RedHat, I had to recompile the kernel to be SoundBlaster compatible so that I could play Doom with sound on my 486.

My first was Ubuntu 14.04. and then 16.04. at school 💀. as early as 2015 iirc

Though Blackbox or Kali might be a contender too (one of the distros my father had installed for fun)

I had rly cool CS teachers, which also administered our infrastructure

then we used Linux Mint in the “Linux” club run by one of said teachers

For personal use, my first one was Manjaro in 2018 (I switched to it with a Windows dual boot, I got rid of Windows entirely in 2020 I think?). Somewhere I switched to Endeavour OS, tried out OpenSuse Tumbleweed on my laptop and eventually settled on Fedora bc of the Grub fiasco Arch had. Am using it to this day.
Though it’s in the form of Nobara on my desktop; I also plan on switching to Bluefin eventually

Ubuntu back in the Gnome 2 days.

litterally arch btw

Turbo Linux in the late 90s. It didn’t go well.

Later I gave Redhat a shot - 5.0 or 5.1, I forget. Stayed with RH and now Fedora.

Intrepid Ibex

Took me a while to dig up the posts on distrowatch, but I’m pretty sure that the first Linux distro that I used heavily was Mepis Linux 8 back in 2007-2009. I loved that OS.

My first distro was Debian, probably back around 2008. I used that and Ubuntu for years without having even looked at a desktop environment. For me, Linux was a server OS and I had to teach myself how to use it to spin up Teamspeak/Mumble, webservers, VPNs, etc.

I first started using Linux as a desktop OS in 2016. Tried SUSE and Fedora, but really liked Manjaro and eventually gravitated to Arch. I tried out NixOS a year or so ago and liked it, but I still go back to Arch with KDE Plasma.

Enlightenment -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Pop

I think it was SuSE 5.1, we’re talking 1997. We got a CD at a show but I can’t remember which or where.

Mandriva. Yes, old and no longer exist. Forst distro i started to to use permantly on desktop is Fedora. The server has always been Ubuntu since the Mandriva time when I first learned about Linux. I think 2005. CS server etc. Desktop was 2024 when MS screwed up Windows too much

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.

Elementary OS

I inherited a Sony Vaio in 2009 which was really slow with windows, but unsurprisingly was ok once I swapped that out for Ubuntu 9.04. Took me a while to get the brightness up as the buttons didn’t respond, but I kept that machine running for 7 years, the HDD controller died in the end so it stopped detecting any HDD.

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.