For a long time, I thought it was Fedora Core 4. I did use that, but I recently found my old burned CDs of Mandrake 8.1. That really took me back. I might install it on a VM for some nostalgia.
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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Ubuntu
First:
- Server: Debian
- Desktop: Debian
- Desktop daily driver: Ubuntu
My first Linux install was Slackware sometime in the late 90's. I didn't really use it though, as I never managed to get it working with my dial-up Internet. Stupid winmodems.
The first distribution I actually used was Mandrake. Others I've used since then include Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS. I've landed on using Manjaro on both my main desktop and laptop, though I have secondary machines running Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, and EndeavourOS.
slackware, from floppy circa 1996
am a simple noob who started with Mint, and remain on Mint on my main gaming machine.
i have fun distro-hopping on my other old, cheap laptops though
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Sadly, Ubuntu. I quickly moved on to debian...and ultimately landed with Arch, my true love for many years. I use Arch, btw.
My first distro was the Asahi Linux Beta which was using Arch Linux ARM. EDIT: Now I use Void Linux
Ubuntu, like a lot of people my age (2000s)
It's crazy how much Canonical has trashed their reputation.
I still respect the work they did back in the day but I have negative respect for Canonical and Shuttlesworth (sp?) today
My first was Ubuntu 14.04. and then 16.04. at school 💀. as early as 2015 iirc
Though Blackbox or Kali might be a contender too (one of the distros my father had installed for fun)
I had rly cool CS teachers, which also administered our infrastructure
then we used Linux Mint in the "Linux" club run by one of said teachers
For personal use, my first one was Manjaro in 2018 (I switched to it with a Windows dual boot, I got rid of Windows entirely in 2020 I think?). Somewhere I switched to Endeavour OS, tried out OpenSuse Tumbleweed on my laptop and eventually settled on Fedora bc of the Grub fiasco Arch had. Am using it to this day.
Though it's in the form of Nobara on my desktop; I also plan on switching to Bluefin eventually
All the old timers are coming out. In the summer of ‘98 I switched to Red Hat Linux.
🫂
Ubuntu > Mint > Manjaro > Arch > PopOS > Debian
(History, not ranking [Debian wins])
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SuSE in 2003
Intrepid Ibex
Took me a while to dig up the posts on distrowatch, but I'm pretty sure that the first Linux distro that I used heavily was Mepis Linux 8 back in 2007-2009. I loved that OS.
My first distro was Debian, probably back around 2008. I used that and Ubuntu for years without having even looked at a desktop environment. For me, Linux was a server OS and I had to teach myself how to use it to spin up Teamspeak/Mumble, webservers, VPNs, etc.
I first started using Linux as a desktop OS in 2016. Tried SUSE and Fedora, but really liked Manjaro and eventually gravitated to Arch. I tried out NixOS a year or so ago and liked it, but I still go back to Arch with KDE Plasma.
I believe it was slackware. it was gifted to teenage me ca 1994, was on the CD of some magazine.
I wanted to try it, so went dual boot. it (or I?) partitioned my 800MB hard disk into a 300MB and an 800MB partition. stupid young me thought this was great and I just gained 300MB. when I noticed date corruption, stupid young me started to copy over important data to the assumed good partition. things didn't end well.
I took a two year break from Linux afterwards 🤣
Yellow Dog Linux ~2004 or so
Enlightenment -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Pop
OpenSuse 5, I think it was called suse Linux back then.
Ubuntu. But I think that will be almost everyones answer who started with Linux in the late-mid 2000s.
Edit: Oh wait. Might have been Knoppix to resuce some data from a broken windows installation.
I actually wanted Arch but everyone was saying that you HAD to do a manual install first and I had been miserably failing at doing it in a WM for a few weeks. I had finally decided to try it directly on hardware so that I had no choice but to complete it if I wanted to use my laptop, and just as was about to burn the ISO on a USB stick the power went out and my hard drive died 😑 On a saturday evening, obviously...
All I had was a Haiku USB I had made to check it out, and a Linux Mint USB a friend lent me that I hadn't tried because I assumed I would hate it. So I used Haiku for about 30 minutes (let's say it had a few bugs), and Mint for the rest of the weekend and did, in fact, absolutely hate it (Windows PTSD 😭 ).
So until the computer store opened on Monday, I spend 48 hours browsing the web to find a better distro and when I got my new SSD I installed AntiX, because it was very light and likely to run well on my potato-grade laptop, it came without a DE and 7 different window managers to try (which seemed cool at the time, but I didn't actually try any of them except the default one IceWM and after a few weeks I installed i3 😅 ) and also because YouTube had convinced me that systemd was the Antechrist (thanks YouTube 😑 ).
After two months I decided to try Manjaro on my other laptop... it didn't go well : incompatible dependencies preventing updates, Nvidia + Wayland making games not display correctly, and if I had to fix all that manually what's the point I just might as well use regular Arch. So I gave up after 48 hours and decided to install Arch, and just as I booted from the Arch ISO the laptop died (fan malfunction) and I had to send it back 😑.
After three months, the third laptop, bought with the refund from the second one, did actually allow me to install Arch without throwing a fit 🥳 using archinstall to preserve my mental health this time.
Arch has been really great but I need to switch to a bigger SSD and I am probably going to try Nix because it seems really cool 🤩
As an Arch user who spun up NixOS for a few months; it's worth it. It will take weeks to perfectly set up and it could take months to properly learn nixlang, but what you get is a solid, unbreakable, reproducible distro. Move over your dotfiles, home-manager, and nixconfigs and you essentially have the same setup on any other PC (though you may have to alter the video driver config).
I had my nixfiles all modular. My nouveau video drivers for the ancient laptop I was using? Imported from a separate config. That way I could leave anything hardware related behind and draw up new hardware configs for the system I was moving to when the time came. Don't like your DE? Comment it out and write in whatever else you want to try.
Don't get me wrong, I still love and use Arch on my main machine. Its just that my dive down the NixOS rabbit hole was really fun and I haven't even tried flakes.
My first Linux install was Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy. Got those wobbly windows going and felt like a fucking king.
Slackware96 from Walnut Creek purchased at Staples back when software came in boxes with manuals. Netscape Navigator 3.0 anyone?
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Deepin in 2019 or so. Yeah don't ask...
Ubuntu lol
I started with Mandrake 6 when the there were lots of 9's or 0's in the year
Then bounced from Slackware/opensuse/Red Hat/Debian/Gentoo/BSD
Now running Kde Neon and MacOS (Debian and BSD as server OSs)
Elementary OS
Mandrake -> Whatever came on the Linux Magazine CD -> Backtrack -> Arch
Ubuntu, before Unity and eventually Gnome desktop 🫢
Ubuntu in the mid 2000s, but it's PopOS that made me a fulltimer ~2 years ago. I don't use it anymore but I'll always be thankful for it.
The first was about 1995-ish Redhat on school computers, after that was Suse on a 2000s laptop, and currently Mint+Mx on a self-built pc. Hardware support and ease of use has come a long way since then.
Mandrake 9
OpenSuse with compiz going hard on an old laptop
My first linux distribution was Linux From Scratch (LFS). I printed like 300 pages at the school library so I could run it at home. My first real distribution was Gentoo or Damn Small Linux.