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
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 for me.
A friend in high school gave me one of these CD, I think it was 7.04.
Same here, though I remember it was 08.04 Hardy Heron for me. I still recall the default background too:
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.
Debian Woody > SuSE > gentoo
Still running gentoo on my main desktop and tumbleweed on my htpc
Slackware on a whole lot of lettered floppy disks.
Slackware.
That was 25+ years ago. So don’t judge me.
Red Hat, at Uni.
I installed Ubuntu decades ago, then moved and never used it again. The first distro I actually used was Peppermint. Loved it.
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.
Ubuntu->Manjaro->Tumbleweed
Debian. They mailed me the install media.
Downloading a kernel source tarball, compiling it on Minix and writing a Lilo boot sector. Sort of an early LFS.
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!)
Technically Raspbian Jessie, I think- I was gifted a Pi 3 in ~2016 and fiddled around with it for a while. I also made some cursed choices, at one point running Windows 10 IoT Core on that thing…
though luckily not for long.
In 2017 or so, I started toying around with Ubuntu in VMs. It wasn’t really until 2020 or so that I started trying other distros; Debian Buster was probably the first non-Ubuntu distro I’d tried (excluding RPi stuff), and I mostly stucked to Debian besides one Arch install.
At a certain point in 2022, I found myself using Unix tools so much I was starting to wonder if I should just use Linux instead of Windows. It was at this time that I tried NixOS in a VM for the first time and thought, “Wow, this is cool… I’m sticking with Debian, though.”
Around that time, I threw Debian Testing (then Bookworm) on a second 256GB drive, ostensibly as a “test run” for daily driving Linux, and by “test run”, I mean I de facto quit using Windows; a few months later, I opted to use dd and copy that “test install” over my Windows install on my bigger 1TB drive (of course with sufficient backups so I could copy my Windows files over). That install is still the one I use on my desktop today and has just transitioned into Debian Testing/Forky*
*A name I quite honestly hate, mostly due to the fact that
Forky represents everything wrong with America todaythe Forky Asks a Question shorts beat out Steven Universe Future for an animation Emmy, though honestly, I don’t know else what I was expecting to happen.Ubuntu; I tend towards Debian Mint, if I’m choosing something more mainstream these days, but I main Guix, now.
