Linux

Mandrake 9 around 2004

Slackware

Debian I think? Probably Debian Wheezy.

Edit: All thanks to my college professor.

Debian Sarge which was testing back then. Woody was stable.

Fedora 38, one year ago. I am on 39 now and had to do a reinstall. It has its problems, a lot of problems actually, but is still miles better than windows in my opinion

Ubuntu back when it was decent lol. I picked it because everyone said that was a beginner-friendly distro, and I had already used it anyway as my parents had an Ubuntu ASUS laptop when I was little (though atp I didn't really remember much from using that laptop).

I used Ubuntu until PAE became required and then switched to either Puppy or DSL (tried them both, honestly don't remember which I stuck with). Eventually got a new computer and used Fedora and Arch (btw) for years. I've recently switched to Debian on a machine I just don't wanna be arsed with worrying about breaking.

I installed Ubuntu 20.10 because I got tired of Windows and liked the monkey wallpaper.

Pop!_OS in mid 2021. Switched to Fedora GNOME in mid 2022, haven't looked back, but am looking forward to Fedora COSMIC.

Ubuntu back in 2013 (I think?) to get the exclusive TF2 item. Good times! :D

Slackware 1.2. It was easier to install than Debian at the time.

The first I tried was Ubuntu 10.10 but for reasons I don’t remember anymore I‘ve decided to rather install Linux Mint 10.

Used Mint for quit a while, then I had my distrohopping phase before finally setteling on plain Debian a couple of years back.

DiLinux. You drop a bunch of files in a fat16 folder, and run a chainloader that chestbursts out of DOS. It used the umsdos filesystem, which was a short-lived thing that lived on FAT and scribed all of the other needed fs features into bonus hidden files.

Deepin since I heard good words about it.

It wasn't good.

My first non-family PC was a Acer netbook with Linpus [Lite] Linux. I was 12, so my first priority was trying to get Rollercoaster Tycoon to work. Eventually I realized how silly that prospect was and instead managed to install Windows XP via a bootable USB. I used XP for a while until Vista came out, and then I gave Linux Mint a try and really liked it. These days I'm using NixOS and Fedora.

My first distro was PopOS! I choose it because I heard it had Nvidia drivers pre-installed into the image which sounded nice, also having the support from a bigger company that know Linux. However, I've distrohopped a lot since then, probably 2 years ago now. These days I'm finding myself liking Tumbleweed the most, and I have tried a lot of different distributions..

Slackware. 3.x. I was studying computer science and wanted to have a similar system at home as in the lab.

My very first linux distro is Zorin OS since it is Windows like and heard it is more light weight. After using it for a while, it didn't feel like more light weight to me so I switched back to Windows.

After some years later, I decided to ditch Windows completely and used Ubuntu 20.04 for about a year. When I broke Ubuntu after using about a year, I switched to Arch and still on Arch to this day.

Linux Mandrake in 1999. It was a bit rough and featured a very ugly KDE. I didn't use KDE again until about 18 months ago, and it is now my desktop environment of choice.

I'm fairly sure it was Scientific Linux because that was the distro used in the labs of my first programming course.

Red Hat back in the 1990s. I had to buy it from a local stationary shop because being in a small, isolated country and the internet being in it's infancy, it was all I could find. Came with a manual bigger than a phone book and cost about the equivalent to these days $200.

Lubuntu was the first distro I remember installing on a low-end netbook.

I’m on a similar path to you: Started with Ubuntu because a friend of mine had also dabbled in it, plus it has a large online community. Switched to Mint shortly thereafter, where I stayed for a while (more than a year). Currently on Fedora for the more recent packages, but sometimes I miss the familiar look & feel of the Cinnamon desktop environment (came from Windows and still use Windows for work).

On my gaming PC, I’ve gone from Windows to Pop_OS! to currently on Nobara (again, for the more recent packages).

ETA over Christmas of 2023 I installed Mint w/ Xfce on my mom’s new (used) laptop and themed it to look and feel like OS X. She knows it’s not a Mac, and I had to teach her some new workflows, but more than a year later she’s getting along well with it. Saved her a grand in the process.

I started with Crunchbang in its final years. It was a great introduction to Linux, to be honest. It was also a very solid distro, as it was Debian-based.

But, sadly, it eventually folded. It still has a spiritual sequel in BunsenLabs but, in the meantime, I'd moved to Arch (btw).

Arch was the only thing I could get working on my E200AH when I started. It's a weird SoC x86_64, with some non-free drivers. Now I can run anything, but the default with arch was figuring out what to do... Debian installer didn't have a mouse and the keyboard didn't work right and I just got stuck. Arch installer dropped me into a TTY and made me figure it out

The first distro I used would be CentOS, followed closely by Gentoo. CentOS was installed on the computers in the computer lab in college, and Gentoo was on the computers in the library. I think I went to the computer lab first. I'm probably biased against those two now, since every time I was using them I was banging my head against the keyboard trying to get some programming assignment to work, or desperately finishing a paper before midnight. :P

The first I installed and used myself was Ubuntu, which I still use. I just bought a System76 laptop, though, and I'm debating if I'll just go with Pop OS or switch to Debian.

Mint of course, then Manjaro and MXLinux. The weird stuff people recommend. Then Kubuntu, KDE Neon, Fedora KDE and now various Fedora Atomic variants.

• mint crashed randomly
• manjaro is very shady but was awesome, convinced me of KDE
• MXLinux was great but horribly outdated. Will never use a "stable" distro as desktop. Nextcloud was incompatible so I needed to switch
• Kubuntu crashed and many Ubuntu .deb apps where horrible, Flatpaks where awesome
• KDE Neon was an unstable mess and likely still is
• Fedora KDE was nice but also had KDE blackscreens
• Fedora Kinoite also gave me issues but either they are hardware related, or upstream KDE issues, or upstream Kernel issues, etc.

I wanted to try Ubuntu on a live disk back in highschool (~2012) but ended up wiping the drive on my laptop. Had to ask a friend who knew Linux for help so I could actually use it. That was eventually followed by debian and Manjaro. Later I tried arch on my desktop, got tired of that and switched back to windows for a few years. I've been running nixos for a while now and have been really enjoying it.

Because my first computers were shitty, I started with antix as main system, Ubuntu or others were too laggy for my systems.

fedora 38 KDE Plasma. still using it today

SLS (Softlanding Linux System) was my first.