What Was Your First Linux Distribution?

[f0rmat]

My first real attempt at Linux was 2004 with Mandrake. I did not attempt to get somewhat serious with using it as a potential personal daily driver until 2014 with Ubuntu. Around 2016 or so, I moved to KDE Neon and have used it ever since.

[lazlo_vii]

My first distro was Slackware back in 1996. I didn't focus much on Linux for a decade. I would distro hop constantly, playing with something for a week end then the next month have another spurt of Linux. In 2006 I decided to my way through the "Linux From Scratch" handbook and that was very educational. After that I started dual booting with Gentoo or Ubuntu. Later I replaced Gentoo with Funtoo and then got tired Funtoo. In 2016 I set up my first LTS Ubuntu server and in 2018 I deleted Windows 10 form all of hardware. Now it only runs in a small VM that only boots up twice a month to check updates. Someday I might need it.

[icaci]

Slackware, back in 1996 or so. No idea what version it was, but the kernel was 0.99pl5. Installing it was quite the challenge because the kernel wouldn't understand LBA out of the box without special boot parameters. Boy, I was so proud when I was finally able to boot it from the hard drive and even got X running... A year or so later, I got my hands on a Debian CD and am stuck with Debian-based distros ever since.

[JanAA]

As I remember, my first try with linux was with Red Hat 5.0/5.1, but as I recall that I rather quickly went with Mandrake instead

[faramirza]

Redhat Linux 5.0

[zyxxel]

SLS and then Slackware. Short visit to Redhat and then moved to Debian - initial test with 2.0/Hamm around 1998 but big move to Debian was 2.2/Potato 2000.

Some side-tracking to Ubuntu and CentOS.

Quite a number of distributions for one-short tests.

[//////]

maybe debian - mandrake - knoppix

[JosiahBradley]

Oh man it's been awhile. Had to look up the versions, but first distro was most likely Knoppix 3.2 followed by Gentoo 1.4ish. There was some dabbling in Ubuntu 5.04 then back to Gentoo for awhile. Now I mainly work with Redhat Enterprise and Centos. Going to try ClearLinux next.

[wizard69]

Interesting question but honestly I can’t remember for certain. Tried many but then decide upon Redhat way back in the day before Fedora existed. That was Redhat 4 I believe.

[Rafale83]

My very first UNIX distribution was SCO XENIX. Yes. MS old SYS V one. Boring.
My first Linux distribution was SLS, downloaded by V22bis and then V32 modem.
Then, bored by magnetic medias troubles, I switched to Yggdrasil plus and play Linux by cdrom ! Linux kernel 0.99pl7 IIRC...
I switched again, very soon, to the vanilla Slackware, very BSD stylish, that learned me all.
Tried rpm one at some moment, but early switched to Debian I can still use for some applications.
I'm happy with Gentoo since 3-4 years. I should have switched to much early.
27 years of Linuxing.
30 years of Unix "pragma".

Happy to contribute here. Long life to Phoronix !