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Mandrake. Emailed to me on a CD. I feel old.
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.
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.
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
Ubuntu... before Canonical nuked it.
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.
Slackware. Fall of '93. Well over 20, 3.5" diskettes. Sacrificed my OS/2 machine to do this.
Oh, and writing the XConfig file with all your monitor timings. Sweet memories…
Mandrake 9.1.
Slackware, and it took years before I tried again.
Linux Mint. It's been a while since I used Mint now, but I do missTimeshift
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 ! Autumn 1999 if I remember well...
Gentoo.
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.
Slackware 0.97 (if I recall correctly) it must’ve been in 1993 I think
Ubuntu (can't remember if it was 6 or 8) was the first distro that I used, my cousin and another family friend used it and I got interested and asked to have it installed on my home desktop.
For years, every LTS release of Ubuntu I installed as dual boot to try and experiment for a few weeks and then uninstalled it, using Windows for everything.
2 years ago, I decided that I wanted to try other distributions and to switch and use Linux as my daily driver, so I installed Manjaro on my laptop and I have been using it daily since.
Debian Woody PPC. I also downloaded Yellow Dog but don't remember ever installing or using it.
Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake :)
Started with Red Had 6 and then moved to Fedora Core 1. Have been on Fedora releases since.
Red hat linux
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.
Redhat 4.? I'm not really sure of the precise version but it was sometime in the late 99 or early 2000.
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.
Backtrack then crunchbang. Eventually I moved to arch. I've been using debian and mint lately though.
I think it was probably Ubuntu 6.10. a friend from high school have me a CD to install it.
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.
It's all a blur because I was maybe like 6 or 7 at the time, but I'm fairly certain it was Red Hat. The original, not RHEL.
I have vivid memories of playing a game that involved collecting gems and avoiding falling rocks in a maze, similar to Boulder Dash or Emerald Mine. I have no idea what it was, but I know it wasn't Rocks'n'Diamonds because I played that a lot and the graphics were different.
I daily drove Puppy Linux live booted off a USB for a few months probably 15 years a go when my hard drive died and I couldn't afford a new one.
Slackware, floppies, my 486.
RedHat 5.2, purchased in a plastic-wrapped cardboard box from Best Buy. God I'm old 😭
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.
Lindows lmao
for me it was: Puppy Linux for a desktop machine with 254MB of RAM when I was on 1-2nd semester in Preparatory School
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.
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.
10 years ago Arch and it was a bloodbath. No background and both IT bros said I should not do it. Took about 4 days and countless rescues, so much manual fstab editing, looking up what the thing I destroyed even is. Glorious times. Dual boot because I thought I might need windows, not anymore.