Linux

my first 'distro' was slackware, on floppy disks. then debian or a flavour of, mainly, ever since. i've never really strayed too far from debian and apt over the years but i have tried most everything.

Started with Soft Landing Systems (SLS). Pre-Slackware. Many hours downloading floppy disk images at school.

Moved to Red Hat (pre-Fedora and pre-RHEL) until I think 7.3 or so and then Mandrake. I did trial runs with many distros over time but none of them really stuck. Fedora for a release or two. Spent a few years on Manjaro for desktop and CentOS for server. Have been on Arch for many years now (or EndeavourOS). Never used Ubuntu really.

Moved to Proxmox for server. Although I never used Debian historically, quite a few of the containers I have on Proxmox now are Debian based as is Proxmox itself.

Lately, I have been using Chimera Linux for desktop though I have an Arch Distrobox on it so I guess I am a bit of a hybrid at this point.

SuSE in 1996. Then Debian between mid-1997 and late 2023, NixOS since.

I'm not a big distrohopper...

In the early 90’s I downloaded Slackware to floppy disks. It took me several days to make them. Slackware holds a special place in my heart.

To this day I still use Linux full time. Arch is my go to, but I like and recommend Endeavor often.

Whatever version of Red Hat there was in 1999. 6 point something if memory serves.

I was running Quake 3 servers a few PCs.

Ubuntu, the release right before unity was the one I started actually using.

After that I switched to arch for a very long time, and now i'm on nixos.

SUSE Linux, back in the 1990s. Because you could buy it for cheap, and you got not only the huge stack of floppy disks to install it from, but also a set of thick fat detailed handbooks (these things made from paper full of pictures and letters and glued together, like your grandparents may have had). I spent many nights with them books instead of my wife...

It was a bear to install and terribly complicated to configure back then; at least for me. But in the end, I had a nice server running well for a while.

I guess technically, Raspbian.

Slackware, of course, but when Debian was first released two years later I obviously switched (and it's been Debian since then).

Slackware 3.1.

Ubuntu back in 2014. Followed by Elementary not long after

Mint cinnamon

Ubuntu in 2009 or so. Booting school computers onto the live DVD felt like hacking. I think around 2016 I installed some spin of Ubuntu on my laptop and used it somewhat regularly. Prior to that it was just random times I felt like using the dual boot function. I mostly used Windows. It took until 2025 for me to switch my desktop to Cachy OS.

It's hard to remember but it was some version of Mandrake probably in the early 2000's. At the time, they were one of the only distros (along with Red Hat) to offer an installation GUI. As a first time user I found partitioning a hard drive too complex to do on the command line.

I only used Mandrake for a short time before reverting to windows but it wasn't long after that when I came back and then started using Debian. Since then I went back to Windows then to OpenSuSe, then Debian, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, and now Pop!_OS.

Arch in like 2019 maybe.

I still like Arch, I tried all sorts of distros in VMs, most feel clunky to me.

Tiling manager, GUI file explorer, minimal status bar and I'm set.

For my laptop this is swaywm, swaybar, nautilus.

I also use drun-like programs

My first was Slackware in the 90s after a friend introduced it to me. He set up a system to use it as a proxy for our network at home to use but would frequently redoing that system so we didn't have internet for sometimes days. It wasn't a good time. Took years to use Linux again.

Ubuntu, as they used to send free CD packs to distribute. Was fun booting into live CD on computers.

Red Hat 8.0, the Linux Starter 2003 double cd edition. From there I tried my first Ubuntu when they where still sending out free cd's which was version 6.06 LTS. After that I dabbled a bit jumping from distro to distro to try out different flavors, tinkering a bit for fun and even tried to build my own with Arch. All the while keeping my Windows (XP, 7, 10) daily driver as my main rig. Finally switched over to Pop_OS! a few years ago as my daily for work. I've been thinking about switching over my gaming rig to a Linux distro but haven't figured out which one is the best one and requires the least amount of tinkering.

Casual Deck owner here. Arch Linux is my answer.

Ubuntu in about 2007 when my windows desktop crashed. A friend installed it in place. Never looked back

Slackware in 1998 I think, from a cd that came in a book I bought while in university.

It didn’t stick, but it demystified it and I’ve used a lot of flavours of *nix since then.

I remember not being able to get sound to work at all on my pentium computer.

SuSE, about 1999, although I didn’t really start ‘getting’ Linux until I tried Slackware a couple of years later. After that I’ve just been bouncing between trusty old Debian and different distros based on it.

Edit: I’ve also tried Gentoo, Arch and Mandrake briefly many years ago.

Mint, then Ubuntu, then Kubuntu, elementaryOS, Manjaro, then I gave up Linux for a while because I needed remote desktop for my PC at work, now back on PopOS!

Ubuntu 6.06 was my first Linux install. I still remember the pain of ndiswrapper to get Windows WiFi drivers working on Linux.

The one I settled on back then was Mandrake.

I think it was Slackware sometime in the early 2000s

Arch Linux, on an old Compaq pizza box server when I was 16. It took me 3 months to install Arch because there was a DIP switch on the motherboard that somehow prevented you from updating the MBR or some shit.

I basically never used it and didn't touch Linux again until 7 years later, when I used SLES 11 SP2 at a job.

Ubuntu all the way! :) Before I learned there were other ones, then wound up back on Mint again after a trip around the houses. :)

Fedora

I guess Ubuntu? 10 years ago or even more? can't remember... Tried it for a bit but didn't stick at first and went back to Windows until 2020.

Installed my first homelab and selfhosted application on my old spare laptop with Debian (only over command line).

So I gave Linux desktop another try... Ubuntu for a few days => Manjaro for a few days => EndeavourOS !

Got hooked and are now a proud EOS user for about 3 years and never will I look back into Windows !

I'm still in the learning process, but in the long run I will probably switch to bare bone Arch.

Yggdrasil In the mid 90s.

Someone installed Fedora for me somewhere around 2006, then I switched between Ubuntu and Windows until permanently settling for Ubuntu a couple of years ago. But I'm thinking of switching to Debian..

Red Hat 7

OpenSuse sometime around '07

It didn't click, ended up moving to Ubuntu almost immediately. A few years later I moved to Fedora. Circa 2020 I dove into Archlinux and managed that for a couple years. Nowadays as I'm learning server stuff I've switched to Mint.

Red Hat 9 in 2004

If just using the Live CD counts, Lubuntu 12.04, to copy files off a broken Windows machine

Then Ubuntu, followed by Deepin (looked cool), UbuntuDDE, Arch, Xubuntu, and finally settled on Debian in 2022.

Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron. I miss loving Ubuntu