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.

Lindows lmao

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.

It's all a blur because I was maybe like 6 or 7 at the time, but I'm fairly certain it was Red Hat. The original, not RHEL.

I have vivid memories of playing a game that involved collecting gems and avoiding falling rocks in a maze, similar to Boulder Dash or Emerald Mine. I have no idea what it was, but I know it wasn't Rocks'n'Diamonds because I played that a lot and the graphics were different.

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.

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.

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.

Debian 2.2 on a consulting job in 2001. I'd used Unix mainframes in college, but other than that had only ever done work on DOS and Windows before then. Didn't think much of it at the time, though it was familiar and easy to work with. Certainly a far cry from the experience we all have with Linux today.

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

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.

Ubuntu sometime in the late 2000's. I remember a friend showing me virtual desktops that rotated between each other.

I dual booted my machine and it was amazing... For 10 seconds until I realized thats all it did. When right back to windows.

I am not really sure but I think it was yggdrasil. I remember loading a ton of floppies one after the other. 5 1/4 inch ones too!

DLD 5 in 1998, a colleague at work handed me a CDR and said "i think this might be something for you", and he was right ;)

Ubuntu back in 2005.

Kubuntu 6.06. Got the CD with a computer magazine that had a good tutorial on how to install the thing next to a pre-existing Windows partition. To this day I miss the look of KDE 3!

Installed and tinkered with Mandrake 6.0 First full time: Ubuntu 04-10. Warty Warthog

Linux Mint

Slackware 7, year 2000. Never seen linux before. Thanks to help from IT geek next door managed to boot net-installer it from single 3.5". After many hours managed do finally get xfree86 working. As far as I remember it was running with KDE.

I can't remember if it was Ubuntu or openSUSE, but I read about both in a PC magazine around 2005-2006 and had to try them out. I'm guessing it was probably openSUSE as it has a cooler logo.

Some version of Ubuntu. I got a free laptop that didn't have an operating system so I just put linux on it because I didn't want to buy windows.

Ubuntu 8.04, and I got it on one of those free discs they used to send out.

Not sure but it was slackware or red hat in 1997

Redhat lol back in the 90’s

Deepin

RedHat 5.2, purchased in a plastic-wrapped cardboard box from Best Buy. God I'm old 😭

Started using Linux a year ago. My friend recommended Manjaro (not a good distro) because he himself used Arch. I was a little to stupid to use Manjaro at the time so I moved to Ubuntu, then Kali and finally Arch which is what I use now. I have practiced some distrohopping with Arco, Vanilla, Archcraft and my favourite Gentoo.In the future I want to dabble with LFS and Gentoo but I do see myself using Arch from this point forward. Linux is such an amazing operating system and it has taught me very much. Also use Neovim.

Ubuntu with Gnome Classic.

My first distro was OpenSUSE (or SuSE Linux back then) sometime around 2002. I picked it up out of curiosity in a book shop. They were selling the handbook, bundled with a DVD with the actual OS. It looked something like this. And thus started decades of distro hopping.

God I am old, I remember before kali rebranded 😭.

Phlak and Knoppix were mine. Neither lasted long since I couldn't install it on my home computer. The first one I installed as a dual boot was Ubuntu. While I have strayed from them over the years they have been my daily driver for the better part of 15 years

My first distro was SlackWare 7.

I'm not anywhere near my desktop(s) but it has largely been an Ubuntu box of differing flavors.

Though I experimented with Yoper, Knollix, SuSe, Mint, and a few other distros.

I don't actively use Linux anymore but I think I first used puppy Linux in middle school. I was a strange kid and got a kick out of anything that could run off a flash drive.

Then I'd use like Ubuntu, lubuntu, and mint typically. I'm back to using windows because I only really use my computer for gaming and I honestly had a rare gift for bricking distros by installing something wrong.

I probably played with some Ubuntu live CDs beforehand, since you could order them for free, but the first time actually using it was back in 2004-2005. I had gotten one of the first AMD 64 bit laptops, with 32 bit Windows and I wanted to see what 65 bit “could do”. So I installed Ubuntu as a dual boot setup. Worked quite well! I played around a lot with customising the experience, making my desktop 3D with Compiz. Great times! I also remember the lack of game support it had, I could only play OpenTTD on it. How times have changed! I’m now running Linux full time on my game machine (EndeavourOS) and haven’t touched Windows in a long time.

I started back on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. It was so much prettier than Windows, it got 11 yr. old me into hosting web servers

SuSe Linux from an installation CD about twenty years ago. A right royal pain in the arse it was.

I forget whether I did Mandrake or Redhat first. This was on a 3.5" floppy, heh.

Old GenToo, when I finally got off of dial-up, was an interesting experience. Building everything from the ground up definitely taught me a lot.

These days, I mostly use Ubuntu at home (and various at work). I may give mint a shot, however.

Mandrake like in 2003.

I spent weeks installing Linux in 2002, finally got it up and running and was like wow this is barely usable.

Turns out I had a fundamental misunderstanding, and there were pre-made distributions of it for you to use! Took me two years to realize that. Picked up Ubuntu and it just worked (other than wifi)

I think it was Debian! My dad had an old cd of it and we live booted into it for fun like almost 20 years ago.