Mandrake. Emailed to me on a CD. I feel old.

Mandrake in 2003, I was young and didn't know what I was doing...

It was no distro, it was kernel 0.99 and bunch of gnu utils on like 8 floppy disks, and 10 more floppies or so for X11. I was running it on a 486DX50 iirc.

Red Hat Linux back in 1999.

Slackware, dont remember the version but it was 1996.

Ubuntu. I couldn't afford a new laptop for college so I desperately googled for some way to make my old machine last.

Mandrake 7 was the first one I installed on my pc. In those days you could buy a boxed version with about 10 cds to install from.

Mandrake 9.1.

Slackware, and it took years before I tried again.

A friend of mine gave me an official Ubuntu 4.10 CD and that was my first Linux distro that I have tried.

I still have that CD.

Knoppix Live CD back in 2004!

Ubuntu... before Canonical nuked it.

Linux 0.2, not.joking. a friend came with it to me, just downloaded from a newsgroup (I think) around 1992, on a floppy! We tested it on my PC, didn't know what to do with it, and promptly removed it. A few years later we gave it another try, and the rest is history

Slackware, installed from a big stack of 3.5" disks

Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake :)

Red hat linux

@deepinder_brar Ubuntu 8.10

Linux Mint. It's been a while since I used Mint now, but I do missTimeshift

Ubuntu (can't remember if it was 6 or 8) was the first distro that I used, my cousin and another family friend used it and I got interested and asked to have it installed on my home desktop.

For years, every LTS release of Ubuntu I installed as dual boot to try and experiment for a few weeks and then uninstalled it, using Windows for everything.

2 years ago, I decided that I wanted to try other distributions and to switch and use Linux as my daily driver, so I installed Manjaro on my laptop and I have been using it daily since.

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn

Mandrake ! Autumn 1999 if I remember well...

Knoppix in 2006, arch today.

Gentoo.

Mint, because it's what my dad put on my first laptop when I was like 10 or something. I remember playing minetest and FTL on it.

Slackware. Fall of '93. Well over 20, 3.5" diskettes. Sacrificed my OS/2 machine to do this.

Slackware. Version 3.1 if I remember rightly, with Linux kernel 2.19.x.

It was installed from floppy disks, you needed about 10 of them to do a full install including X Windows.

At the time (1997 or 1998) I only had dial up internet at home, so over the period of several days I brought blank floppies in to work, downloaded the relevant images and copied them on to the disks.

I then spent most of a weekend trying to persuade an (even then elderly) PS/2 with 4 MB of RAM to become a Linux box. Got there in the end, though!

Started with Red Had 6 and then moved to Fedora Core 1. Have been on Fedora releases since.

Debian Woody PPC. I also downloaded Yellow Dog but don't remember ever installing or using it.

DSL (Damn Small Linux) was what I started plying with, but my first daily driver was PCLOS.

Redhat. When it came time to upgrade i dug myself into rpm hell so many times. I struggled, had to reinstall. Next redhat upgrade, same experience.
I tried debian potato, and dist-upgraded to next stable with no issues. I was floored. Have been dist-upgrading ever since. And run a few hundreds of debian servers.

Knoppix. Was recommended it by someone I chatted with at the time and that did not go well. This was not Knoppix's fault though, but rather me not knowing what I got into. Things worked as one would expect, the applications that were included ran without issues, but the issue came when wanted to install software. At the time didn't know anything about linux, so didn't know how to use the terminal to install software, and when trying to install new ones using exe files that didn't work for now obvious reasons. So threw that stuff out and went back to windows, and didn't touch Linux again until Ubuntu Hardy Heron which went a lot better.

Some version of Ubuntu. I forgot which version number.

Backtrack then crunchbang. Eventually I moved to arch. I've been using debian and mint lately though.

Attempted to use Red Hat 4 (pre-RHEL), but couldn't work out the partitioning. However, I tried SuSE Linux Personal 7.0 soon afterwards and YaST gave me a much smoother time when installing everything; I've been using SUSE/openSUSE ever since as my primary Linux distro.

Hard to remember because it was in 2000 on my gateway PC, but I remember trying to setup Gentoo and redhat and knoppix and failing miserably.

Redhat 4.? I'm not really sure of the precise version but it was sometime in the late 99 or early 2000.

VoyagerOS - no idea about anything other than Windows being a thing, less of a clue about what I was doing, think I read something about it being lightweight and guessed it fit my needs.

The very first Linux? That would be DSL (Damn Small Linux).

I don't know whether it still exists but in 2003-ish, I was looking for something on-the-go and came across DSL.

I recently (2 years now) started using Linux as a daily driver again. Had to learn a lot of new things. This time someone on GamingOnLinux adviced me to start with Mint. But it wasn't for me. So it's been a great journey.

Arch. Went in at the deep end.

Suffice to say that I no longer use Linux. Got it built with relative ease though inevitably hit issues along the way, but got tired of having to use terminal for everything. Would not recommend Arch as your first distro unless you already love existing in a terminal.

Oh god it's been so long (20+ years). I only remember that whatever distro I installed had that great game preinstalled in which Tux slides down a mountain. Ah... Nice memories of easier times.

Slackware 0.97 (if I recall correctly) it must’ve been in 1993 I think

I daily drove Puppy Linux live booted off a USB for a few months probably 15 years a go when my hard drive died and I couldn't afford a new one.

This is the weirdest attempt to get my website security question answers... But... Slackware on floppies.

10 years ago Arch and it was a bloodbath. No background and both IT bros said I should not do it. Took about 4 days and countless rescues, so much manual fstab editing, looking up what the thing I destroyed even is. Glorious times. Dual boot because I thought I might need windows, not anymore.

Slackware, floppies, my 486.