long while, although work was RHEL and SuSE

Raspbian Wheezy. I remember learning how to use apt-get because I wanted to see a Pi 1B run Minecraft. Minecraft Pi Edition was the first apt-get install I ever did.

Brand spanking new Kali linux after it was redone from Backtrack.

Thought I was cool for 5 seconds until I saw the Kali forums tearing into the thousands of idiots like me who hadn't touched Linux before but somehow managed to jump through the sketchy Debian installer to load an OS with a metric ton of offensive security tools that none of use knew how to use.

Eventually played with Ubuntu for home use, disliked it, tried Debian which was nice for server, saw Linus Torvalds uses Fedora for user friendly experience, and ended up there.

Slackware, in 1999.

Ubuntu; I tend towards Debian Mint, if I'm choosing something more mainstream these days, but I main Guix, now.

Knoppix here too. It was the only thing that felt "safe" enough to experiment with. First proper install was Slackware, I think.

my friend (who was the it manager at one of my first jobs) had a fedora machine in 2007ish? and i loved using it. i only used linux for servers and websites for the longest time before i took the plunge into personal use though so my first personal distro was linux mint earlier this year.

Ubuntu, I was drawn in with the 3D cube and the ability to play games. The only game I had compatible then was TF2. So I left.

Back to it full time now, almost all games work, and on Mint

Fedora Core 6. Package manager kept failing so I couldn't update or install software. So I tried Ubuntu 7.04. That one worked. Had a bunch of animations and stuff that made windows xp look like a child's toy. Been using Linux as my daily ever since