Slackware

Yellow Dog Linux

Moblin 2.1 in live environment I think. Ubuntu 11.04 a bit later, which actually had WiFi drivers, but I needed to get them to a thumb drive, because they weren’t shipped by default.

Then random Ubuntu variants (including Linux Mint) before getting back to Windows (8.1 and then 10), but I am back to Linux with Debian 12, and now 13.

mandrake was my first. Good memories

Ubuntu 12.04. I really tried to use it as a daily but wine wasn’t as good back then, a lot of apps I wanted to run were also platform specific. If a package wasn’t in your distros repo you had to try and build it from source which was really difficult for someone just trying to start with Linux. I tried again with Ubuntu 16.04 and it was better but still wasn’t quite there.

Fast forward to now and I’m actually dailying Bazzite 42. I’m not sure if wine has just improved a ton or proton has helped out a lot but windows compatibility has improved so much in the last decade. As much as everyone hates Electron for being heavier than native apps I would prefer an Electron app over no Linux version. Actually a lot of the apps I want to run now ship Linux versions so I don’t even need wine for most things.

Flatpaks and appimages with Gear Lever have made installing apps on Linux as easy as Windows and MacOS. It might not seem like it but it’s come a long way

RedHat 3.0, kernel 1.2, early 1996. I was a contract developer and took a job for a customer to update an in-house curses app on SCO Unix. Aside from a few lab uses in college, I had never used Unix before. I was like, welp, I’ll just install RedHat, do the work there, and recompile the app at the customer’s site on their SCO machine. Stupidly charged into a massive learning curve (unix vs linux, gmake vs make, gcc vs cc, ncurses vs curses, … none of which I had any familiarity with), but, amazingly, I got the job done! Kept RedHat as a second boot option on my workstation, and continued to use it more and more… 30 years later, I’m typing this on a MacBook Air running NixOS.

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!)

Tried ubunto with mint about 10 years back. My first actual daily driver was endeavoros about 1.5 years ago and it has stuck!

Its either Ubuntu or Debian I cant remember

I think it was actually DBAN I dabbled with firstly, and then like you Knoppix. I played too much later with microkernel distros like DSL / Tinycore, then Debian / Ubuntu’s etc.

Red hat (in '99). I chose it because it was included on the disc that came with an IT magazine I bought at the time

I moved to Linux From Scratch a few years later, then to Debian. I have been on Debian based OSes since then, I like Mint at the moment

Knoppix was my favourite recovery and rescue live CD

BeOS ;)

I know, not Linux. But it was my first OS other than the one that came pre-installed.

Can’t remember exactly which was my very first Linux distro but probably Knoppix or another early live one.

My first “wipe Windows and install on bare metal” was PC-BSD. I know, again, not Linux.

And again, can’t remember exactly the very first “wipe Windows and install on bare metal” Linux, probably Puppy or Ubuntu.

Slackware on a whole lot of lettered floppy disks.

Suse 5 or 6. I think. Throw some Debian in there around that same time frame.

Soft Landing Systems (SLS). So many disks!