Mine was Knoppix because back in the day Libraries used to let you borrow all sorts of computer software and games and that’s what they had and I was stuck on dialup lol
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Mandrake 9.2 (before the Mandriva rebranding)
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.
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!)
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.
Corel Linux. It didn’t last long because it didn’t play my games.
Slackware
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.
me too with redhat 5 at my first job. shortly after moved to 6 that, as far as I remember, was the first showing the green OK at the right of every service starting instead of a mess of output
Ubuntu 18.04 (2018) -> Manjaro (2019-2021)-> Arch (2021-2022) ->EndeavourOS (2022-present on my desktop) ->NixOS (2024-present on my laptop)
Slackware.
That was 25+ years ago. So don’t judge me.
I dipped my toe with Fedora, but that didn’t last. My real commitment with Linux started with Ubuntu.
Debian. They mailed me the install media.
Its either Ubuntu or Debian I cant remember
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
I still have an EeePC 900A that came with Xandros. I kept Xandros on it until Ubuntu 10.04 Network Edition came out.
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.
