My first Linux install was Slackware sometime in the late 90’s. I didn’t really use it though, as I never managed to get it working with my dial-up Internet. Stupid winmodems.

The first distribution I actually used was Mandrake. Others I’ve used since then include Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS. I’ve landed on using Manjaro on both my main desktop and laptop, though I have secondary machines running Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, and EndeavourOS.

Ubuntu Karmic Koala. To be fair, I was a kid and that was, according to people on the Internet, the most likely to work. And so it did - it had out of the box support for my wifi adapter, which some other distros I tried later did not, I had to use something called ndiswrapper. Of course I did not yet know about compiling my own configured kernel, that came a month or 2 later.

I only stayed on Ubuntu for a while, then tried Mint, used that on and off for years, dabbled with Arch at some point, too. In the last 5 years I’ve used PopOs, Gentoo, OpenSuse, NixOS. I’m not gonna bother with capitalization and punctuation on some of these.

It depends how you define it. I first installed Slackware at work on a retired IBM PS/2 in '94 or '95, because somebody was working on MicroChannel bus support. (That never materialized.) Later, we checked out Novell Linux Desktop, maybe Debian, too. At a later job, we had some Red Hat workstations, version 5 or 6, and I had Yellow Dog Linux on an old Power Mac.

At home, I didn’t switch to Linux until Ubuntu Breezy Badger. It was glorious to install it on a laptop, and have all of the ACPI features just work. I had been running FreeBSD for several years, NetBSD on an old workstation before that, and Geek Gadgets (a library for compiling Unix programs on Amiga OS) before that.

arch linux since december

I use arch btw

and I use hyprland btw

Knoppix circa 2004-2005, It was in a cd that came from chip.de. I had no clue what linux was back then. I know even less now.

slackware, from floppy circa 1996

XanderOS way tf back in 2005 or 2006, but mostly just messed around and had no clue what I was doing with it… After that I did a Gentoo install. Been kinda off and on with Linux since, flirting with the possibility of switching to it fully but never actually making the jump until last year when I built a new machine and put Mint on it.

Mine was slackware in I think 1997?

Yellow Dog Linux ~2004 or so

My first distro was the Asahi Linux Beta which was using Arch Linux ARM. EDIT: Now I use Void Linux

Mklinux. It was the only thing you could run on one of those jank-ass PowerPC/nubus Macs.

Ubuntu

Debian 1.3, Bo - 1997

Ubuntu, before Unity and eventually Gnome desktop 🫢

Deepin in 2019 or so. Yeah don’t ask…