Asklemmy

In high school I got my hands on an old Sun workstation with Solaris, and eventually after a week or so of compiling switched to Gentoo

If you could call it an OS, ZX spectrum basic was my first. My first Linux was Slackware 6 or 7 installed from a string of floppies. Good times.

Whatever Commodore 64 ran, back when I was a little kid in the early 90s.

MS DOS v4.somthing. (1995)

Slackware that came on three 5.25" floppies. (1997)

First hard drive Linux: Debian.

Eventually red hat for several years, then back to Debian based (mint etc) around 2005. Been using Sid (Debian "unstable") for a long time.

Hmmmm Amsdos on an early amstrad CPC machine

First I put real time on would have been the Atari TOS, man those machines where the biz at the time!!

Windows 98, Windows XP, Ubuntu 6.06, some other distros on and off, Arch Linux is the last OS I would ever need for desktop PC btw

Knoppix 3.something

It was ages ago.

DOS 5. 286-12. first Linux was slackware in... sometime in the 90s, installed from 1.44mb floppies. took a while.

DOS s.u.s.e. 4.x or 5.x

PC-DOS on an IBM 5150 (iirc).

Sinclair Basic on my ZX81 with 1k ram. My first personal linux distro was Redhat 5.2. I used VAXVMS at work.

Comodore 64 os in the late 80's then msdos, win 3.1, etc. First Linux distro i believe was either slackware or debian.

Amiga Workbench 1.3. - preemptive multitasking ftw

my first was windows for workgroups 3.11 with msdos 6.22 back in 1994; later upgraded to windows 95.

my first linux as mandrake linux (aka mandriva) in 2002 on kernel 2. i use linux fulltime now and no longer own a windows computer.

First operating system was DOS 4 or 5, I think. On big 5.25” floppy disks on an 8088. Unless we’re counting whatever was running on a commodore vic20.

My first Linux distribution was Red hat Linux, somewhere around 1997, 1998 and I had a really tough time getting it installed.

I also once had a trial version of os/2 warp. Which was fun but pointless.

My desktop OS history:

1. Windows 98
2. Windows XP
3. Windows Vista
4. Windows 7
5. Ubuntu
6. Linux Mint
7. Antergos
8. Arch Linux
9. NixOS

I've used others, but not enough to warrant a place in the list above.

DOS/Win3.1 I was pretty young. It was far back enough that it was still common to find Apple II's in my grade-school classrooms off to the side for when we had downtime. I regret that I was just a little too young to experience the Commodore 64 craze.

Desktop: Windows XP

Linux: Probably Raspbian on a Pi 2 b

Tech has come a long way since then lol

First OS: DOS 4.something on dad's PCXT clone.

First Linux: Kurumin Linux

Of course Ubuntu was my first Linux distribution. I didn't use it for long.

First OS: I think it was Windows 98. I have then gone through XP, Vista, 7 and staying at 10 for as long as i can.

First Linux distro: Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10 don't remember clearly but it certainly was before GNOME 3 and in a VM. From then i have also run Fedora, Debian and most recently Linux Mint and Pop! OS in VMs as well. Maybe one day i finally set up a dual boot...

The first OS I recall using is Windows 7 (yes I’m young), and for Linux, I switched from Windows 11 to Linux Mint, which is what I use in the present day.

First OSish was what came default with the Commodore 64. My first full fledged OS was Windows 3.11. My first Linux distro was Mandrake I think 6.

Reading the comments I want to say I feel old (25y) but compared to others I feel like a gen alpha

I came late in the tech world. I started with Windows XP

And my first distro was Ubuntu 10.10 till Ubuntu 17.10. Now I just hop from distro to distro. Right now using Pop!_OS for a year now.

The first one my family owned, was Windows 95.

Not sure if the first one I used was Windows 3.x, DOS, or MacOS

Windows → Mint → Windows → Void → NixOS

First os was whatever was on a apple II. First linux was fedora. I spent 9 years using various red hat disteos as my main work machine.

Gaming kept me on windows at home. Now that proton let's me game i've been running mint debian for over a year and loving it.

My wife uses arch btw.

Technically (but only very technically as we basically never used them and they were obsolete at the time already) it would have been a version of Acorn MOS but realistically it was Windows 3.1.

First OS: TRSDOS 1.3

First Linux distro: Slackware 4

TOS

MS DOS 2.11.

My first OS was most likely DR DOS 3.41

For my daily driver desktop PCs that was followed by

• MS-DOS 5.0
• Windows 3.11
• Windows 98 SE
• Windows XP
• Windows 7
• Windows 10

On the linux side, I got started with Gentoo, experimented with several lightweight distributions for an old laptop and had a Mint VM for a few years. These days I run Ubuntu on a couple of servers and in WSL. Never got around to using it as my main desktop OS.

For university I had (in order) an iBook G3, a MacBook and a MacBook Pro, so you can add most of macOS 10.x to that list.

MSX, some version of MS-DOS, DR-DOS, Windows 3.0, 3.11, Slackware 3.0, Windows 95,98,NT,XP,7, CentOS, and now, MacOS.

At work, Windows XP,7 and 10, and several versions and flavors of RHEL.

Atari 800 basic.

Gentoo was the first distro I used for any significant amount of time (college).

Commodore ROM BASIC; 1980

Well, this sets a new level of recent here judging by the comments.

Desktop OS: Linux Mint 20 MATE. Yep, that's right. I only got my first proper computer in 2020.
Thankfully, I had to install the OS myself, which was of course preceded by choosing an OS.
I had Windows 10 on that laptop for 2 days which served me to compare different OSs and burn the install DVD. I had no flash drives, and just dug out one old DVD-RW. OK, I'll be honest, hearing about Linux first I was searching for "just Linux", pure Linux, not derivatives. Oh well, GNU+Linux copypasta actually being helpful.

Alright, but why did I "have" to install an OS if I got it with Windows? It was used. I did reset it, but even though it was my first proper PC, I had no lack of paranoia. I thought that someone before me could have put spyware on that.
And I was right. Not the way I thought, but I was. That someone was Microsoft.

First OS was DOS (I think) on an Apple IIE at school. I think there were a few Commodore 64’s there as well. A couple years later we got our first home computer running Windows 95. Good times playing Doom, Jane’s Apache, an MS Flight Simulator.

My first personal computer was running Windows XP and I switched to Ubuntu sometime in 2004. Ran Ubuntu for the most part till a few months ago when I switched my desktop and laptop to NixOS.

Started self hosting services in 2012 and started with Ubuntu as base OS. Now though most of my servers are Proxmox with the VMs usually running Ubuntu LTS, though NixOS is starting to creep in there as well.

It was a Lisa. Those were good times.

Commodore64 for first OS, taught myself to type and then taught myself BASIC on that beast.

I honestly do not know what my first Linus distro was, whatever was on the machines in the CS half of the computer lab in college. First one I installed myself was Ubuntu, but I abandoned it almost immediately in favor of another distro that I also don't remember.

Probably some version of DOS, I can't remember. First Linux distro was Fedora Core 4.