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Mandrake in 2003, I was young and didn't know what I was doing...
Mine was also mandrake in the early 2000's. There was no Ubuntu back then, and Mandrake was the "home desktop" for Linux, specially if you didn't need servers running. I think it worked fine, not sure why it got so much hate.
Knoppix Live CD back in 2004!
Red Hat Linux back in 1999.
It was no distro, it was kernel 0.99 and bunch of gnu utils on like 8 floppy disks, and 10 more floppies or so for X11. I was running it on a 486DX50 iirc.
Linux 0.2, not.joking. a friend came with it to me, just downloaded from a newsgroup (I think) around 1992, on a floppy! We tested it on my PC, didn't know what to do with it, and promptly removed it. A few years later we gave it another try, and the rest is history
Mandrake. Emailed to me on a CD. I feel old.
Slackware, and it took years before I tried again.
A friend of mine gave me an official Ubuntu 4.10 CD and that was my first Linux distro that I have tried.
I still have that CD.
Ubuntu. I couldn't afford a new laptop for college so I desperately googled for some way to make my old machine last.
Mandrake 7 was the first one I installed on my pc. In those days you could buy a boxed version with about 10 cds to install from.
Ubuntu... before Canonical nuked it.
Red hat linux
Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake :)
Linux Mint. It's been a while since I used Mint now, but I do missTimeshift
Mint, because it's what my dad put on my first laptop when I was like 10 or something. I remember playing minetest and FTL on it.
Gentoo.
Slackware 0.97 (if I recall correctly) it must’ve been in 1993 I think
Debian Woody PPC. I also downloaded Yellow Dog but don't remember ever installing or using it.
Mandrake ! Autumn 1999 if I remember well...
Slackware. Version 3.1 if I remember rightly, with Linux kernel 2.19.x.
It was installed from floppy disks, you needed about 10 of them to do a full install including X Windows.
At the time (1997 or 1998) I only had dial up internet at home, so over the period of several days I brought blank floppies in to work, downloaded the relevant images and copied them on to the disks.
I then spent most of a weekend trying to persuade an (even then elderly) PS/2 with 4 MB of RAM to become a Linux box. Got there in the end, though!
Mandrake 9.1.
DSL (Damn Small Linux) was what I started plying with, but my first daily driver was PCLOS.
Some version of Ubuntu. I forgot which version number.
I don't actively use Linux anymore but I think I first used puppy Linux in middle school. I was a strange kid and got a kick out of anything that could run off a flash drive.
Then I'd use like Ubuntu, lubuntu, and mint typically. I'm back to using windows because I only really use my computer for gaming and I honestly had a rare gift for bricking distros by installing something wrong.
Arch. Went in at the deep end.
Suffice to say that I no longer use Linux. Got it built with relative ease though inevitably hit issues along the way, but got tired of having to use terminal for everything. Would not recommend Arch as your first distro unless you already love existing in a terminal.
Ubuntu 16.04
Backtrack then crunchbang. Eventually I moved to arch. I've been using debian and mint lately though.
Debian 2.2 on a consulting job in 2001. I'd used Unix mainframes in college, but other than that had only ever done work on DOS and Windows before then. Didn't think much of it at the time, though it was familiar and easy to work with. Certainly a far cry from the experience we all have with Linux today.
Redhat 4.? I'm not really sure of the precise version but it was sometime in the late 99 or early 2000.
for me it was: Puppy Linux for a desktop machine with 254MB of RAM when I was on 1-2nd semester in Preparatory School
Redhat. When it came time to upgrade i dug myself into rpm hell so many times. I struggled, had to reinstall. Next redhat upgrade, same experience.
I tried debian potato, and dist-upgraded to next stable with no issues. I was floored. Have been dist-upgrading ever since. And run a few hundreds of debian servers.
Slackware, floppies, my 486.
I did some research on what would be a good OS for someone coming from Windows and at the time Linux Mint was recommended a lot so that's what I chose.
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Immediately liked the interface, but was bummed by lack of software and (expected) subpar performance on my shitty hardware. Went back to Windows 7 after a month or so. It took me quite a lot of hopping between many Linux distros and Windows to finally settle on Manjaro as my desktop OS of choice
The very first Linux? That would be DSL (Damn Small Linux).
I don't know whether it still exists but in 2003-ish, I was looking for something on-the-go and came across DSL.
I recently (2 years now) started using Linux as a daily driver again. Had to learn a lot of new things. This time someone on GamingOnLinux adviced me to start with Mint. But it wasn't for me. So it's been a great journey.
Oh god it's been so long (20+ years). I only remember that whatever distro I installed had that great game preinstalled in which Tux slides down a mountain. Ah... Nice memories of easier times.
I think it was probably Ubuntu 6.10. a friend from high school have me a CD to install it.
Knoppix, on a live CD. Then shorty after, Aurox Linux, distributed as a number of CD with a magazine. Around 2004-2005. Then Mandriva.
Hard to remember because it was in 2000 on my gateway PC, but I remember trying to setup Gentoo and redhat and knoppix and failing miserably.
RedHat 5.2, purchased in a plastic-wrapped cardboard box from Best Buy. God I'm old 😭
I learned on Red Hat back in the 90s
I had got a copy for free some place, so I taught myself how to install and use it
Knoppix. Was recommended it by someone I chatted with at the time and that did not go well. This was not Knoppix's fault though, but rather me not knowing what I got into. Things worked as one would expect, the applications that were included ran without issues, but the issue came when wanted to install software. At the time didn't know anything about linux, so didn't know how to use the terminal to install software, and when trying to install new ones using exe files that didn't work for now obvious reasons. So threw that stuff out and went back to windows, and didn't touch Linux again until Ubuntu Hardy Heron which went a lot better.