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
Damn, how long did you stick with Knoppix?
I had two firsts—I messed around with Ubuntu around high school or so, but I don’t count that because I was only curious and had no intention to actually try and use it for any decent stretch of time.
Second, which I consider the “true first”, was Fedora, and man was it dope. It’s the distro that made me realize Linux is a lot more accessible than I had thought.
Soft Landing Systems (SLS). So many disks!
Downloading a kernel source tarball, compiling it on Minix and writing a Lilo boot sector. Sort of an early LFS.
I had a machine with multiple OSes chosen at startup with OS/2 Boot Manager, including OS/2 Warp, Windows NT Workstation 4, and Redhat 5.0 which came on a CDROM labeled Pink Tie 5.0. (It was late '90s I guess. I used MSDOS before that. And a Commodore 64 before that) I believe I put a mail server on it (the Redhat partition) while I was still on dial-up (128K ISDN). The mails waited somewhere until I got online and signalled to send them to me. But then upgraded it to DSL. I was still running Redhat 7.3 with my mail server until 2006, even though Redhat 9 and Fedora were out by then. In 2006, I shut it down and bought a Windows 98 laptop to travel around Central America for a year. The Guatemalans laughed at my Windows 98 laptop–they were running Vista. When I got back to the US in 2007, and broke the laptop screen, oops, I bought a $300 desktop PC that had Lindows installed.
Tried Ubuntu 8.04 when it was still new. Said egh, that’s cool, and moved on, until around 2015 I’ve installed Mint on more permanent basis, got frustrated with it a week later, and figured out Arch instead
Tried Ubuntu 20.04 in a VM, then screwed around with a couple other distros in Vbox. Eventually dailied Ubuntu MATE, then Mint after my MATE install borked. Got a new laptop, installed FerenOS, installed ZorinOS after I couldn’t figure out how to bind the start menu to Meta (for some reason it was unbound), then eventually moved to EndeavourOS (where I am now). Might try Aurora on my main laptop eventually.
Ubuntu; I tend towards Debian Mint, if I’m choosing something more mainstream these days, but I main Guix, now.
Must have been Suse 6 or 7 (I think 7.0) around 2000, as I got a physical copy as a prize on a lan party and I actually installed it…
But then I needed the space for something else, probably Counter-Strike and custom maps. :D
Debian Woody > SuSE > gentoo
Still running gentoo on my main desktop and tumbleweed on my htpc
Its either Ubuntu or Debian I cant remember
Slackware, in 1999.
Xandros baby! But I was too young to understand what I was doing. I had one single mp3 file that I played over and over, and chatting with my friends on MSN via Pidgin. It didn’t last long, but I remember it fondly
I still have an EeePC 900A that came with Xandros. I kept Xandros on it until Ubuntu 10.04 Network Edition came out.
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!)
RedHat 5.1. Man I’m old.
I also still have a Slackware 3.0 CDROM lying around. Which I actually liked back in the day.
me too with redhat 5 at my first job. shortly after moved to 6 that, as far as I remember, was the first showing the green OK at the right of every service starting instead of a mess of output
Slackware
Mine was also slackware. I think I broke my windows (95? 98?) installing it.
Hehe, I, too, broke my windows 95 installing Slackware.
I came from deskview and then OS/2
