Who was your first?

Redhat 2.1, a cd stuck to a huge book
- 7.0.90 here, that one had kernel 2.4. Been a minute.
- Wow, nice! I started on 6.1.

Ubuntu, before Unity came along
- to be fair gnome3 was a hot steaming pile of shit when it released, and was still bad for literal years. i say that as a gnome user, but i'm sorry, it was unusable for a big stretch of time there.
  as much as i dislike canonical for pushing snaps, Unity makes sense to me under that light.

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
- Slackware for me at about the same time. Installed from 3.5" floppys.
- Slackware on 3.5" floppy's FTW!

Knoppix STD
- Klaus would be proud

Mandrake mid 1990s
- I've still got my Mandrake 9.2 CDs somewhere that a friend burned for me. Didn't dig the rebranding to Mandriva.
- My people! Their screenshot gallery was the sole reason I got into Linux back when I was in the sixth grade. The skills I learned by using it as my daily driver got me a job at a web hosting company and started a very fulfilling career.

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

Slackware.
- Me too, on floppy disks, kernel 2.0.something... I remember I struggled to get X11 running, so I tried with redhat next
  
  Getting X to work required mucking about with a textfile where you specified parameters directing the operation of the electron gun inside a CRT monitor that were so down to the metal, that you could create your own resolution or even blow up your monitor.
  Ah, those were the days ;)
- Same. The year was 1997…

Mandrake Linux. I'm old, I know 😊
- There is another :D

Yggdrasil LGX, back in ‘93.
- Damn, you got in on like the ground floor haha
  
  It was quite the interesting thing to run back then — it was all very “Wild West” of software, and a LOT of stuff didn’t work well.
  It wasn’t my daily driver; it really wasn’t ready for most workloads back then. But it was nearly free, and we shared around the CD-ROM amongst hacker friends interested in giving it a try.

Red hat on a disc from a for dummies book at the library.
- Same here. Red Hat 5 from the Linux for Dummies book.

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.
- When I saw the numbers "7.04" I immediately heard the login drum-like sound "bu-du-bup" and remembered Feisty Fawn. It's one of my fondest computer memories. It felt like a friend.

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

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.
- Could you hand me the X floppy?

AT&T SVR4
Oh, Linux. Slackware 1.2, but I had already used SunOS, Solaris, Ultrix, BSD, A/UX, and Unixware
- Damn, you old 😂
  
  Get of my lawn!
- What is the difference between SunOS and Solaris?
  Solaris uname identifies as SunOS. iirc
  
  In vague, hand waving terms, SunOS was based on BSD, while Solaris was a shift to more of a System V flavor of Unix. And they changed the version numbering. Lots more details, but that's the gist.

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

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.
- Pop got me into Linux in July 2021 (i switched the same time as the steamdeck was announced) and I ran Pop for a good two and a half years. Great distro.
  Now I'm on EndeavourOS, but it was Pop that helped me make the transition.

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.
- I started with PopOS but it went so smooth that after like a week I decided I needed something a bit more exciting and installed Arch. Except I accidentally partitioned the wrong drive in fdisk (my Windows drive).
  
  happy little accident

Debian

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.
- Ubuntu really was a big step forward for ease of setup back when it first came out, but other distros have since caught up. I think the ultimate success of an open source project is when they make themselves obsolete because they had such a big impact on the eco system at large. I think Ubuntu achieved their main goal, but once they did that they ended up adding a bunch of bloat to distinguish themselves as the intro user option.

Pop! OS

Ubuntu back in the day before enshitification.
- Got in just after Dapper, those days fooling around with compiz were the best. Went distrohopping when Unity happened.

Debian in the nineties :) Watched the towers fall on slashdot...
Now on bazzite, it's also glorious.
- Show me your #debian scars.
- +1
  I fondly remember having the bootloader on a floppy to dual boot my own machine due to some limitation about where Linux lived on my hard disk, but honestly it was probably more of a knowledge limitation at the time!
  First shell was on a Debian 1.x machine in my friend’s living room since they had broadband.

