linuxmemes

Redhat 2.1, a cd stuck to a huge book

Ubuntu, before Unity came along

Knoppix STD

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

Mandrake mid 1990s

Yggdrasil LGX, back in ‘93.

Slackware.

Red hat on a disc from a for dummies book at the library.

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

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.

Open suse and mandrake

Ubuntu 8.10

I don't like Ubuntu anymore but I loved it then

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Debian

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.

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.

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

Pop! OS

AT&T SVR4

Oh, Linux. Slackware 1.2, but I had already used SunOS, Solaris, Ultrix, BSD, A/UX, and Unixware

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 threw months for it to arrive.

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.

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

Arch

Ubuntu, then arch.

Fedora

Then Arch

And finally NixOS

Some old ass Fedora Core distro.

Open Suse in the mid 2000s.

I started with Ubuntu, but since I was a kid at the time, wifi not working scared me away as I only ever knew of "everything works out of the box". After 2 years, I took a shot at linux again and I gotta say that it was mint that helped me build enough confidence in fixing any issues myself and to try other harder distros like arch. Now after all the exploring/distro hopping, I have settled down on opensuse as a daily driver, but mint will always be one of my favorites, and will always recommend it to any newbie.

CentOS But now it seems that it has withdrawn from the stage of history.

SLS (Soft Landing System) then Slackware. 30+ years and still enjoying the Linux ride...

Ubuntu

Day 1 was some awesome crazy dude on IRC teaching me how to compile the kernel from source, what options to choose, and then installing Slackware.

Ubuntu Breezy (5.10)

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

Mint was my first main. Before that there were some projects on raspbian.

Pardus in 2007

Debian with kde, because it looked a bit like Windows.

Then slackware because it was supposedly a "simple" Linux distro. Apparently simple doesn't mean simple to use for a newbie...

The year was 2002, and the distro was Caldera Open Linux 2.2

edit to add: Currently running KDE Neon. KDE 6 is pretty great so far.