Mandrake was pretty cool. The original user-friendly distro. I've never used it (was too deep down the rabbit hole running Red Hat to try something "friendly") but I remember there was a bit of hype going back in the day about it.
Proxmox VE is a packaging of Linux as an operating system. It is a distribution. Straight from the wikipedia page:
It is a Debian-based Linux distribution with a modified Ubuntu LTS kernel[7] and allows deployment and management of virtual machines and containers.[8][9]
Cool way to respond to a comment btw:
Am I taking crazy pills?
The VMs I'm running in Proxmox are also Linux, but that's less interesting to me.
failed to install Debian Woody and SUSE in early naughts – finally succeeded with a Stage 1 Gentoo install (yay for me?) – a long sabbatical from Linux, back into the groove with Pop!_OS for a while, and recently replaced with Debian stable (successfully this time ;p ) – getting old enough that “bleeding edge” doesn’t hold any appeal any more, “boring” is far more interesting
My first flavour was Red Hat back in the late 90s. It's a shame I didn't give it more of a go back then. Then Mint for a couple of years in the earlyish 2010s before finally settling on Arch where I've been for almost a decade now.
I started with Slackware around 1997 because I needed a free C compiler plus all I had were junk, hand-me-down computers. Stopped programming & using linux around 2000 and had switched back to Windows on a newly built, decent computer. From about 2000 until about 2016 I rarely used linux besides a couple routers. Raspberry pi 3 came out with built-in wifi & my dislike of Windows 10 got me back into linux for more use cases. Valve's work on proton finally made it so I could switch to linux for most gaming & my Windows usage dropped to almost nothing. Currently using Manjaro on primary desktop and Fedora 38 on tablet with mix of distros in LXC & VMs on mini-PC w/ Proxmox VE & Synology NAS. SteamVR on linux been getting decent amount of work on it lately so once it gets stable I'll have one less reason to need Windows.
I just noticed Christian Edition and Muslim edition, and was puzzled...this is the best article I could find on them. I think its interesting that religious distros keep showing up, rather than just religious packages being available on package managers.