Linux

Red Hat, at Uni.

My first ever distro was Xubuntu. (I did install Lubuntu before it, but found it too "ugly" so switched to Xubuntu after about 30 mins.)

I was still in high school, around 2014-15. My pc was getting old, and I read online that Linux can make your pc run faster. So, I decided to give it a try. I also read online that Xubuntu (and Lubuntu) is among the lightest of distros, so decided to install that. It was worthwhile, to say the least.

I currently use mostly EndeavourOS and AlmaLinux for my personal machines, depending on the type of the device. I have installed Fedora on my sister's laptop, and Debian Stable on my parents' PC, so I have to maintain those as well. Also, I have a few Pi zero2s for various things, so I use PiOS (or whatever it's called these days) from time to time.

Slackware. In 1993.

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

It was Ubuntu. Can't remember which version but at the time they would mail you a cd if you requested one.

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

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.

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

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

Slackware

Yellow Dog Linux

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.

mandrake was my first. Good memories

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

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.

Slackware, to get away from the pink boys! Also there were only two or three distributions at the time.
Too many to remember since then.

(Hail Eris!)

Tried ubunto with mint about 10 years back. My first actual daily driver was endeavoros about 1.5 years ago and it has stuck!

Its either Ubuntu or Debian I cant remember

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.

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

Slackware on a whole lot of lettered floppy disks.

BeOS ;)

I know, not Linux. But it was my first OS other than the one that came pre-installed.

Can't remember exactly which was my very first Linux distro but probably Knoppix or another early live one.

My first "wipe Windows and install on bare metal" was PC-BSD. I know, again, not Linux.

And again, can't remember exactly the very first "wipe Windows and install on bare metal" Linux, probably Puppy or Ubuntu.

Suse 5 or 6. I think. Throw some Debian in there around that same time frame.

Mandrake 9.2 (before the Mandriva rebranding)

Debian. They mailed me the install media.

Soft Landing Systems (SLS). So many disks!

Tried Ubuntu 8.04 when it was still new. Said egh, that's cool, and moved on, until around 2015 I've installed Mint on more permanent basis, got frustrated with it a week later, and figured out Arch instead

Ubuntu 18.04 (2018) -> Manjaro (2019-2021)-> Arch (2021-2022) ->EndeavourOS (2022-present on my desktop) ->NixOS (2024-present on my laptop)

Raspbian Bullseye ARM32 -> Ubuntu 18.04/22.04 LTS -> Kubtuntu 22.04/24.04/25.04 (--minimal-install to avoid snap)

Debian because that was the one I had read most about. Then I tried many other distros, some for years, until now when I am once again a Debian user...

I had a machine with multiple OSes chosen at startup with OS/2 Boot Manager, including OS/2 Warp, Windows NT Workstation 4, and Redhat 5.0 which came on a CDROM labeled Pink Tie 5.0. (It was late '90s I guess. I used MSDOS before that. And a Commodore 64 before that) I believe I put a mail server on it (the Redhat partition) while I was still on dial-up (128K ISDN). The mails waited somewhere until I got online and signalled to send them to me. But then upgraded it to DSL. I was still running Redhat 7.3 with my mail server until 2006, even though Redhat 9 and Fedora were out by then. In 2006, I shut it down and bought a Windows 98 laptop to travel around Central America for a year. The Guatemalans laughed at my Windows 98 laptop--they were running Vista. When I got back to the US in 2007, and broke the laptop screen, oops, I bought a $300 desktop PC that had Lindows installed.

SuSE 1992 (1995?) (don't remember the exact number, but the year was on the accompanying paper manual), on some 1.3.xx Kernel, I think. Good times.

My first "test" was Conectiva. I lasted a few days with it, then ditched it. (I think this was in 2002? Conectiva would eventually merge with Mandrake.)

Then a few years later I went for Kurumin. It was a local Knoppix derivative, focusing on ease of use. Eventually Ubuntu became popular enough that Kurumin's maintainer saw no reason to continue the project.

It was probably Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog, though it didn't stick. I tried other versions of Ubuntu and even gentoo again over the following years, but none of them would stick. I would eventually tinker with something I couldn't repair, and rather than re-installing and starting again, I'd just return to windows.

Linux finally stuck for me last year, and Linux (Arch and then CachyOS) has been my full time OS for about the last 18 months

Red Hat for a few years and then Debian. Never had any reason to move from Debian.

Red hat 2.0

RedHat 6.

It came on a CD on the cover of a massive tome titled RedHat Linux 6 Unleashed.

RedHat6.

It came on a CD on the cover of a massive tome titled RedHat Linux 6 Unleashed.

Ubuntu 12.04 was my starting point. Made my laptop feel like a brand new device compared to Windows 7...

EDIT: Who downvotes every single comment on this thread? I mean it's perfectly okay to dislike Linux but that's petty and dumb.

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.

It was Fedora. Most of the recommendations for beginners at the time were for Ubuntu or derivatives and I was being contrary just because I could.