Linux

Red Flag Linux 3.0,
taking the RedNote route decades before it was cool,
but did not get much further than the installation screen,

After that it was Ubuntu -> Mint -> Arch -> Parabola -> Manjaro.

Knoppix live cd

I think Ubuntu 10.04 or whatever mint version around then

Slackware in the early mid-nineties. But of course there was other Unix variants before that. And what was it called, OS/2 or something like that?

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.

Ubuntu 5.10 back when a random Finnish teenager could ask Canonical for free install CDs and they'd just mail them to you no money asked.

The first was Redhat Linux 7, but not for long. I moved to Slackware soon after.

CentOS

Puppy Linux. On very old hardware.

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.

Mandrake Linux. I couldn’t tell you what year but I remember booting into it and thinking it was the coolest thing.

Red Hat Linux, about 2002 from a CD I got from somewhere.

My parents had some of the ancient ubuntu (or ubuntu based?) distros that they let me play with, I myself tried Manjaro in 2017 for a month (very scuffed back then), and then full Arch Linux since March or Apr 2021

Haven't bothered switching since, but if I did, I'm lightly curious on the NixOS hype. Why yes, I just installed Arch Linux for the archbtw, but also it feels like it just works for me at this point (yknow, till the next fuckup akin to the grub2 fiasco)

Manjaro. It broke a few times. Then I used plain arch ca 2 years without anything breaking. (Their was no guided installer yet)

The last 2 years I have been happy with opensuse Tumbleweed. Of course I have experiment a bunch of others too. Including running distros on servers.

That I played with on an old Pentium II rig? The now-defunct Crunchbang (Bunsen Labs is that distro's successor).

That I actually used as a daily driver? Ubuntu 12.10.

I've been daily-driving Linux for well over a decade at this point and have pretty much settled on Arch now after multiple distro-hops in that timespan.

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

Kurumin, a brazilian offshoot of Knoppix, sometime in early 2007 I think. The distro has been discontinued back in 2008. I was completely amazed that the whole OS would boot and work straight out of the CD, without needing to install anything.

Ubuntu 6 on a Samsung laptop I had lying around 2006ish. The webcam and trackpad wouldn't work, but a mouse and not caring about the webcam made that tolerable. It was the only OS I ran for a year or so. I went back to Windows for gaming shortly afterwards, but have been using Linux off-and-on in some form ever since.

RedHat, I had to recompile the kernel to be SoundBlaster compatible so that I could play Doom with sound on my 486.

For a long time, I thought it was Fedora Core 4. I did use that, but I recently found my old burned CDs of Mandrake 8.1. That really took me back. I might install it on a VM for some nostalgia.

litterally arch btw

First:

• Server: Debian
• Desktop: Debian
• Desktop daily driver: Ubuntu

Ubuntu back in the Gnome 2 days.

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.

Turbo Linux in the late 90s. It didn't go well.

Later I gave Redhat a shot - 5.0 or 5.1, I forget. Stayed with RH and now Fedora.

My first was Ubuntu 14.04. and then 16.04. at school 💀. as early as 2015 iirc

Though Blackbox or Kali might be a contender too (one of the distros my father had installed for fun)

I had rly cool CS teachers, which also administered our infrastructure

then we used Linux Mint in the "Linux" club run by one of said teachers

For personal use, my first one was Manjaro in 2018 (I switched to it with a Windows dual boot, I got rid of Windows entirely in 2020 I think?). Somewhere I switched to Endeavour OS, tried out OpenSuse Tumbleweed on my laptop and eventually settled on Fedora bc of the Grub fiasco Arch had. Am using it to this day.
Though it's in the form of Nobara on my desktop; I also plan on switching to Bluefin eventually

I inherited a Sony Vaio in 2009 which was really slow with windows, but unsurprisingly was ok once I swapped that out for Ubuntu 9.04. Took me a while to get the brightness up as the buttons didn't respond, but I kept that machine running for 7 years, the HDD controller died in the end so it stopped detecting any HDD.

Mandriva. Yes, old and no longer exist. Forst distro i started to to use permantly on desktop is Fedora. The server has always been Ubuntu since the Mandriva time when I first learned about Linux. I think 2005. CS server etc. Desktop was 2024 when MS screwed up Windows too much

Intrepid Ibex

Took me a while to dig up the posts on distrowatch, but I'm pretty sure that the first Linux distro that I used heavily was Mepis Linux 8 back in 2007-2009. I loved that OS.

My first distro was Debian, probably back around 2008. I used that and Ubuntu for years without having even looked at a desktop environment. For me, Linux was a server OS and I had to teach myself how to use it to spin up Teamspeak/Mumble, webservers, VPNs, etc.

I first started using Linux as a desktop OS in 2016. Tried SUSE and Fedora, but really liked Manjaro and eventually gravitated to Arch. I tried out NixOS a year or so ago and liked it, but I still go back to Arch with KDE Plasma.

Enlightenment -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Pop

My first Linux install was Slackware sometime in the late 90's. I didn't really use it though, as I never managed to get it working with my dial-up Internet. Stupid winmodems.

The first distribution I actually used was Mandrake. Others I've used since then include Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS. I've landed on using Manjaro on both my main desktop and laptop, though I have secondary machines running Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, and EndeavourOS.

OpenSuse 5, I think it was called suse Linux back then.

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.

Mine was slackware in I think 1997?

Elementary OS

slackware, from floppy circa 1996

Ubuntu Karmic Koala. To be fair, I was a kid and that was, according to people on the Internet, the most likely to work. And so it did - it had out of the box support for my wifi adapter, which some other distros I tried later did not, I had to use something called ndiswrapper. Of course I did not yet know about compiling my own configured kernel, that came a month or 2 later.

I only stayed on Ubuntu for a while, then tried Mint, used that on and off for years, dabbled with Arch at some point, too. In the last 5 years I've used PopOs, Gentoo, OpenSuse, NixOS. I'm not gonna bother with capitalization and punctuation on some of these.