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

Open suse and mandrake

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
- I feel this comment
- You're dead to us
- No shame, if you would use GUI on a different OS then you would use a GUI on Linux
  If you would use CLI on a different OS then you would use CLI on Linux
- You could try a web UI like Webmin. If it's a public-facing system like a VPS, the once you get the VPN working, configure Webmin to only listen on the VPN IP so that it's not exposed publicly.
  By the way, I'd recommend Wireguard or Tailscale over OpenVPN. Tailscale uses Wireguard but makes it a lot easier to configure. One of the major advantages is that Wireguard/Tailscale are peer-to-peer models that don't use a central server like OpenVPN does. Wireguard doesn't have servers, only peers.
  Basically, if you have two devices on the VPN that want to communicate with each other (eg say you're at a coffee shop and want to connect to your laptop from your phone), they can communicate directly rather than having to go through a server that's potentially located somewhere else.
  
  To be honest the problem is I'm trying to connect to the VPN provider I have with openvpn client. Im with windscribe, I get as far as importing the profile, attempting to start the service, entering the username and password for the VPN but the thing just won't start.

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.

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.

Ubuntu, then arch.

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

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!

Debian

Some old ass Fedora Core distro.

CentOS But now it seems that it has withdrawn from the stage of history.
- Hey, another CentOS guy! I ran my home phone on that with Asterisk for years, on a dual pentium machine that was already ancient.
  When I rebuilt it years later as a VM I went to Ubuntu LTS, but CentOS was my first! It’s been so long I don’t even remember what, as a newbie, drove me to choose that one.

mandrake, in 2004

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.
- I have been searching soo long to get musicbee working on Linux and I think some ppl may have had a bit of luck with wine shinnanigans but other then that I can't see it happening :(
  
  have you looked into using any alternative Linux native mp3 players? I used musicbee for a bit when I was on windows but I didnt find anything too unique about it.
  
  Yeah, I had hoped with proton and whatnot, it would be a solved thing. Hell, it may be, but I'm fine using what I've got until it dies, so I only check about once a year.

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.

Fedora
Then Arch
And finally NixOS
- How is NixOS going? I am also an Arch convert, but the issue with Gentoo is that it feels like a clusterfuck after days spent on configuration that is not easy to replicate. I mean it works but I might not want to go through it next time.
  
  I really like centralised configuration, stability and development environments of Nix
  After overcoming initial learning curve and configuring NixOS and Home Manager, I rarely change anything. It just works™
  And if I ever wanted clean installation or if I moved to another machine, I would just copy config from /etc/nixos/ and it should work the same.

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.

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)

Ubuntu

For me, it was Mandrake, I think it was back around 2000. I played so much Tux Racer on that machine. However, after they switched the branding to Mandriva, the OS started to run pretty poorly for me around that time. I stayed away from Linux entirely until around 10 years ago when I friend introduced me to Mint. It's been my main ever since, though I've played with others since then, like OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, and most recently, Debian and EndeavourOS.

SuSe Linux in the early 2000s. Came on a couple of CD-ROMs. We used it to run JBoss servers at work, alongside various Unix flavours. But my first experience with Unix was in the late eighties at university. Been using Mint as my daily driver for about two years now and I'm never going back.

Open Suse in the mid 2000s.

Kubuntu

Mandrake. After that it gets hazy, but Mandrake was first.

I think I went Mint - MX Linux - Opensuse tumbleweed which is where I have stayed for the last year and loving it

I think Puppy or Damn Small Linux, maybe knoppix, i was on dial up at the time. Then I found that I could request a free Ubuntu install disk and the speed and cleanliness and compiz effects blew my mind. 04 or 06, can't remember which. From there I think it was xubuntu, mint, arch, arch nvme died and I needed an os immediately so manjaro, got sick of manjaro and garuda sounded neat so i tried it and that's where I am now on my main. Made a mess toying with wayland and am ready to reinstall, probably back to arch or try out nixos
edit: reading through all these comments is bringing back so many memories of other distros I played with back then.

Epic trolled by my friend, my first was Gentoo

Kubuntu 8.04 was my first, with the KDE 4 demo, it was pretty as fuck compared to Windows XP that came with that PC

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

I don't remember the year or the version because it has been so long (2003 maybe). It was Ubuntu from the free mail order CDs they used to give away. I remember waiting something like three months for it to arrive.
- Those cds were a godsend for broke kids on dial up back then.

knoppix, then slax, then slackware, then.... Ubuntu 4.10