What Was Your First Linux Distribution?

[seanzh]

My very first was Ubuntu, many many years back. I stuck with it for a few years until an update broke it. Then I briefly tried Mint and LMDE before settling on Debian for a few more years. Then I needed newer packages so I tried Manjaro, Antergos, Fedora and OpenSUSE and went with Fedora.

mandrake

[AlanTuring69]

Ubuntu 7.04 on an early-2000s single-threadded AMD machine with a broken heatsink fan.

[the-infinity]

Kali Linux because I wanted to be a superhacker like mr. robot XD

[capnbfg]

Knoppix 1.4. I was in 9th grade at the time. I saw an article somewhere about this crazy new bootable Linux-on-a-CD and had to try it. Not sure they were even calling such things a "Live CD" yet, but if they were, I was unaware of it. I booted it up on my Pentium II 450 system, said wow that's pretty neat, and had absolutely no idea what to do with it. So I'm not sure whether that counts.

My first real foray into Linux, where I actually had to install things, was a few years later with Fedora Core 3 during my freshman year of college. Like everyone else my primary PC was running WinXP, but I also had an older Athlon Thunderbird system on hand to experiment with. I still knew very little about any of it. The main highlight I remember is playing with Gnome Chess, setting it to do AI vs AI on hardest difficulty, and then watching the long pauses as that old Athlon struggled to calculate moves.

[jagdpanther]

Red Hat 3 or 4 (not Enterprise) in mid/late 1990s. I purchased the CDROMs in store at Frys Electronics.

[Eirikr1848]

I just thought I would ask what your first Linux distribution was that you ever tried.

My first distribution that I used way back when was Mandrake.

2007 when this post first was made: I had a MacBook (Black! Core 2 Duo Santa Rosa! 4GB RAM, 250GB HDD!) running Mac OS X 10.5, Windows XP, and Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. It is still on a shelf... running 10.8 Mountain Lion, Windows 10, and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS! With Mesa driver optimizations this thing... flies.

1997? 1998? Something like that. I mowed lawns. Saved up. Upgraded my computer from a 486 DX4 66MHz to a Pentium Overdrive 100MHz CPU, 64MB RAM, and 8GB HDD. Windows 95 upgrade from Windows 3.1... then send in some mailer and got... Debian I believe? On floppy disk. Didn't know what I was doing, screwed it up. Stepdad ended up wiping it with Windows 98 for me. Floppies... somewhere in storage.

Then... later... 2003? I *paid* for Mandrake (then later Mandriva)... messed up the family computer -- had dialup and the WinModem wouldn't work.

Then... 2004? 2005? Whenever Ubuntu launched, got a free CD and installed it on an old PII 233MHz NEC PC... Was pretty cool. Then dualbooted it with Longhorn on my 1GHz Athlon Thunderbird rig.... then went off to college and got that MacBook listed above!

Was mostly a Mac/Windows user in various workplace environments, with non-Mac *nix being reserved for VMWare ESX, a firewall hosted on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS VM, and some backup storage appliance OSes.

In 2018 I started using Ubuntu again at home on my old MacBook (18.04LTS) and an Ethereum mining rig with 4x cards (gosh I wish I hung onto those... I'd have milions $$ today)

Queue 2021, Steam Deck announcement and pre-order. Asahi Linux was becoming a thing. I started using Manjaro to familiarize myself with the OS "as close to the OS of the Steam Deck and Asahi as possible" then went down the rabbit hole of eventually installing Arch.

(Now I use EndeavourOS when feeling like taking the easy route for the install xD)

Today: EndeavourOS and Arch Linux on my non-Apple devices, and macOS (Beta Channel) on my M1 Air -- but sadly the Asahi installer no longer works with Ventura. Debian on my Ubiquiti stuff, my Pihole and other edge devices. Ubuntu on my that MacBook, and my 2008 iMac with a Radeon 2600 Pro.

Wow time flies when did I get this old!

[OmniNegro]

Puppy. I cannot say which one, as there are many. It was certainly one of the early ones.

Now I am on Mint XFCE, and very happy here.

[down1]

I first tried ubuntu and fedora. I had bad experiences just trying to get flash installed in the browser on fedora and getting my wifi to work on ubuntu. Eventually I settled on ubuntu as it was somewhat easier.

[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.