linuxmemes

Ubuntu 8.10. My XP install had gotten corrupted and I didn’t own a disc copy of Windows. One of the tech support ladies at my school gave me a copy. Once I discovered the desktop cube and GTK themes I was hooked.

RHEL desktop 4 when it was still free and I was in middle school

First must've been Caldera Linux in 1996 or 1997. Absolutely wild to compare with contemporaries at the time.

RedHat 5.2 in 1998. The manual that came with the box set was amazing.

My first linux distro was i dunno how many years ago. Ubuntu I gave a old dell inspirion with an althlon to one of our church members at the time, no idea what happened to that laptop.

Currently I'm using linux mint due to recommendations for being easy, just recently switched from windows 11 actually.

First one I tried was suse. Had it installed at an installfest (ah those heady days). But when I got it home it wouldn't work with my monitor.

Second I bought Mandrake, but couldn't get that to work either because I had lost my monitor manual and couldn't give it the vsync value for it.

First one I got to work was called LibraNet. That worked great for a couple of years until they stopped supporting it because it was run by a father and son team and the father passed away.

So then I chose suse again, hoping a bigger org wouldn't suffer the same problem. But then later there was some controversy I can't remember anymore (was it with microsoft?), so I switched to Kubuntu which I have been using forever, but am going to switch to opensuse very soon for various reasons.

Fun trivia: used KDE on every one of them.

I found a distro that would install on the windows file system and boot. Apparently it was slackware based didn't have a concept in my head of package managers couldn't figure out how to install gaim (now pidgin) gave up. Didn't go back for another 4 years doing C in college. Didn't look back from there.

Ubuntu 5.04 back in like 2004-2005. Although I did pick up RedHat 5 back in the late 90s but never managed to get it installed... Because I was like 11 or 12 lol

DLD with some 2.0 kernel.

Red Hat 5.1 CD from a magazine. Ended up at fedora and couldn't be happier.

Ubuntu in 2010 (with compiz' burning screen of course!). Got a new laptop a the time with decent to good specs and was shocked how bad it performed with the stock Win7 and bloated with bloatware (it was a Sony).

Ubuntu 6.04. It was really simple to get it up and running even back then.

Technically the first distro i used was Lubuntu 10.04, but it was only a live cd because i was 13 by then and i was terrified that i installed linux and my father got angry at me if i left any evidence. The first one i used as a full SO to use as i like, Raspbian, so debian (wheezy, i believe).

Slackware circa 1996

Suse Linux before it was opensuse

SuSE Linux 6.0 I believe. Its been a while and I was very young then...

Fedora 7

Debian Lenny in 1999.

Red Hat 6 in college.

Mandrake Linux 7 at home.

In 2000

Zorin :D

Ubuntu on an orangepi 5 when it released, now Linux Mint dual-booted to windows (haven't booted into windows for ages now) on my main rig. I'll figure out making VR work at some point I hope, it's all I really use windows for now.

*ubuntu (Xubuntu -> Ubuntu 10.04 -> Kubuntu 12.04) -> Debian 8 (KDE). Debian since then.

Something that ran from loadlin, I can't remember. Slackware, probably.

Ubuntu, then Mint, now Arch, but I'm too inexperienced for it and want to try Kubuntu for native KDE with Plasma desktop.

@Waffelson First effort was Corel Linux back in 1999. The experience was so bad that I didn't try linux again until 2008, and it finally stuck 6 years ago. Now i'm all in.

I saw some Red Hat first around 2000, then tried Mandrake on my machine around 2005.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu

Debian -> Zorin -> Fedora -> Nobara

Kind of just been going down the convenience route.

Ubuntu studio 🤣🤣🤣

Mint -> Kubuntu -> EndeavourOS -> Arch (btw)

ChromeOS (more it's Debian Container)

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

Distrohopping every view Weeks

KDE Neon

NixOS

My first distro was ubuntu 11.04 if I remember correctly.

Slackware, circa 1995. Kernel 1.2.8

Suse linux. I didnt know what partitioning was, so I partitioned my hard drive 6 times and messed up my bootloader. I didn't know what that was too, so I had to figure out how to do all this....with a Suse linux disk from the library.

Later on, I discovered Wesnoth and that was an awesome game. I also played around with Ubuntu 6+, Slackware, DSL, and a host of others. Its been a fun ride. Nowdays, I like PopOS and Manjaro (steamdeck). Most anything debian.

rocky linux 8 on a vm (rocky is a tablet os to me)

redacted

I tried to have a go at ubuntu but my hardware was pretty crap and it didn't work, I can't remember my first one that worked but it was probably debian or alpine or something

Redhat 5.2 on cd. I learned a lot about compiling kernels as it didn’t support scsi emulation which was required for an ide cd burner. I think I ended up on Mandrake for a while before bouncing around including LFS. Then gentoo for many many years. And I’ve come full circle and been back on fedora for about 10 years now.