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Mandrake. Emailed to me on a CD. I feel old.
Mandrake in 2003, I was young and didn't know what I was doing...
Mine was also mandrake in the early 2000's. There was no Ubuntu back then, and Mandrake was the "home desktop" for Linux, specially if you didn't need servers running. I think it worked fine, not sure why it got so much hate.
Red Hat Linux back in 1999.
Knoppix Live CD back in 2004!
It was no distro, it was kernel 0.99 and bunch of gnu utils on like 8 floppy disks, and 10 more floppies or so for X11. I was running it on a 486DX50 iirc.
Linux 0.2, not.joking. a friend came with it to me, just downloaded from a newsgroup (I think) around 1992, on a floppy! We tested it on my PC, didn't know what to do with it, and promptly removed it. A few years later we gave it another try, and the rest is history
Ubuntu... before Canonical nuked it.
A friend of mine gave me an official Ubuntu 4.10 CD and that was my first Linux distro that I have tried.
I still have that CD.
Mandrake 7 was the first one I installed on my pc. In those days you could buy a boxed version with about 10 cds to install from.
Slackware. Fall of '93. Well over 20, 3.5" diskettes. Sacrificed my OS/2 machine to do this.
Oh, and writing the XConfig file with all your monitor timings. Sweet memories…
Mandrake 9.1.
Ubuntu. I couldn't afford a new laptop for college so I desperately googled for some way to make my old machine last.
Slackware, and it took years before I tried again.
Mandrake ! Autumn 1999 if I remember well...
Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake :)
Debian Woody PPC. I also downloaded Yellow Dog but don't remember ever installing or using it.
Red hat linux
Ubuntu (can't remember if it was 6 or 8) was the first distro that I used, my cousin and another family friend used it and I got interested and asked to have it installed on my home desktop.
For years, every LTS release of Ubuntu I installed as dual boot to try and experiment for a few weeks and then uninstalled it, using Windows for everything.
2 years ago, I decided that I wanted to try other distributions and to switch and use Linux as my daily driver, so I installed Manjaro on my laptop and I have been using it daily since.
Linux Mint. It's been a while since I used Mint now, but I do missTimeshift
Gentoo.
Slackware 0.97 (if I recall correctly) it must’ve been in 1993 I think
Started with Red Had 6 and then moved to Fedora Core 1. Have been on Fedora releases since.
Slackware. Version 3.1 if I remember rightly, with Linux kernel 2.19.x.
It was installed from floppy disks, you needed about 10 of them to do a full install including X Windows.
At the time (1997 or 1998) I only had dial up internet at home, so over the period of several days I brought blank floppies in to work, downloaded the relevant images and copied them on to the disks.
I then spent most of a weekend trying to persuade an (even then elderly) PS/2 with 4 MB of RAM to become a Linux box. Got there in the end, though!
Mint, because it's what my dad put on my first laptop when I was like 10 or something. I remember playing minetest and FTL on it.
Redhat 4.? I'm not really sure of the precise version but it was sometime in the late 99 or early 2000.
Attempted to use Red Hat 4 (pre-RHEL), but couldn't work out the partitioning. However, I tried SuSE Linux Personal 7.0 soon afterwards and YaST gave me a much smoother time when installing everything; I've been using SUSE/openSUSE ever since as my primary Linux distro.
386BSD, on a 386dx processor with 4mb ram. Compiled from 24 3.5" floppies that took 24 hours to compile. Before Linux existed.
Technically this does not answer OP's question, but thank you anyways. Now I don't feel that old.
I think it was probably Ubuntu 6.10. a friend from high school have me a CD to install it.
for me it was: Puppy Linux for a desktop machine with 254MB of RAM when I was on 1-2nd semester in Preparatory School
Some version of Ubuntu. I forgot which version number.
Hard to remember because it was in 2000 on my gateway PC, but I remember trying to setup Gentoo and redhat and knoppix and failing miserably.
Redhat. When it came time to upgrade i dug myself into rpm hell so many times. I struggled, had to reinstall. Next redhat upgrade, same experience.
I tried debian potato, and dist-upgraded to next stable with no issues. I was floored. Have been dist-upgrading ever since. And run a few hundreds of debian servers.
Arch. Went in at the deep end.
Suffice to say that I no longer use Linux. Got it built with relative ease though inevitably hit issues along the way, but got tired of having to use terminal for everything. Would not recommend Arch as your first distro unless you already love existing in a terminal.
Backtrack then crunchbang. Eventually I moved to arch. I've been using debian and mint lately though.
I daily drove Puppy Linux live booted off a USB for a few months probably 15 years a go when my hard drive died and I couldn't afford a new one.
Oh god it's been so long (20+ years). I only remember that whatever distro I installed had that great game preinstalled in which Tux slides down a mountain. Ah... Nice memories of easier times.
RedHat 5.2, purchased in a plastic-wrapped cardboard box from Best Buy. God I'm old 😭
This is the weirdest attempt to get my website security question answers... But... Slackware on floppies.
It's all a blur because I was maybe like 6 or 7 at the time, but I'm fairly certain it was Red Hat. The original, not RHEL.
I have vivid memories of playing a game that involved collecting gems and avoiding falling rocks in a maze, similar to Boulder Dash or Emerald Mine. I have no idea what it was, but I know it wasn't Rocks'n'Diamonds because I played that a lot and the graphics were different.
I learned on Red Hat back in the 90s
I had got a copy for free some place, so I taught myself how to install and use it