Manjaro -> openSuse tumbleweed -> Fedora (Desktop) and tuxedoOS (Laptop)

I first tried Mandrake for a couple days in the late 9ps because I heard it was easy. It was definitely easy to brick my system and have no idea why!

So I switched to Slackware and never looked back. I'm still daily driving Slackware all these years later.

redhat 4.1 or maybe 5.2 back around 1996-1998 (plus a freebsd release around the same time). I got a pile of probably 15 discs from walnut creek and they were the only two I could get running. I didn't have internet access at the time.

Hmm, the years are a bit faded but first install of Redhat in 1996-7 somewhere as a short experiment, then Slackware, SuSE, LFS, Gentoo, and since then lazy with Kubuntu.. Might switch again soon with the Snap fiasco.

Ubuntu (because I have seen it on laptops in shops), Debian (because I found out that Ubuntu is based on Debian, is a community distro instead of a company distro), OpenSuse (I wanted to try something different to apt, it looked different), Zorin (because I loved the custom desktop environments), Mint (because a software I needed didn't work on Zorin, and because Cinnamon DE was very friendly), Trisquel (because it's 100%, recommended by FSF). I also tested other distros in VM's (Steam, Guix System, Pure OS, Dragora, Dynebolic, Alpine, Slackware and that's all I remember). A really beautiful journey!

redhat 5.5

I think I tried to compile Gentoo about 20 years ago for some reason.. Took many hours, and I don't remember even getting it running. Later I tried dual booting Ubuntu, but ended up using Windows all the time since that's where my games were. Started using Linux only (Xubuntu) some time around 2010.

It was Ubuntu 14.10 (still had Unity) installed on a Mac mini to run a Plex server. I actually really liked Ubuntu then, it was all new and very different to Windows. I had it hooked up to a TV and used the DE to maintain it I.e console, update app etc.

There was this really annoying error that would occur every time it would boot which drove me to look elsewhere. Ended up trying Arch and didn't put a DE on there because I started to get comfortable with the terminal and SSHing in.

I eventually installed Arch on my desktop and dual booted for a couple years using XFCE. Once I discovered KDE there was no going back.

I haven't used Windows on any of devices for years, all running Fedora and KDE.

Pretty sure tails os :P

Ubuntu, installed on a 256 gb flash drive as an experiment back in 2020. My first daily driver distro was Mint last year, then KDE Neon, and finally Kubuntu today

Distro doesn't matter to me anymore, I just like the Plasma DE and will use anything that uses it. Eventually I'm gonna have to try Arch with it and make my own Steam machine

Mandrake! It was a fucking disaster! Fortunately, I came back later using Kubuntu and had a much better experience.

Whatever Ubuntu was available in 2015. I only dabbled in Linux over the past 10 years. More seriously switching over in the last year or so.

I have Unraid as a server OS (~~Debian~~ slackware based, running a lot of docker containers and a couple VMs). Debian on my laptop. And Bazzite (fedora based) on my Lenovo Legion Go.

Still need to swap my gaming PC from windows. May try Bazzite on that as well. I've also tried Mint, Manjaro, and Zorin

openSUSE

scientific linux. I failed to get most things running and switched to ubuntu. this was about 10 years ago

debian

I somehow could not find the Mint install so I went with Ubuntu Mate. It was fine.

Debian 1.3, Bo - 1997

Linux Mint. I made a dumb decision to install it right away thinking it's just like Windows. Boy was i wrong. Took me years until I felt ready to switch to Linux.

I use Arch BTW

Mklinux. It was the only thing you could run on one of those jank-ass PowerPC/nubus Macs.

XanderOS way tf back in 2005 or 2006, but mostly just messed around and had no clue what I was doing with it... After that I did a Gentoo install. Been kinda off and on with Linux since, flirting with the possibility of switching to it fully but never actually making the jump until last year when I built a new machine and put Mint on it.

Started in 2022 on Kubuntu, moved to Fedora in October 2022, switched back to the Fedora KDE Spin in 2023, and been there since.

arch linux since december

I use arch btw

and I use hyprland btw

It depends how you define it. I first installed Slackware at work on a retired IBM PS/2 in '94 or '95, because somebody was working on MicroChannel bus support. (That never materialized.) Later, we checked out Novell Linux Desktop, maybe Debian, too. At a later job, we had some Red Hat workstations, version 5 or 6, and I had Yellow Dog Linux on an old Power Mac.

At home, I didn't switch to Linux until Ubuntu Breezy Badger. It was glorious to install it on a laptop, and have all of the ACPI features just work. I had been running FreeBSD for several years, NetBSD on an old workstation before that, and Geek Gadgets (a library for compiling Unix programs on Amiga OS) before that.

Ubuntu Karmic Koala. To be fair, I was a kid and that was, according to people on the Internet, the most likely to work. And so it did - it had out of the box support for my wifi adapter, which some other distros I tried later did not, I had to use something called ndiswrapper. Of course I did not yet know about compiling my own configured kernel, that came a month or 2 later.

I only stayed on Ubuntu for a while, then tried Mint, used that on and off for years, dabbled with Arch at some point, too. In the last 5 years I've used PopOs, Gentoo, OpenSuse, NixOS. I'm not gonna bother with capitalization and punctuation on some of these.

Ubuntu. For Work purpose in 2020 as a development VM.

Since then i moved privately to Zorin and now to Nobara. At Work it still is Ubuntu for me, but hopefully i will soon change positions and can shelve that stuff.

Elementary OS

Enlightenment -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Pop

Intrepid Ibex

OpenSuse 5, I think it was called suse Linux back then.