Linux

slackware, from floppy circa 1996

Ubuntu

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.

Mandrake Linux

Welcome to Lemmy stranger.

Slackware back in the early 90s on a Compaq 386/SX20 💾

Enlightenment -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Pop

OpenSuse 5, I think it was called suse Linux back then.

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

Elementary OS

I actually wanted Arch but everyone was saying that you HAD to do a manual install first and I had been miserably failing at doing it in a WM for a few weeks. I had finally decided to try it directly on hardware so that I had no choice but to complete it if I wanted to use my laptop, and just as was about to burn the ISO on a USB stick the power went out and my hard drive died 😑 On a saturday evening, obviously...

All I had was a Haiku USB I had made to check it out, and a Linux Mint USB a friend lent me that I hadn't tried because I assumed I would hate it. So I used Haiku for about 30 minutes (let's say it had a few bugs), and Mint for the rest of the weekend and did, in fact, absolutely hate it (Windows PTSD 😭 ).

So until the computer store opened on Monday, I spend 48 hours browsing the web to find a better distro and when I got my new SSD I installed AntiX, because it was very light and likely to run well on my potato-grade laptop, it came without a DE and 7 different window managers to try (which seemed cool at the time, but I didn't actually try any of them except the default one IceWM and after a few weeks I installed i3 😅 ) and also because YouTube had convinced me that systemd was the Antechrist (thanks YouTube 😑 ).

After two months I decided to try Manjaro on my other laptop... it didn't go well : incompatible dependencies preventing updates, Nvidia + Wayland making games not display correctly, and if I had to fix all that manually what's the point I just might as well use regular Arch. So I gave up after 48 hours and decided to install Arch, and just as I booted from the Arch ISO the laptop died (fan malfunction) and I had to send it back 😑.

After three months, the third laptop, bought with the refund from the second one, did actually allow me to install Arch without throwing a fit 🥳 using archinstall to preserve my mental health this time.

Arch has been really great but I need to switch to a bigger SSD and I am probably going to try Nix because it seems really cool 🤩

Yellow Dog Linux ~2004 or so

Sadly, Ubuntu. I quickly moved on to debian...and ultimately landed with Arch, my true love for many years. I use Arch, btw.

Red Hat, before the enterprise stuff, back in 1999. Installed from a CD found in a book from the library

Kali Linux. Because I was a kid who wanted to be a hackerman.

All the old timers are coming out. In the summer of ‘98 I switched to Red Hat Linux.

Deepin in 2019 or so. Yeah don't ask...

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.

Mandrake -> Whatever came on the Linux Magazine CD -> Backtrack -> Arch

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.

Ubuntu, like a lot of people my age (2000s)

Ubuntu, before Unity and eventually Gnome desktop 🫢

am a simple noob who started with Mint, and remain on Mint on my main gaming machine.

i have fun distro-hopping on my other old, cheap laptops though

I used slackware, btw

SuSE in 2003

arch linux since december

I use arch btw

and I use hyprland btw

Debian 💖

I believe it was slackware. it was gifted to teenage me ca 1994, was on the CD of some magazine.

I wanted to try it, so went dual boot. it (or I?) partitioned my 800MB hard disk into a 300MB and an 800MB partition. stupid young me thought this was great and I just gained 300MB. when I noticed date corruption, stupid young me started to copy over important data to the assumed good partition. things didn't end well.

I took a two year break from Linux afterwards 🤣

Ubuntu. But I think that will be almost everyones answer who started with Linux in the late-mid 2000s.

Edit: Oh wait. Might have been Knoppix to resuce some data from a broken windows installation.

Yggdrasil in 1998 or so.

My first linux distribution was Linux From Scratch (LFS). I printed like 300 pages at the school library so I could run it at home. My first real distribution was Gentoo or Damn Small Linux.

Redhat.

Stuck with redhat on the server, had another server with Gentoo, and then Mepis and Debian for desktop.

Now days its arch and fedora.

Ubuntu > Mint > Manjaro > Arch > PopOS > Debian

(History, not ranking [Debian wins])

It started with Red Hat 6.1 in 1999 and ended up with NixOS.

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.

OpenSuse with compiz going hard on an old laptop

Ubuntu lol

Debian 🥔

Andromeda Linux around 2009. It had cool astronomy based theme and animation.