CentOS But now it seems that it has withdrawn from the stage of history.

Debian

Open Suse in the mid 2000s.

Mandrake. After that it gets hazy, but Mandrake was first.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

Ubuntu

I think Puppy or Damn Small Linux, maybe knoppix, i was on dial up at the time. Then I found that I could request a free Ubuntu install disk and the speed and cleanliness and compiz effects blew my mind. 04 or 06, can't remember which. From there I think it was xubuntu, mint, arch, arch nvme died and I needed an os immediately so manjaro, got sick of manjaro and garuda sounded neat so i tried it and that's where I am now on my main. Made a mess toying with wayland and am ready to reinstall, probably back to arch or try out nixos

edit: reading through all these comments is bringing back so many memories of other distros I played with back then.

Elementary OS Freya. I love a good GUI

I started with Ubuntu, but since I was a kid at the time, wifi not working scared me away as I only ever knew of "everything works out of the box". After 2 years, I took a shot at linux again and I gotta say that it was mint that helped me build enough confidence in fixing any issues myself and to try other harder distros like arch. Now after all the exploring/distro hopping, I have settled down on opensuse as a daily driver, but mint will always be one of my favorites, and will always recommend it to any newbie.

I don't remember the year or the version because it has been so long (2003 maybe). It was Ubuntu from the free mail order CDs they used to give away. I remember waiting something like three months for it to arrive.

For me, it was Mandrake, I think it was back around 2000. I played so much Tux Racer on that machine. However, after they switched the branding to Mandriva, the OS started to run pretty poorly for me around that time. I stayed away from Linux entirely until around 10 years ago when I friend introduced me to Mint. It's been my main ever since, though I've played with others since then, like OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, and most recently, Debian and EndeavourOS.

I think I went Mint - MX Linux - Opensuse tumbleweed which is where I have stayed for the last year and loving it

Redhat 5.2 in 1998. I think I bought a box set from CompUSA.

Knoppix, followed by Mandrake, Ubuntu, etc.

Linux Mint was the only one that I installed and used unironically followed by Kubuntu.

I'm a simpleton, I just want my OS to work.

Kubuntu 8.04 was my first, with the KDE 4 demo, it was pretty as fuck compared to Windows XP that came with that PC

Epic trolled by my friend, my first was Gentoo

Arch

Day 1 was some awesome crazy dude on IRC teaching me how to compile the kernel from source, what options to choose, and then installing Slackware.

SLS (Soft Landing System) then Slackware. 30+ years and still enjoying the Linux ride...

Knoppix

SuSe Linux in the early 2000s. Came on a couple of CD-ROMs. We used it to run JBoss servers at work, alongside various Unix flavours. But my first experience with Unix was in the late eighties at university. Been using Mint as my daily driver for about two years now and I'm never going back.

Kubuntu

knoppix, then slax, then slackware, then.... Ubuntu 4.10

Ubuntu Breezy (5.10)

Pardus in 2007

it was mine too, in 2020... bring me memories <3

My first was Suse Enterpise Linux. Bought from Best Buy in the late 90s.

Mint was my first main. Before that there were some projects on raspbian.

Suse

Manjaro GNOME Edition,
But am now on NixOS 😸❄️🐈✨

Slackware. Horrible experience.

Then Ubuntu.

Now Debian.

Some form of Novell-era Suse Linux when I was in college… 20 years ago. I didn’t get it back then. Mint is my daily driver today.

Ubuntu -> Mandriva -> Zorin -> Ubuntu -> Debian

FreeBSD 3.3

Kubuntu 5.10 that breezy badger release was the best

First Debian, then Ubuntu because people said it was better, then back to Debian because it wasn't (snaps really suck and break things), then to Pop OS (bc new laptop preinstalled with it). I also got a SteamDeck semi-recently if that counts (still use the Pop OS laptop).

I tried Puppy with a persistent live USB first, then I used Ubuntu through WUBI for a while until it borked my MBR.