What was your first distro?

Ubuntu, I was drawn in with the 3D cube and the ability to play games. The only game I had compatible then was TF2. So I left.

Back to it full time now, almost all games work, and on Mint

my friend (who was the it manager at one of my first jobs) had a fedora machine in 2007ish? and i loved using it. i only used linux for servers and websites for the longest time before i took the plunge into personal use though so my first personal distro was linux mint earlier this year.

Debian Woody > SuSE > gentoo

Still running gentoo on my main desktop and tumbleweed on my htpc

Ubuntu->Manjaro->Tumbleweed

Ubuntu; I tend towards Debian Mint, if I'm choosing something more mainstream these days, but I main Guix, now.

Slackware, in 1999.

Slackware.

That was 25+ years ago. So don't judge me.

Brand spanking new Kali linux after it was redone from Backtrack.

Thought I was cool for 5 seconds until I saw the Kali forums tearing into the thousands of idiots like me who hadn't touched Linux before but somehow managed to jump through the sketchy Debian installer to load an OS with a metric ton of offensive security tools that none of use knew how to use.

Eventually played with Ubuntu for home use, disliked it, tried Debian which was nice for server, saw Linus Torvalds uses Fedora for user friendly experience, and ended up there.

Raspbian Wheezy. I remember learning how to use apt-get because I wanted to see a Pi 1B run Minecraft. Minecraft Pi Edition was the first apt-get install I ever did.

Slackware. In 1993.

You beat me by 1 year. I switched to slackware when windows 95 came out because I liked cli from ms dos 6.22

It was Ubuntu. Can't remember which version but at the time they would mail you a cd if you requested one.

Same for me.
A friend in high school gave me one of these CD, I think it was 7.04.
Same here, though I remember it was 08.04 Hardy Heron for me. I still recall the default background too:

My first ever distro was Xubuntu. (I did install Lubuntu before it, but found it too "ugly" so switched to Xubuntu after about 30 mins.)

I was still in high school, around 2014-15. My pc was getting old, and I read online that Linux can make your pc run faster. So, I decided to give it a try. I also read online that Xubuntu (and Lubuntu) is among the lightest of distros, so decided to install that. It was worthwhile, to say the least.

I currently use mostly EndeavourOS and AlmaLinux for my personal machines, depending on the type of the device. I have installed Fedora on my sister's laptop, and Debian Stable on my parents' PC, so I have to maintain those as well. Also, I have a few Pi zero2s for various things, so I use PiOS (or whatever it's called these days) from time to time.

Caldera. I don't know why I picked that. Later I went SuSE.

I've been running Debian for long while, although work was RHEL and SuSE

Red Hat, at Uni.

Downloading a kernel source tarball, compiling it on Minix and writing a Lilo boot sector. Sort of an early LFS.

I installed Ubuntu decades ago, then moved and never used it again. The first distro I actually used was Peppermint. Loved it.

Tried Ubuntu 20.04 in a VM, then screwed around with a couple other distros in Vbox. Eventually dailied Ubuntu MATE, then Mint after my MATE install borked. Got a new laptop, installed FerenOS, installed ZorinOS after I couldn't figure out how to bind the start menu to Meta (for some reason it was unbound), then eventually moved to EndeavourOS (where I am now). Might try Aurora on my main laptop eventually.

Not sure, I installed a distro on my laptop when I was like 11 but I don't remember which one it was.

Slackware

Mine was also slackware. I think I broke my windows (95? 98?) installing it.
- Hehe, I, too, broke my windows 95 installing Slackware.
- I came from deskview and then OS/2

Manjaro. And even though I left it for good a while ago, I still sometimes wake up in cold sweat remembering these dark times.

mandrake was my first. Good memories

This was mine as well. I then moved on to Mandriva and then Mageia off and on. Mageia 9 has been good. Some of the earlier versions not so much. Thinking of trying OpenMandriva next.

Yellow Dog Linux

Slackware, to get away from the pink boys! Also there were only two or three distributions at the time.
Too many to remember since then.

(Hail Eris!)

