Mine was Knoppix because back in the day Libraries used to let you borrow all sorts of computer software and games and that’s what they had and I was stuck on dialup lol
Caldera. I don’t know why I picked that. Later I went SuSE.
I’ve been running Debian for long while, although work was RHEL and SuSE
Red Hat, at Uni.
My first ever distro was Xubuntu. (I did install Lubuntu before it, but found it too “ugly” so switched to Xubuntu after about 30 mins.)
I was still in high school, around 2014-15. My pc was getting old, and I read online that Linux can make your pc run faster. So, I decided to give it a try. I also read online that Xubuntu (and Lubuntu) is among the lightest of distros, so decided to install that. It was worthwhile, to say the least.
I currently use mostly EndeavourOS and AlmaLinux for my personal machines, depending on the type of the device. I have installed Fedora on my sister’s laptop, and Debian Stable on my parents’ PC, so I have to maintain those as well. Also, I have a few Pi zero2s for various things, so I use PiOS (or whatever it’s called these days) from time to time.
Slackware. In 1993.
Downloading a kernel source tarball, compiling it on Minix and writing a Lilo boot sector. Sort of an early LFS.
It was Ubuntu. Can’t remember which version but at the time they would mail you a cd if you requested one.
I installed Ubuntu decades ago, then moved and never used it again. The first distro I actually used was Peppermint. Loved it.
Tried Ubuntu 20.04 in a VM, then screwed around with a couple other distros in Vbox. Eventually dailied Ubuntu MATE, then Mint after my MATE install borked. Got a new laptop, installed FerenOS, installed ZorinOS after I couldn’t figure out how to bind the start menu to Meta (for some reason it was unbound), then eventually moved to EndeavourOS (where I am now). Might try Aurora on my main laptop eventually.
Not sure, I installed a distro on my laptop when I was like 11 but I don’t remember which one it was.
Manjaro. And even though I left it for good a while ago, I still sometimes wake up in cold sweat remembering these dark times.
Slackware
Mine was also slackware. I think I broke my windows (95? 98?) installing it.
I came from deskview and then OS/2
Yellow Dog Linux
mandrake was my first. Good memories
This was mine as well. I then moved on to Mandriva and then Mageia off and on. Mageia 9 has been good. Some of the earlier versions not so much. Thinking of trying OpenMandriva next.
Moblin 2.1 in live environment I think. Ubuntu 11.04 a bit later, which actually had WiFi drivers, but I needed to get them to a thumb drive, because they weren’t shipped by default.
Then random Ubuntu variants (including Linux Mint) before getting back to Windows (8.1 and then 10), but I am back to Linux with Debian 12, and now 13.
Ubuntu 12.04. I really tried to use it as a daily but wine wasn’t as good back then, a lot of apps I wanted to run were also platform specific. If a package wasn’t in your distros repo you had to try and build it from source which was really difficult for someone just trying to start with Linux. I tried again with Ubuntu 16.04 and it was better but still wasn’t quite there.
Fast forward to now and I’m actually dailying Bazzite 42. I’m not sure if wine has just improved a ton or proton has helped out a lot but windows compatibility has improved so much in the last decade. As much as everyone hates Electron for being heavier than native apps I would prefer an Electron app over no Linux version. Actually a lot of the apps I want to run now ship Linux versions so I don’t even need wine for most things.
Flatpaks and appimages with Gear Lever have made installing apps on Linux as easy as Windows and MacOS. It might not seem like it but it’s come a long way
