Red Hat 5.0 "Hurricane" from 1997. I still have the CD.

Raspbian (modified Debian Jesse) on a raspberry pi 2B (which I am still using over a decade later to host some discord bots). Also now using Debian 1Bookworm on an old optiplex as a media server.

Way back: Ubuntu live CD. More recent history: Pop!_OS > Zorin OS > Fedora.

Happily been running Fedora for like 2 years now.

BackTrack 5 because I was too poor to pay for my own Wi-Fi back then, so I had to become creative heheh

Ubuntu... Then Slackware... Then Fedora... Then Arch I still dont know why tf I went to Slackware... It was painful, but worth it

Gentoo, sometime in the early 00's

Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 somewhere around 2000. Ran that for a year or two until the PC it was on died.

Next time I was able to run it was 2008ish on a pos dell laptop on which I installed Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). When that laptop died a year or so later I went macOS and was happy there until about 2022ish.

Now I'm running it across several machines for different purposes.

Arch dualbooting OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my tinkering laptop.

Ubuntu Server 22.04 on my server (started with 18.04)

Fedora 41 on family computers/laptops

Asahi on the last bit of Apple hardware left in the house

Raspberry Pi OS on a number of PiS serving different purposes.

Yellow Dog in early 2000s, and I think I switched to Debian PPC not long after. My memory of back then is quite hazy. A way while after that I had an Eee PC which I think I put Ubuntu on initially (the desktop was dog slow) and then changed over to LMDE. Have a feeling I had something else on it before Ubuntu... may have been the default Eee distribution, which I forget the name of (think it began with an X).

First attempt was Slackware, installed from a CD that came with a magazine because we didn't have the internet in about 2001 or 2002. It worked for one glorious afternoon but I'd tried to dual boot with Windows and nuked that partition. Got into big trouble and was banned from the family computer for the rest of the summer. Couldn't try again until a couple of years later when I got my very own laptop and paid my friend £5 to leave his PC on overnight downloading an ISO of dynebolic over dial up and burn it to a CD for me.

That was great but then I got my hands on a beefier PC and used Ubuntu thanks to the free CDs you could get in the mail. When I finally got a job and a broadband connection I switched to Mandriva, then Ubuntu again for a few years with most of that being Xubuntu and for like the last 10 years mostly Debian. I switched to Fedora a couple of times and tried a few others like MX Linux and Qubes. I also had a Pinebook Pro for a while running Manjaro ARM. I just always ended up going back to Debian. I can't see myself ever changing distros again.

WSL, Deepin for an hour, and then endeavourOS (easy Arch) ever since

My first Linux was Gentoo. It took several tries to get code compiled and working on that Pentium 4, but I will say, the process taught me a lot about Linux in general. It was the ultimate crash course. I’d recommend Gentoo for all beginners who don’t mind digging in to the point of frustration, because it’s a great learning experience.

Slackware in 1997.

I ran it on a 486SX/40 with 32MB of RAM and a 2GB harddrive.

It turned me into the man I am today.

Slackware back in '96 when It was the only option. Then tried everything else before settling on Mint and never having to worry about picking another distribution again.

I dual booted Ubuntu originally, but I never used it. Had to really make the jump when I installed Arch on my desktop in ~2020 because I heard it would run games better. I've stayed 100% on Linux since! After trying quite a few distros (Fedora, Debian, EndeavourOS, Garuda, Archcraft, more I'm forgetting) I have finally settled on NixOS... it's been over a year and I still haven't switched, that's gotta be worth something :)

Dreamlinux :) 2.2 maybe.

Ubuntu, circa 2005ish I think. Played with all the *buntu derivatives back then, went back to windows for a while, then tried Manjaro, found it frustratingly unstable, and now I use PopOS.

Casual Deck owner here. Arch Linux is my answer.

Lycoris in 2002. It sucked. I think I tried it because it was pushed towards newbies. I tried Mandrake with KDE not long after and that is when I really became a Linux fan.

SuSE, about 1999, although I didn’t really start ‘getting’ Linux until I tried Slackware a couple of years later. After that I’ve just been bouncing between trusty old Debian and different distros based on it.

Edit: I’ve also tried Gentoo, Arch and Mandrake briefly many years ago.

I guess Ubuntu? 10 years ago or even more? can't remember... Tried it for a bit but didn't stick at first and went back to Windows until 2020.

Installed my first homelab and selfhosted application on my old spare laptop with Debian (only over command line).

So I gave Linux desktop another try... Ubuntu for a few days => Manjaro for a few days => EndeavourOS !

Got hooked and are now a proud EOS user for about 3 years and never will I look back into Windows !

I'm still in the learning process, but in the long run I will probably switch to bare bone Arch.

Red Hat 7

Red Hat 9 in 2004

Ubuntu sometime around 2010. It definitely wasn't what I was looking for so I didn't try another distro until 3 years ago. Linux Mint's working well for me but I'm curious about Bazzite.

Installed Ubuntu back at 2012 on my Surface. Since then, I’ve hopped to CentOS, OpenSUSE, and Fedora. For now I’ve settled on Arch Linux!

Ubuntu 6.06 I always come back to Arch now-a-days.

Redhat 4.1 back in 97. I even purchased the CD from PC World, seems wild now to buy a CD/DVD of a distro.

First PC I installed it on was a work laptop, had to compile a bunch of kernel modules and then the kernel to get everything working but get everything working I did, Thinkpads being good for Linux even then.

I first got to try Kali Linux while getting my degree.

One of the first slackware (so many floppies) on my mighty 486 DX 50. Linux wasn't at 1.0 yet at the time.

Linux (many versions) has been my daily driver ever since, with windows as a gaming backup a lot of the time. I still have it on a single machine in a small partition because of VR :‐/

Still shopping for one when I make the switch. Mint looked pretty user friendly.

I am not a computer unfortunately, only a ungabunga caveman

Technically I first experuenced Linux as a very small kid in 2009 in my school computers, but my first time trying Linux for my personal desktip usage was in December 11, 2021, when I first tried Linux Mint. My setup was a very humble, 14 years old, ddr2 board, and I was amazed at how much faster Cinnamon was compared to Windows 10. Since then, I already helped about 5 people to move to Linux too 😁

@midtsveen if I remember correctly, I think it must have been Ubuntu 12.04
My first steps into the Linux world - it's incredible to see how far the Linux desktop has come since. I've got a laptop that runs exclusively Zorin OS and I love it!

Lubuntu about 10 years ago, then Mint, openSUSE, and I've stuck with Debian for the past eight.

Lubuntu — what a horrible experience (back then)! Now I'm happy with openSUSE Tumbleweed, Void Linux, and Nobara (for my wanna-be gaming PC, lol; trying to get just enough frames for CS2). Every once-and-a-while (I feel like hyphenating that), I do a fresh install, just to get rid of the cruft. Nowadays that makes me wonder if I should be switching to immutable...

Mint

I started using Linux this year. I first tried out Debian, but then switched to mint. Has been very happy with mint every since, so I don't think I will switch again in the near future.

My first linux was Ubuntu 10.04. And I swapped to Arch only when Ubuntu added snap.

Knoppix on live cd which I installed later on hdd but a few days later switched to Mandrake, I think it was... 2001? Good times, good times. There has been a lot of distrohopping since then.

OpenSuSE that came with the Linux magazine