(Linux users !) What was the first Linux distro that you used ?

deepinder_brar@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 149 points –

Are there any linux users here, am i asking this in wrong community ?, If yes then sorry

Anyways the first linux for me was kali linux, I was a hopeless kid who wanted to learn hacking, and as everyone thinks linux is for hackers i just did some random google search about "Best linux distro for hacking" and the result was kali linux (since parrot os was not there at the time)

I watched a tutorial on how to install it, and that's where it got worse. We didn't have that much data to download a 3-4GB of iso file, so i went to a nearby friend to use their wifi and downloaded it. When I was installing it I selected the partition in which we stored all our family photos and other memories ( At the time I didn't knew much about partitions and just wanted to try out linux). As I selected the wrong partition the windows installed on that partition and the files got deleted and I got into Kali linux, it took me some time to realise what I have done, but eventually I realised that many files were missing and was not able to boot into windows. Eventually I got scolded so much from my parents, but I don't regret it because that opened up a new world of linux for me (but with some sacrifices)

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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.

Yay another Mandrake user! I actually bought the box from a computer store back in 2003. Mandrake was actually a decent effort for a user friendly distribution and the standard installation included tons of software. Getting pppd to connect that serial ISDN modem to the internet for the first time was magical. I've been a Linux user ever since. The other main alternatives at the time were Debian, Slackware both too complicated for a newbie.

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.

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, dont remember the version but it was 1996.

Slackware was my second, version 3 or 4 was the first I used, I don't remember what year it was, but I've learned so much from it.

Slackware, installed from a big stack of 3.5" disks

Same. I pulled a copy originally from CLEVNET that had a local mirror of CWRU ftp at the Cleveland Public Library. I believe it was 2.3, I know it was while they were still on a.out before the swap to ELF.

Don't forget to read your install.end files.

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. I couldn't afford a new laptop for college so I desperately googled for some way to make my old machine last.

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…

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.

Knoppix :) I was just a wee boy using it to analyze malware safely on a Windows machine. The idea we were booting an OS and running it live off a 1GB USB stick blew my bosses mind. Didn't use Linux seriously at all for another 5 years, now with the rise of Proton I'm all in on PopOS 😎

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.

Slackware 0.97 (if I recall correctly) it must’ve been in 1993 I think

Which Kernel was that? I used Slackware with the 1.0.20 kernel.

Phew… digging deep in my memories. I am almost certain it was pre-1.0.

We got it from our Prolog teacher at school. It was a huge stack of disks. I think we compiled the kernel on a daily basis to tweak things, or get hardware working. Fun times!

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn

Same! I spent days trying to get Beryl with wobbly windows and cube workspaces to work and tinkering with Wine to try and run Windows games.

I think back then the 64 bit version couldn't even run any 32 bit applications and you had to carefully choose, but I'm not entirely sure.

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!

Debian Woody PPC. I also downloaded Yellow Dog but don't remember ever installing or using it.

I remember having Yellow Dog installed on my PS3 for some time. I was sad when Sony took away "otheros" capabilities.

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.

for me it was: Puppy Linux for a desktop machine with 254MB of RAM when I was on 1-2nd semester in Preparatory School

The very first Linux? That would be DSL (Damn Small Linux).

I don't know whether it still exists but in 2003-ish, I was looking for something on-the-go and came across DSL.

I recently (2 years now) started using Linux as a daily driver again. Had to learn a lot of new things. This time someone on GamingOnLinux adviced me to start with Mint. But it wasn't for me. So it's been a great journey.

I have fond memories of DSL! Sadly it hasn't been updated since 2012. I think nowadays people use tinycore for that.

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.

1 more...

10 years ago Arch and it was a bloodbath. No background and both IT bros said I should not do it. Took about 4 days and countless rescues, so much manual fstab editing, looking up what the thing I destroyed even is. Glorious times. Dual boot because I thought I might need windows, not anymore.

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.

