What Was Your First Linux Distribution?

[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.

[//////]

maybe debian - mandrake - knoppix

[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.

[faramirza]

Redhat Linux 5.0

[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Batan]

My first attempt was Mandrake Linux (which was really bad), then I deleted Windows and my journey started: Debian, Suse, Redhat, Ubuntu (for a very long time), Gentoo, Xubuntu, Ubuntu.
I think Ubuntu lost it’s “dark feeling” and became more like candy :/

[masinick]

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.

All power to you! I have tried all of the distributions you mention, with the possible exception of Funtoo. I'm not certain I ever installed that one. Linux From Scratch (LFS) takes a long time to build, even if you use a very complete "starting point" and the same is true for Gentoo and its derivatives. I tried them, thinking that a version compiled on my own hardware would yield performance improvement. I personally found that any improvements were not "felt" in any obvious way, such as vastly improved start up or overall performance.

I've always felt comfortable with Slackware, but my favorite distributions are all Debian-based. These two have a reasonable combination of packaging, reasonable performance, current software and conveniences. Between them, Debian continues to have a strong following, plus quite a few derivatives that work well on Intel and AMD processors, so today 75% or more of the distributions I regularly use are based, directly or indirectly, on Debian software.