What Was Your First Linux Distribution?

[Zplay]

I started with Slackware in 1999, a friend gave me "Slackware magazine" with install CD and some how-to install / start / configure.

I'm still using Slackware nowadays, at home and at office.

Why Slackware ? I've been using FreeBSD, Fedora, OpenSuse each for 4-6 months at work, and Slackware is my favorite. I don't have some stupid GUI not working, I don't get updates that break the system (only security updates) and I am not tempted to update to bleeding-edge and break my system.

The slackbuild repo contains nearly all I need, and I don't care doing "./configure && make && sudo make install" from sources to install a new software. I start all my local services from /etc/rc.d/rc.local (lighttpd / redis for example).
The machine is using Lilo, the boot is very slow, but the computer works, and continue to works.

For me, Slackware keeps to be very simple while it's not the best for performance or up-to-date packages.

[methril]

I started with 3 distributions at a time, at the end of 1997:

• Debian (I think it was 1.3).
• Slackware 3.4.
• Red Hat 4.2, and later 5.

I also went to some testing stage with a lot of distributions, having used them for a long time: SuSE, Madrivia, Gentoo, Linux from Scratch and lately at Ubuntu, after so many years of using Debian and Gentoo.
Actually I had Ubuntu but I want to get away from it.
I would like use a rolling release, but not so disruptive as Debian sid.
I know there are Arch and Sabayon, and look quite appealing.
Any recommendations for Mac supported machines?

[garegin]

opensuse. i was trying to mount a hidden partition to read a recovery partition password on an acer laptop. i noobed out. the next day i came back with an ubuntu disk and managed to mount it on the command line.

[Sonadow]

Started with Red Hat 7.0 when it came with a book. None of my hardware worked with it at that time, back to Windows.

Tried out Xandros sometime in 2003, again none of my hardware worked, so back to Windows.

Experimented with Fedora Core 2 in 2004 but eventually went back to Windows again because none of my hardware worked.

Tried out Ubuntu in 2007 and dropped it after 2 days because WiFi and native resolution wasn't working.

Tried Ubuntu once more in the later part of 2007 and stuck with it for a couple of months until an update killed WiFi. Back to Windows.

Tried out Ubuntu once more in 2008 and for the first time, everything worked.

Dumped Ubuntu for Mandriva a few months later but switched back to Ubuntu because Mandriva had (and still has even today) problems with WiFi.

Switched to OpenSUSE 11.1 and Fedora 10 in 2008.

Tried Debian for a short period, dropped it and went back to OpenSUSE + Fedora because packages were too old.

Tried Mandriva 2009 and 2010 and went back to Fedora + OpenSUSE because urpmi is a major pain in the nuts.

Switched notebook over to Mageia on its first release, desktops still on Fedora + OpenSUSE.

Currently: Mageia 2 on notebook, Fedora 17 and OpenSUSE 12.2. No plans to move away from RPM for a very, very long time.

[Nobu]

First distro I used was either RedHat (not sure which version) or Mandrake (either 7 or 9, can't remember). Mandrake was nice, installed with a wide variety of DEs (gnome was fun to play with--putting drawers inside drawers, opening them all up, then closing and opening the first drawer and watching them cascade. lol), Enlightenment was still cool.

Unfortunately, even back then, it was a pretty old version of Mandrake so it was hard to get packages that worked on it. It was pretty much a fenced off sandbox for playing and webbrowsing. Still, had some pretty fun games included on the CD.

[MichalekII]

first distro

I played with Suse in 1998, but I really started to use Linux with Debian Woody.

[moilami]

It was IT Linux 2000 professional, which was based on Redhat 6.2, I think.

[TheOne]

red hat linux 7 then fedora, then ubuntu and xubuntu and havnt looked back

[allenmaher]

Red Hat 5.0 but there were hardware conficts so I went back to OS2 at home and IRIX at work.
Mandrake 5.x became my first full time linux distro at home. Eventually I left that because I grew tired of rpm even though mandrake was better than red hat.
I fiddled with a bunch of others even toyed with the idea of Gentooing but then I stumbled onto ubuntu in 2006 (warthog and all),I have been happy ever since...

[ACiD]

Caldera for me. I didn't even have an internet connection then, bought a cd