Linux

Mandrake 6.0 in 1998. The kernel was still 2.2, and KDE 1.1.1.

am a simple noob who started with Mint, and remain on Mint on my main gaming machine.

i have fun distro-hopping on my other old, cheap laptops though

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.

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.

Red Hat, way back in the 90s - must have been 5.0 IIRC.

Since then I went through Ubuntu and now landed on Fedora.

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.

Ubuntu had a thing for a while where they would send you a CD if you asked for it. Friend of mine from school gave me one.

Ubuntu > Mint > Manjaro > Arch > PopOS > Debian

(History, not ranking [Debian wins])

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

Red Hat 5.0 "Hurricane" from 1997. I still have the CD.

I started with Mandrake 6 when the there were lots of 9's or 0's in the year

Then bounced from Slackware/opensuse/Red Hat/Debian/Gentoo/BSD

Now running Kde Neon and MacOS (Debian and BSD as server OSs)

Lubuntu — what a horrible experience (back then)! Now I'm happy with openSUSE Tumbleweed, Void Linux, and Nobara (for my wanna-be gaming PC, lol; trying to get just enough frames for CS2). Every once-and-a-while (I feel like hyphenating that), I do a fresh install, just to get rid of the cruft. Nowadays that makes me wonder if I should be switching to immutable...

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

Way back: Ubuntu live CD. More recent history: Pop!_OS > Zorin OS > Fedora.

Happily been running Fedora for like 2 years now.

Mint

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.

Slackware96 from Walnut Creek purchased at Staples back when software came in boxes with manuals. Netscape Navigator 3.0 anyone?

I started using Linux this year. I first tried out Debian, but then switched to mint. Has been very happy with mint every since, so I don't think I will switch again in the near future.

Mandriva Linux, then RHEL, the Debian and fedora.

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

BackTrack 5 because I was too poor to pay for my own Wi-Fi back then, so I had to become creative heheh

Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron. I miss loving Ubuntu

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.

Slackware 3.1.

Mint cinnamon

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

I was running Quake 3 servers a few PCs.

Debian Slink

Before that, Windows NT, A/UX, Solaris and VAX/VMS.

Before that, Vic 20 and Apple II

Still using Debian every day whilst navigating the perils of MacOS.

Ubuntu in the mid 2000s, but it's PopOS that made me a fulltimer ~2 years ago. I don't use it anymore but I'll always be thankful for it.

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.

Raspbian Wheezy.

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.

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

I'm not a big distrohopper...

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.

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 technically, Raspbian.

Yggdrasil In the mid 90s.