Backtrack was my first consistent distro as well. Ah, the good old days of wardriving WEP! Also landed on Debian as my daily driver since Ubuntu is a bit chonk.

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.

Debian 2.2 on a consulting job in 2001. I'd used Unix mainframes in college, but other than that had only ever done work on DOS and Windows before then. Didn't think much of it at the time, though it was familiar and easy to work with. Certainly a far cry from the experience we all have with Linux today.

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.

This is the weirdest attempt to get my website security question answers... But... Slackware on floppies.

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.

Also started with Puppy. Then went on to Red Hat and finally settled into Mint.

I don't actively use Linux anymore but I think I first used puppy Linux in middle school. I was a strange kid and got a kick out of anything that could run off a flash drive.

Then I'd use like Ubuntu, lubuntu, and mint typically. I'm back to using windows because I only really use my computer for gaming and I honestly had a rare gift for bricking distros by installing something wrong.

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.

DSL (Damn Small Linux) was what I started plying with, but my first daily driver was PCLOS.

Knoppix. Was recommended it by someone I chatted with at the time and that did not go well. This was not Knoppix's fault though, but rather me not knowing what I got into. Things worked as one would expect, the applications that were included ran without issues, but the issue came when wanted to install software. At the time didn't know anything about linux, so didn't know how to use the terminal to install software, and when trying to install new ones using exe files that didn't work for now obvious reasons. So threw that stuff out and went back to windows, and didn't touch Linux again until Ubuntu Hardy Heron which went a lot better.

VoyagerOS - no idea about anything other than Windows being a thing, less of a clue about what I was doing, think I read something about it being lightweight and guessed it fit my needs.

I did some research on what would be a good OS for someone coming from Windows and at the time Linux Mint was recommended a lot so that's what I chose.

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

Knoppix, on a live CD. Then shorty after, Aurox Linux, distributed as a number of CD with a magazine. Around 2004-2005. Then Mandriva.

Arch Linux. Took me 9 days and several reinstalls to get to a working window manager.

RHEL 2.3, still have the cd somewhere

God I am old, I remember before kali rebranded 😭.

Phlak and Knoppix were mine. Neither lasted long since I couldn't install it on my home computer. The first one I installed as a dual boot was Ubuntu. While I have strayed from them over the years they have been my daily driver for the better part of 15 years

Ubuntu, either version 12.04 or 12.10 when I got my first computer, a Chromebook, in Christmas 2013 when I was 10. I hated how Chrome OS didn't support anything so I found a way to put Ubuntu on it and messed around with Blender and Minecraft. Despite this early start, I proceeded to do nothing productive with it, broke it out of frustration, and now I'm 20 and struggling with Arch lmao

I installed linux mint on some really old laptop when i was a little kid but i wouldnt really consider that my first distro that i actually used on a dailybasis, that would be SteamOS on a Steam deck, it showed me how great linux could be and got me hooked on it.

I think it was probably Ubuntu 6.10. a friend from high school have me a CD to install it.

My first distro was SlackWare 7.

I'm not anywhere near my desktop(s) but it has largely been an Ubuntu box of differing flavors.

Though I experimented with Yoper, Knollix, SuSe, Mint, and a few other distros.

Ubuntu sometime in the late 2000's. I remember a friend showing me virtual desktops that rotated between each other.

I dual booted my machine and it was amazing... For 10 seconds until I realized thats all it did. When right back to windows.

I think it was Debian! My dad had an old cd of it and we live booted into it for fun like almost 20 years ago.

I spent weeks installing Linux in 2002, finally got it up and running and was like wow this is barely usable.

Turns out I had a fundamental misunderstanding, and there were pre-made distributions of it for you to use! Took me two years to realize that. Picked up Ubuntu and it just worked (other than wifi)

I am not really sure but I think it was yggdrasil. I remember loading a ton of floppies one after the other. 5 1/4 inch ones too!

I never got yggdrasil to work.

