Redhat 2.1, a cd stuck to a huge book

Ubuntu, before Unity came along

Slackware 3.0 in 1996

Then this new promising distro called Debian

Got my own PC, went with Slackware again for some God-forsaken reason

Debian again and that's where I've stayed for most part - I tried using Ubuntu as a desktop laptop distro for a while but at some point I realised I should have installed Debian to begin with so I went with that there too

Knoppix STD

Mandrake mid 1990s

Ubuntu, it was an on-off-relationship until I finally made it

Slackware.

Mandrake Linux. I'm old, I know 😊

Fedora from 2015, to circumvent my school laptop's OS with it installed on a USB stick.

The first I tried was Ubuntu 7.04 but I didn't stick with it and went back to XP. Until I ended up with a hardware setup that wouldn't work on Windows XP (widescreen monitor + Intel graphics driver with no widescreen mode options) but worked perfectly on Ubuntu 9.10. I never truly went back to Windows since.

Tried a few other distros in 2011 then switched to Arch for a couple years, Xubuntu for a couple years, Ubuntu GNOME for 7-8 years, and finally switched to Fedora last year.

Yggdrasil LGX, back in ‘93.

Ubuntu

Slackware 3.5 because my friend thought it'd be funny and didn't tell me fuck all about distros.

Helped me learn a lot though.

SteamOS, just seeing how friendly and similar-to-windows KDE looked (and proton running all the games I cared about) gave me all the confidence I needed to install fedora and later nobara on my desktop

Ubuntu 8.10

I don't like Ubuntu anymore but I loved it then

AT&T SVR4

Oh, Linux. Slackware 1.2, but I had already used SunOS, Solaris, Ultrix, BSD, A/UX, and Unixware

Linux Mint, until I made a mistake during a version upgrade and aptitude had a memory leak while trying to escape dependency hell and roll every package back. Then I replaced it with arch and am happy to be on a rolling release distro.

Debian in the nineties :) Watched the towers fall on slashdot...

Now on bazzite, it's also glorious.

Ubuntu back in the day before enshitification.

Ubuntu, then arch.

Debian

Pop! OS

Pop!_OS... About 5 months ago. first time user just hard switched on my main.

But now 3 PCs are running it in the house.

Caldera Open Linux 2.(?) back around 98/99, for long enough to download Slackware and Win98SE.

Ubuntu Server 14.04. Years later I tried Arch+Win10 dual boot, but during a forced update, Windows ate the boot partition and then unalived itself. That's when I nuked the SSD and hard-switched to Manjaro (first daily driver, never had Windows since), later Endeavour, and most recently, Arch. If/when Arch breaks, I'll most likely hop to Nix.

I was one if those newbies who went with Arch as their first distro, but I found my home with Fedora. It's not the most up-to-date or polished distro, but it's by far the best all-rounder.

POS Ubuntu giving me repo cancer every other week making me think Linux for desktop was not ready.

Then I tried Debian (and XFCE) and realized Ubuntu was just on some drugs and eventually landed on Fedora after demoing some distros.

Some old ass Fedora Core distro.

Fedora

Then Arch

And finally NixOS

Ubuntu. Back when win 10 was announced and all the bullshit started.

But unity was definitely not my thing, and I tried a handful of other distros on my dad's old computer. I figured if I could get a decent functionality on that, I'd be able to comfortably use whatever I settled on for a decent box.

Mint with cinnamon is where I settled. Cinnamon or plasma are perfect for my wants, and mint being debian related makes software damn easy to get going fast. What's not to like about that? I tried it with dual boot on my gaming box at the time, and then when I set up a newer box, I went straight mint. Now, the old one is my air gapped media machine running win7 because fuck life without musicbee.

Everything else is on mint except my kid's gaming laptop (which is an oxymoron imo, but whatever) because they're unwilling to try anything else, and my dad's current but ancient box running 11 and being nearly useless because of that. But he's damn near 80, so he can do whatever he wants short of shitting on the dinner table.

Archlinux if you don't count the time when I was five. I install Ubuntu then a series of packages to make it "look and feel" like Mac os. After that I was disappointed with how janky it was as a Mac clone and switching back to windows.

I was crazy about macs when I was a kid. When I finally got one, I enjoyed the polish but ultimately found it limiting. After 15 years; about six years on macos, seven on Windows. I played with archlinux in an emulator for a few months before I nuked my system and never went back, thanks wine/DXVK!

Raspbian (Buster) for my first; Kubuntu for my longest, and still happily enjoying it!

Call me a normie if you must, I need shit to work and I like it lookin' pretty.

First time I mucked with Linux I don’t think there were any formal distros yet. Had to rawrite the kernel to my full height 5.25” 100mb hard drive

Debian

Guys this is off topic but I'm using Ubuntu server for a jellyfin/coding server and getting headaches trying to do things cli only.. for example connecting openvpn.

My question is how much shame is there using a distro with a gui for a server

CentOS But now it seems that it has withdrawn from the stage of history.

its been a long time

i think around 2013 i started occasionally tinkering with ubuntu,
i then quickly started distrohopping
(mint, debian, kubuntu, antergos and probably more)

in 2017 i started seriously using antergos (i3wm) on my work pc

i was still only occasionally tinkering at home,
untill 2022, when i learned about proton,
and fully migrated my private computer from win 10 to fedora(kde)

mandrake, in 2004

Puppy Linux on an old Celeron @ 333MHz, with 160MB of RAM and 4GB of disk space.

I was amazed at the speed compared to Windows XP and even 98SE. It weighed about 100MB but had quite a few applications like mtpaint, Inkscape, Abiword, some spreadsheet program (I don't remember which was it, don't think it was GNUmeric), mplayer, some lightweight browser (I think it was Midori), even XChat.

The only (and BIG) problem is that you basically ran everything as root.

Some time later I bought a more powerful PC (Intel something dual core @ 3GHz, 4GB RAM and 500GB disk), and used the pre installed Windows 7 for some time before installing Ubuntu (I think 12.04) and I've been using it since.