Soft Landing Systems (SLS). So many disks!

Debian. They mailed me the install media.

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

Early Mandriva with KDE 3.4 or 3.5 I think, but I can barely remember anything with clarity. It couldn't have been bad though, since I haven't used Windows on my own devices since 😉.

From my foggy memory, I think it was good for my then nocoder self, easy to use, stable, relatively lite, and had good looks.

I missed the Mandrake and pre-Fedora Red Hat era, but not by much.

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

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.

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.

Slackware on a whole lot of lettered floppy disks.

Mandrake 9.2 (before the Mandriva rebranding)

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.

Red hat 2.0

RedHat 6.

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

RedHat6.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Linux Mint

... or maybe it was Ubuntu, but it didn't last long so I don't really count it. Linux Mint stuck for a number of years.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Must have been Suse 6 or 7 (I think 7.0) around 2000, as I got a physical copy as a prize on a lan party and I actually installed it...

But then I needed the space for something else, probably Counter-Strike and custom maps. :D

Slackware 1.01

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

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

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

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.

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

Knoppix here too. It was the only thing that felt "safe" enough to experiment with. First proper install was Slackware, I think.

Fedora core 2

Gentoo, to really learn the innards. The Gentoo Wiki was a great resource.

First Linux I ever tried was Corel Linux, booted from a gaming-magazine's CD. It worked, appart from the mouse cursor. It was there. I just couldn't see it.

OG Suse 6 but quickly switched to Debian and never left.

Ubuntu, maybe version 5.10 or or 6.4.

First was technically knoppix because it had a live boot cd function. That didn't go well. There was some kind of bug where it murdered the bios on my pentium2 and I was unable to recover the system, bricking the computer.

First time I was able to fully install and use was ubuntu warthog... So that's what... 4.10? I think so.