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
Ubuntu, I was drawn in with the 3D cube and the ability to play games. The only game I had compatible then was TF2. So I left.
Back to it full time now, almost all games work, and on Mint
Debian Woody > SuSE > gentoo
Still running gentoo on my main desktop and tumbleweed on my htpc
Slackware.
That was 25+ years ago. So don’t judge me.
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.
You beat me by 1 year. I switched to slackware when windows 95 came out because I liked cli from ms dos 6.22
It was Ubuntu. Can’t remember which version but at the time they would mail you a cd if you requested one.
Same here, though I remember it was 08.04 Hardy Heron for me. I still recall the default background too:
Same for me.
A friend in high school gave me one of these CD, I think it was 7.04.
Slackware
Mine was also slackware. I think I broke my windows (95? 98?) installing it.
mandrake was my first. Good memories
RedHat 3.0, kernel 1.2, early 1996. I was a contract developer and took a job for a customer to update an in-house curses app on SCO Unix. Aside from a few lab uses in college, I had never used Unix before. I was like, welp, I’ll just install RedHat, do the work there, and recompile the app at the customer’s site on their SCO machine. Stupidly charged into a massive learning curve (unix vs linux, gmake vs make, gcc vs cc, ncurses vs curses, … none of which I had any familiarity with), but, amazingly, I got the job done! Kept RedHat as a second boot option on my workstation, and continued to use it more and more… 30 years later, I’m typing this on a MacBook Air running NixOS.
Slackware, to get away from the pink boys! Also there were only two or three distributions at the time.
Too many to remember since then.(Hail Eris!)
Tried ubunto with mint about 10 years back. My first actual daily driver was endeavoros about 1.5 years ago and it has stuck!
Its either Ubuntu or Debian I cant remember
Damn, how long did you stick with Knoppix?
I had two firsts—I messed around with Ubuntu around high school or so, but I don’t count that because I was only curious and hand no intention to actually try and use it for any decent stretch of time.
Second, which I consider the “true first”, was Fedora, and man was it dope. It’s the distro that made me realize Linux is a lot more accessible than I had thought.
Red Hat for a few years and then Debian. Never had any reason to move from Debian.
I still have a 9" netbook with Debian 12 Bookworm on it. Sadly, it’s 32 bit so won’t be getting Debian 13 Trixie. Maybe Void?
Ubuntu 12.04 was my starting point. Made my laptop feel like a brand new device compared to Windows 7…
