Slackware96 from Walnut Creek purchased at Staples back when software came in boxes with manuals. Netscape Navigator 3.0 anyone?
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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I got a T-shirt from Mozilla in the early 1990's and foolishly wore it to death. My Linux tie pin is somewhere, but I'm sure that my penguin tie has died, as have the Debian Potato CDs with boot disks for x86, PowerPC and SPARC.
I started with Mandrake 6 when the there were lots of 9's or 0's in the year
Then bounced from Slackware/opensuse/Red Hat/Debian/Gentoo/BSD
Now running Kde Neon and MacOS (Debian and BSD as server OSs)
My first Linux install was Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy. Got those wobbly windows going and felt like a fucking king.
Ubuntu in the mid 2000s, but it's PopOS that made me a fulltimer ~2 years ago. I don't use it anymore but I'll always be thankful for it.
Debian Slink
Before that, Windows NT, A/UX, Solaris and VAX/VMS.
Before that, Vic 20 and Apple II
Still using Debian every day whilst navigating the perils of MacOS.
my first 'distro' was slackware, on floppy disks. then debian or a flavour of, mainly, ever since. i've never really strayed too far from debian and apt over the years but i have tried most everything.
SuSE in 1996. Then Debian between mid-1997 and late 2023, NixOS since.
I'm not a big distrohopper...
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Ubuntu, like a lot of people my age (2000s)
I guess technically, Raspbian.
Ubuntu had a thing for a while where they would send you a CD if you asked for it. Friend of mine from school gave me one.
Mandrake 9
I believe it was slackware. it was gifted to teenage me ca 1994, was on the CD of some magazine.
I wanted to try it, so went dual boot. it (or I?) partitioned my 800MB hard disk into a 300MB and an 800MB partition. stupid young me thought this was great and I just gained 300MB. when I noticed date corruption, stupid young me started to copy over important data to the assumed good partition. things didn't end well.
I took a two year break from Linux afterwards 🤣
The one I settled on back then was Mandrake.
Ubuntu lol
Slackware 3.1.
Whatever version of Red Hat there was in 1999. 6 point something if memory serves.
I was running Quake 3 servers a few PCs.
Mint, then Ubuntu, then Kubuntu, elementaryOS, Manjaro, then I gave up Linux for a while because I needed remote desktop for my PC at work, now back on PopOS!
I think it was Slackware sometime in the early 2000s
Arch Linux, on an old Compaq pizza box server when I was 16. It took me 3 months to install Arch because there was a DIP switch on the motherboard that somehow prevented you from updating the MBR or some shit.
I basically never used it and didn't touch Linux again until 7 years later, when I used SLES 11 SP2 at a job.
In the early 90’s I downloaded Slackware to floppy disks. It took me several days to make them. Slackware holds a special place in my heart.
To this day I still use Linux full time. Arch is my go to, but I like and recommend Endeavor often.
Ubuntu. But I think that will be almost everyones answer who started with Linux in the late-mid 2000s.
Edit: Oh wait. Might have been Knoppix to resuce some data from a broken windows installation.
Someone installed Fedora for me somewhere around 2006, then I switched between Ubuntu and Windows until permanently settling for Ubuntu a couple of years ago. But I'm thinking of switching to Debian..
Slackware, of course, but when Debian was first released two years later I obviously switched (and it's been Debian since then).
Some ancient version of SuSE Linux way back in like 2001. I did not stick with it back then.
If just using the Live CD counts, Lubuntu 12.04, to copy files off a broken Windows machine
Then Ubuntu, followed by Deepin (looked cool), UbuntuDDE, Arch, Xubuntu, and finally settled on Debian in 2022.
Zorin OS because they said it was windows like
Sadly, Ubuntu. I quickly moved on to debian...and ultimately landed with Arch, my true love for many years. I use Arch, btw.
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Yggdrasil In the mid 90s.
My first was Slackware in the 90s after a friend introduced it to me. He set up a system to use it as a proxy for our network at home to use but would frequently redoing that system so we didn't have internet for sometimes days. It wasn't a good time. Took years to use Linux again.
All the old timers are coming out. In the summer of ‘98 I switched to Red Hat Linux.
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Red Hat 8.0, the Linux Starter 2003 double cd edition. From there I tried my first Ubuntu when they where still sending out free cd's which was version 6.06 LTS. After that I dabbled a bit jumping from distro to distro to try out different flavors, tinkering a bit for fun and even tried to build my own with Arch. All the while keeping my Windows (XP, 7, 10) daily driver as my main rig. Finally switched over to Pop_OS! a few years ago as my daily for work. I've been thinking about switching over my gaming rig to a Linux distro but haven't figured out which one is the best one and requires the least amount of tinkering.