Tried ubunto with mint about 10 years back. My first actual daily driver was endeavoros about 1.5 years ago and it has stuck!

Using Hyprland as the DE

Moblin 2.1 in live environment I think. Ubuntu 11.04 a bit later, which actually had WiFi drivers, but I needed to get them to a thumb drive, because they weren't shipped by default.

Then random Ubuntu variants (including Linux Mint) before getting back to Windows (8.1 and then 10), but I am back to Linux with Debian 12, and now 13.

Ubuntu 12.04. I really tried to use it as a daily but wine wasn't as good back then, a lot of apps I wanted to run were also platform specific. If a package wasn't in your distros repo you had to try and build it from source which was really difficult for someone just trying to start with Linux. I tried again with Ubuntu 16.04 and it was better but still wasn't quite there.

Fast forward to now and I'm actually dailying Bazzite 42. I'm not sure if wine has just improved a ton or proton has helped out a lot but windows compatibility has improved so much in the last decade. As much as everyone hates Electron for being heavier than native apps I would prefer an Electron app over no Linux version. Actually a lot of the apps I want to run now ship Linux versions so I don't even need wine for most things.

Flatpaks and appimages with Gear Lever have made installing apps on Linux as easy as Windows and MacOS. It might not seem like it but it's come a long way

Its either Ubuntu or Debian I cant remember

Slackware on a whole lot of lettered floppy disks.

Slackware was my first linux distro, but would Solaris or SunOS count?
- No, but bonus credit. I went Vax VMS, DEC Alpha DUX, Slackware, slowaris (x86 Solaris), Redhat, then LFS, Gentoo, RHEL, Solaris 9, and then eventually a little of everything else.

RedHat 3.0, kernel 1.2, early 1996. I was a contract developer and took a job for a customer to update an in-house curses app on SCO Unix. Aside from a few lab uses in college, I had never used Unix before. I was like, welp, I'll just install RedHat, do the work there, and recompile the app at the customer's site on their SCO machine. Stupidly charged into a massive learning curve (unix vs linux, gmake vs make, gcc vs cc, ncurses vs curses, ... none of which I had any familiarity with), but, amazingly, I got the job done! Kept RedHat as a second boot option on my workstation, and continued to use it more and more... 30 years later, I'm typing this on a MacBook Air running NixOS.

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 think it was actually DBAN I dabbled with firstly, and then like you Knoppix. I played too much later with microkernel distros like DSL / Tinycore, then Debian / Ubuntu's etc.

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

Mandrake 9.2 (before the Mandriva rebranding)

Same with Mandrake, though I can't remember what version number.

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

Debian. They mailed me the install media.

Red hat (in '99). I chose it because it was included on the disc that came with an IT magazine I bought at the time

I moved to Linux From Scratch a few years later, then to Debian. I have been on Debian based OSes since then, I like Mint at the moment

Knoppix was my favourite recovery and rescue live CD

Debian because that was the one I had read most about. Then I tried many other distros, some for years, until now when I am once again a Debian user...

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

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.

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

I still have a 9" netbook with Debian 12 Bookworm on it. Sadly, it's 32 bit so won't be getting Debian 13 Trixie. Maybe Void?

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.

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

The Ubuntu story is exactly what happened to me.
OpenSUSE Table weed is what got Linux to stick for me though. Once I learnt enough with that to get started and my OS needed a reinstall, I ended up going with CachyOS too eventually.

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

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.

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.

Soft Landing Systems (SLS). So many disks!

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 Fedora. Most of the recommendations for beginners at the time were for Ubuntu or derivatives and I was being contrary just because I could.

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

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.

Forgot to mention that I wasn't exactly young at the time. We just didn't have reliable broadband internet back then in my neck of the woods. So I had to download ISOs and save them in a USB thumb drive in a uni computer lab.

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.

me too with redhat 5 at my first job. shortly after moved to 6 that, as far as I remember, was the first showing the green OK at the right of every service starting instead of a mess of output

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

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

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

I still have an EeePC 900A that came with Xandros. I kept Xandros on it until Ubuntu 10.04 Network Edition came out.

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

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

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

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.