Unfortunately that makes me really wonder, what it was that I eventually got to work.

Something on a lot 3½ inch floppies.

Someone below mentioned mandrake. I think that was it.

In which case it would have been 5 or 6 years (and a couple of computers) after giving up on yggdrasil.

Installed and tinkered with Mandrake 6.0 First full time: Ubuntu 04-10. Warty Warthog

Kubuntu 6.06. Got the CD with a computer magazine that had a good tutorial on how to install the thing next to a pre-existing Windows partition. To this day I miss the look of KDE 3!

Some version of Ubuntu. I got a free laptop that didn't have an operating system so I just put linux on it because I didn't want to buy windows.

I forget whether I did Mandrake or Redhat first. This was on a 3.5" floppy, heh.

Old GenToo, when I finally got off of dial-up, was an interesting experience. Building everything from the ground up definitely taught me a lot.

These days, I mostly use Ubuntu at home (and various at work). I may give mint a shot, however.

I probably played with some Ubuntu live CDs beforehand, since you could order them for free, but the first time actually using it was back in 2004-2005. I had gotten one of the first AMD 64 bit laptops, with 32 bit Windows and I wanted to see what 65 bit “could do”. So I installed Ubuntu as a dual boot setup. Worked quite well! I played around a lot with customising the experience, making my desktop 3D with Compiz. Great times! I also remember the lack of game support it had, I could only play OpenTTD on it. How times have changed! I’m now running Linux full time on my game machine (EndeavourOS) and haven’t touched Windows in a long time.

I started back on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. It was so much prettier than Windows, it got 11 yr. old me into hosting web servers

i think the first one i tried was Ubuntu 7.04 when i was just messing around with linux on an old Windows XP Machine. A few years later I ran Mint on my laptop and now I'm kind of getting back into it with Manjaro on my current old laptop lol.

No better way to learn about linux than to just try it out

Slackware 7, year 2000. Never seen linux before. Thanks to help from IT geek next door managed to boot net-installer it from single 3.5". After many hours managed do finally get xfree86 working. As far as I remember it was running with KDE.

My first distro was OpenSUSE (or SuSE Linux back then) sometime around 2002. I picked it up out of curiosity in a book shop. They were selling the handbook, bundled with a DVD with the actual OS. It looked something like this. And thus started decades of distro hopping.

SuSe Linux from an installation CD about twenty years ago. A right royal pain in the arse it was.

Hah I came here to say that too. I don't even know how I came by that cd-rom, probably some magazine.

Although I didn't end up using SuSE linux for long, the non-windows look really appealed to me, and I'm sure it hastened my permanent switch years later.

I can't remember if it was Ubuntu or openSUSE, but I read about both in a PC magazine around 2005-2006 and had to try them out. I'm guessing it was probably openSUSE as it has a cooler logo.

@when @deepinder_brar

This was years before I ever thought about Linux and still a Windows slave, but I can vaguely remember a guy on a bus working on a laptop and telling me all about Ubuntu. That was probably my very first exposure to Linux and I forgot about it for a decade.

Not sure but it was slackware or red hat in 1997

DLD 5 in 1998, a colleague at work handed me a CDR and said "i think this might be something for you", and he was right ;)

Started using Linux a year ago. My friend recommended Manjaro (not a good distro) because he himself used Arch. I was a little to stupid to use Manjaro at the time so I moved to Ubuntu, then Kali and finally Arch which is what I use now. I have practiced some distrohopping with Arco, Vanilla, Archcraft and my favourite Gentoo.In the future I want to dabble with LFS and Gentoo but I do see myself using Arch from this point forward. Linux is such an amazing operating system and it has taught me very much. Also use Neovim.

Ubuntu 8.04, and I got it on one of those free discs they used to send out.

Same! 8.04 was a great introduction. Though I learned about wifi drivers the hard way back then...

