Slackware wasn't the first Linux distro, but it's the oldest still alive and kicking
(www.theregister.com)
I was a mac guy in the 90s, which was rather unpopular. I started just experimenting with stuff to expand my horizons. In ~97 I started playing with BeOS, and NetBSD. The latter was pretty much the only thing that had a native boot loader for the OpenFirmware. Played a bit with Yellow Dog Linux and MKLinux after that, but NetBSD remained my go to. I almost fully switched in the early 00s but OSX came out and being Unix system I stuck around. By the mid 00s I was using a mix of NetBSD and Debian/Ubuntu for servers, and a couple years later fully switched to Debian to have one single OS that I could use everywhere.
Never looked back!