Linux

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.

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

Mandrake 9.2 (before the Mandriva rebranding)

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...

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.

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

Slackware. In 1993.

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

I don't really remember, I think Ubuntu? My girlfriend installed it for me in 2010 but I went back to Windows after a year or two. I think I started messing with Linux again around 2013 and have been on (K)Ubuntu for a while before eventually trying Arch. I'm on Endeavor now.

Most of my servers are Debian

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.

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

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!)

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.

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.

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

Debian. They mailed me the install media.

Damn, how long did you stick with Knoppix?

I had two firsts—I messed around with Ubuntu around high school or so, but I don't count that because I was only curious and had no intention to actually try and use it for any decent stretch of time.

Second, which I consider the "true first", was Fedora, and man was it dope. It's the distro that made me realize Linux is a lot more accessible than I had thought.

Slackware

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

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.

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

Xandros baby! But I was too young to understand what I was doing. I had one single mp3 file that I played over and over, and chatting with my friends on MSN via Pidgin. It didn't last long, but I remember it fondly

ubuntu because it was marketed as the distro newcomers should choose.

Nowadays you can't go wrong with one of the big ones but fedora with ublue has the first mover advantage

Damn Small Linux (Knoppix-based) which was the gateway drug to Fedora Core 4 on an old Pentium III that was lying arouind.

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.

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

Corel Linux. It didn’t last long because it didn’t play my games.

I dipped my toe with Fedora, but that didn’t last. My real commitment with Linux started with Ubuntu.

Red Hat Linux 7.3 (2002)

Tried it to install a few months ago on 86Box and couldn't figure it out to setup network card.
Today everything is mostly plug & play, back then was a pain to setup graphical server, network

RedHat 5.1. Man I'm old.

I also still have a Slackware 3.0 CDROM lying around. Which I actually liked back in the day.

RedHat6.

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

RedHat 6.

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

Red hat 2.0

mandrake was my first. Good memories

Its either Ubuntu or Debian I cant remember

Slackware.

That was 25+ years ago. So don't judge me.

Debian Woody > SuSE > gentoo

Still running gentoo on my main desktop and tumbleweed on my htpc

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

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