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... before Canonical nuked it.

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

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.

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.

I learned on Red Hat back in the 90s

I had got a copy for free some place, so I taught myself how to install and use it

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.

Knoppix Live CD back in 2004!

Mandrake. Emailed to me on a CD. I feel old.

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.

VoyagerOS - no idea about anything other than Windows being a thing, less of a clue about what I was doing, think I read something about it being lightweight and guessed it fit my needs.

Ubuntu 16.04

Knoppix. Was recommended it by someone I chatted with at the time and that did not go well. This was not Knoppix's fault though, but rather me not knowing what I got into. Things worked as one would expect, the applications that were included ran without issues, but the issue came when wanted to install software. At the time didn't know anything about linux, so didn't know how to use the terminal to install software, and when trying to install new ones using exe files that didn't work for now obvious reasons. So threw that stuff out and went back to windows, and didn't touch Linux again until Ubuntu Hardy Heron which went a lot better.

DSL (Damn Small Linux) was what I started plying with, but my first daily driver was PCLOS.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Immediately liked the interface, but was bummed by lack of software and (expected) subpar performance on my shitty hardware. Went back to Windows 7 after a month or so. It took me quite a lot of hopping between many Linux distros and Windows to finally settle on Manjaro as my desktop OS of choice

386BSD, on a 386dx processor with 4mb ram. Compiled from 24 3.5" floppies that took 24 hours to compile. Before Linux existed.

Arch Linux. Took me 9 days and several reinstalls to get to a working window manager.

Knoppix, on a live CD. Then shorty after, Aurox Linux, distributed as a number of CD with a magazine. Around 2004-2005. Then Mandriva.

Mandrake 9.1.

Slackware 7, year 2000. Never seen linux before. Thanks to help from IT geek next door managed to boot net-installer it from single 3.5". After many hours managed do finally get xfree86 working. As far as I remember it was running with KDE.

Linux Mint

Installed and tinkered with Mandrake 6.0 First full time: Ubuntu 04-10. Warty Warthog

Kubuntu 6.06. Got the CD with a computer magazine that had a good tutorial on how to install the thing next to a pre-existing Windows partition. To this day I miss the look of KDE 3!

Ubuntu sometime in the late 2000's. I remember a friend showing me virtual desktops that rotated between each other.

I dual booted my machine and it was amazing... For 10 seconds until I realized thats all it did. When right back to windows.

Ubuntu, either version 12.04 or 12.10 when I got my first computer, a Chromebook, in Christmas 2013 when I was 10. I hated how Chrome OS didn't support anything so I found a way to put Ubuntu on it and messed around with Blender and Minecraft. Despite this early start, I proceeded to do nothing productive with it, broke it out of frustration, and now I'm 20 and struggling with Arch lmao

I installed linux mint on some really old laptop when i was a little kid but i wouldnt really consider that my first distro that i actually used on a dailybasis, that would be SteamOS on a Steam deck, it showed me how great linux could be and got me hooked on it.

Gentoo circa 2002. Soooooo over my capabilities at the time

Redhat 4.? I'm not really sure of the precise version but it was sometime in the late 99 or early 2000.

SimplyMEPIS, I really liked it & after it was discontinued I switched to Ubuntu

Ubuntu!

I downloaded the installer in 2017 after MS forced an update to Windows 10 from 7. My laptop, from 2010, couldn't handle W10 and I heard Linux was good for old laptops. Not long after that I hopped around to other distros but Ubuntu was first.

Linux Mint. It's been a while since I used Mint now, but I do missTimeshift

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.

I think it was probably Ubuntu 6.10. a friend from high school have me a CD to install it.

It was SuSE 5.3, in 1998. That's about the time I went to Linux workshops with a HAM club, getting into packet radio, AX25 and stuff. Good times

Debian. Can't remember the version. I copied the images on a handful of floppy disks and ran a graphical desktop OS off 32MB of RAM and 200MB of storage.

Never really moved away from that since then, except when using a piece of hardware that came with something specific.

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn

Ubuntu 21.10

Kubuntu 14.04 burned on a CD my brother gave me when I started studying programming. Switched a lot along the way and ironically ended up on Kubuntu 23.04. I love KDE.