All the old timers are coming out. In the summer of ‘98 I switched to Red Hat Linux.

I think it was Slackware sometime in the early 2000s

Ubuntu 8.10 in early 2009, after Windows Vista otherwise bricked my laptop. I've distro-hopped on a few occasions but most of my 16 years of Linux have been on Ubuntu. That said, I moved away from Ubuntu after a failed upgrade to 22.04 LTS, to OpenSUSE and then to KDE Neon, now I'm on Nobara and couldn't be happier.

Ubuntu. But I think that will be almost everyones answer who started with Linux in the late-mid 2000s.

Edit: Oh wait. Might have been Knoppix to resuce some data from a broken windows installation.

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.

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.

Yggdrasil In the mid 90s.

Knoppix circa 2004-2005, It was in a cd that came from chip.de. I had no clue what linux was back then. I know even less now.

Ubuntu, I hated it lol

Fedora

For me it was elementary OS. Dual-booted with Windows back in 2015/2016. Maybe 1 year later, I installed Linux Mint Cinnamon and gradually used it more than Windows. Now I am using EndeavourOS XFCE and only using Windows virtually... when I am bored or need to use Adobe Lightroom Classic.

Mandrake Linux

Ubuntu 6.06. It came on a CD with a PC magazine. I've used it to convince my parents to allow me to spend as much time as I want in front of the computer because "there are no games on Linux".

WoW worked on it.

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.

My first was Ubuntu 06.06, but I was only messing around using a live CD. I tried it again with Ubuntu 12.04 when Steam added Linux support, but went back to Windows because gaming on Linux wasn't really there.

Finally decided to dual boot and distro hopped a bit in 2015 between Mint, Kubuntu, then KDE Neon for a bit before settling on Manjaro some time in 2017. Eventually I switched to Arch in 2022 after Manjaro forgot to renew their certs again.

Ubuntu all the way! :) Before I learned there were other ones, then wound up back on Mint again after a trip around the houses. :)

in order (2000-present): red hat, slackware, debian, ubuntu, arch, manjaro, nix

I tried to set up arch, realized I didn’t want that kind of work for a gaming setup and swapped to debian, and i’ve used that since lol

I used slackware, btw

Void linux

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

Started with Mint and stuck with that for a year. No issues, just felt comfortable enough to try something "fancier", I guess Mint was a little too reliable lol. Went with PopOS a while for the native dock and tiling manager, loved it. Now I'm on a brand new PC build and enjoying gaming with Bazzite. No tinkering involved, it setup my 5070 Ti automatically.

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

Mandrake. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. But I did get it installed.

Red Hat 5.1, which I quickly abandoned after learning the hard way about winmodems

I think it was SuSE 5.1, we're talking 1997. We got a CD at a show but I can't remember which or where.

Ubuntu, and the experience was crap lol.

Then I got to try Debian on a server and it was much nicer.

Then I saw Torvalds uses Fedora, and given that he also disliked Debian and Ubuntu for their lack of end user ease, I switched and have been happy ever since.

Seriously though, GNOME 40 really should not be the default DE. It made me think Linux UI was years behind Windows when it was actually the opposite with proven DEs like XFCE, KDE, and GNOME 3/2 etc.

Pop!_OS since January of this year \o/

elementary os in 2016. I still use eos on my desktop machine, mainly because it's kinda ubuntu but not quite. Running Fedora on one of my laptops, the rest are running macos

Mandrake 2003. Followed by Ubuntu server 5.10 in 2005.

Switched to Debian in 2020, been on Debian since.

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.

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.

I started with Ubuntu back when you could put in your parent's home address and they sent you free CDs. I'm on Arch (since about 2010), and I can't change.

OpenSuse with compiz going hard on an old laptop

Knoppix. I didn't see it listed yet so I had to chime in.

I saw it and was confused that computers could run something that wasn't Windows and wasn't Mac. Then I was handed a Knoppix LiveCD and suddenly MY computer was Linux. Absolutely blew my mind.

I then explored Mandrake (now Mandrivia?) for a while but it never really stuck.

A few years later Ubuntu was handing out LivdCDs to everyone running Warty Warthog and soon after window managers started to use Beryl (?) which let you have a fancy cube desktop. Absolutely pointless but that's how it all started.

litterally arch btw

I actually wanted Arch but everyone was saying that you HAD to do a manual install first and I had been miserably failing at doing it in a WM for a few weeks. I had finally decided to try it directly on hardware so that I had no choice but to complete it if I wanted to use my laptop, and just as was about to burn the ISO on a USB stick the power went out and my hard drive died 😑 On a saturday evening, obviously...

All I had was a Haiku USB I had made to check it out, and a Linux Mint USB a friend lent me that I hadn't tried because I assumed I would hate it. So I used Haiku for about 30 minutes (let's say it had a few bugs), and Mint for the rest of the weekend and did, in fact, absolutely hate it (Windows PTSD 😭 ).

So until the computer store opened on Monday, I spend 48 hours browsing the web to find a better distro and when I got my new SSD I installed AntiX, because it was very light and likely to run well on my potato-grade laptop, it came without a DE and 7 different window managers to try (which seemed cool at the time, but I didn't actually try any of them except the default one IceWM and after a few weeks I installed i3 😅 ) and also because YouTube had convinced me that systemd was the Antechrist (thanks YouTube 😑 ).

After two months I decided to try Manjaro on my other laptop... it didn't go well : incompatible dependencies preventing updates, Nvidia + Wayland making games not display correctly, and if I had to fix all that manually what's the point I just might as well use regular Arch. So I gave up after 48 hours and decided to install Arch, and just as I booted from the Arch ISO the laptop died (fan malfunction) and I had to send it back 😑.

After three months, the third laptop, bought with the refund from the second one, did actually allow me to install Arch without throwing a fit 🥳 using archinstall to preserve my mental health this time.

Arch has been really great but I need to switch to a bigger SSD and I am probably going to try Nix because it seems really cool 🤩

Ubuntu... Then Slackware... Then Fedora... Then Arch I still dont know why tf I went to Slackware... It was painful, but worth it

It was Slackware... Back in the late 90s. Do not ask me about how kid me managed that, all I recall is endless terminals, kernel panics and eventually getting a desktop through some arcane means I can't remember.

I didn't return to linux for many years after that experience.

I still have the 1996 edition of Slackware Linux Unleashed and the CD in my bookshelf as a reminder.

Yellow Dog in early 2000s, and I think I switched to Debian PPC not long after. My memory of back then is quite hazy. A way while after that I had an Eee PC which I think I put Ubuntu on initially (the desktop was dog slow) and then changed over to LMDE. Have a feeling I had something else on it before Ubuntu... may have been the default Eee distribution, which I forget the name of (think it began with an X).

I had Slackware running on a couple of 386 machines with 200MB hard disks. It was impossible to do almost anything as it was all compile from source but I didn't have the disk space to install all the compiler tools and what I was trying to run on them. I was originally going to use them as part of a distributed system for my degree, but in the end I didn't use them and did something different instead.

I used CentOS at work a lot for several years and liked it, but only fully switched form Windows at home 10 years ago and I went to Ubuntu at the time. Installed KDE on it, messed around with i3 and had a great time. I then went hopping and landed on Endeavour OS which I've been really enjoying for many years now and have no intention of moving from. All my servers still run Ubuntu LTS Server as it has been unbelievably solid.

Slackware, in the 90s, installed from floppy disks. I also used SuSE, Debian and now stick with Fedora.

WSL, Deepin for an hour, and then endeavourOS (easy Arch) ever since

Slackware in 1997.

I ran it on a 486SX/40 with 32MB of RAM and a 2GB harddrive.

It turned me into the man I am today.