Raw linux: Android

Raw desktop OS : ChromeOS

GNU/Linux : Ubuntu 18.09

Current : Debian 12

The first time I used Linux was at an old job, and we used Xubuntu for desktop, Debian for servers, and Raspbian on the Raspberry Pis, but technically Xubuntu would have been the first. I currently use KDE neon as my daily driver

Fedora. Core 3 or Core 4 according to Wikipedia and the fact that I recognize the names. An acquaintance suggested I try Linux, so I found info on it, didn't really understand what a distro was and settled on Fedora because I had bought O'Reilly Linux Pocket Guide that used that distro.

I switched pretty quickly after that, and used Ubuntu, Debian, then Mepis for awhile. I've run Arch, dual-booted with Windows for several years on the desktop and Debian testing on my remote server

Manjaro, that is the distro in my families computer

Ubuntu!

I downloaded the installer in 2017 after MS forced an update to Windows 10 from 7. My laptop, from 2010, couldn't handle W10 and I heard Linux was good for old laptops. Not long after that I hopped around to other distros but Ubuntu was first.

Redhat. I can't remember the version, but I found it at Fry's electronics in early 2000. Using Fedora now.

Ubuntu. I think it was around when Unity was starting off.

Iirc it was actually Lubuntu instead of Ubuntu, since I liked the idea of Ubuntu but found it's UI atrocious

Ubuntu, when I started studying IT after high school, my tutor was very insistent that we know about different weird things, and how tech in general worked, and because Ubuntu was so simple, that's where he started.

I played with SuSE 6.2 for a while in 1999 but only really turned to Linux in 2001 with Mandrake Linux 8.0.

Ubuntu > OpenSuse > Mint

Tried some others along the way but didn't liked them.

It was SuSE 5.3, in 1998. That's about the time I went to Linux workshops with a HAM club, getting into packet radio, AX25 and stuff. Good times

Debian. Can't remember the version. I copied the images on a handful of floppy disks and ran a graphical desktop OS off 32MB of RAM and 200MB of storage.

Never really moved away from that since then, except when using a piece of hardware that came with something specific.

Officially it was Raspberry Pi OS although I had messed around with Mint and Ubuntu a bit before that.

Red Hat mid 90s and then Slackware, Red Hat was more polished but I learnt so much more from Slackware.

Slackware. Don't remember the version.

The first I had for work was Ubuntu.

Corel Linux, I doubt anyone else here knows it especially used it. Very user friendly, got me into linux.

Absolutely remember and used Corel. We old people are fading fast. haha

I tried Caldera first, but could never get it to boot. The first one I managed to actually use was Ubuntu 5.10, and that's what got Linux to be my daily driver. Lots of distro-hopping later, I'm still daily driving Linux, Debian these days.

I couldn't run Linux on my PC due too lack of hardware support at the time, but FreeBSD had support, so I ran that for a couple of years until Linux caught up.

At that time, there wasn't much choice when it came to distros. These days, it's a little bit of everything. Arch on my daily driver, RHEL on my ERP and DB servers, Ubuntu server on my Dev server, and I'm planning on deploying NixOS across the 700 PCs at our different locations.

Manjaro for a while. It broke a few times and then I started using Nix os, until I started using Endeavour.

Ubuntu 5.04 for a day because the name sounded funny and had one of the free CDs at home.

Ubuntu 10.04 in an airport because someone told me it was the free version of macOS and I was really into Macs.

Ubuntu 16.04 properly later because coding is easy with Linux

I started on Arch and it's the only distro I've ever really loved.

Ubuntu. If I remember correctly it was in 2016. I do remember that it was still using the Unity desktop environment, which was pretty good in my opinion. I didn't know anything about Linux back then, and I tried to run Minecraft on it through WINE. It didn't work lol.

Ubuntu. But that was an office pc so pretty limited. Mint was the first ever I installed and stayed there for a few years.

Ubuntu, I kept distro hopping but I still kept on coming back to it until I switched to Arch Linux.

I still use Ubuntu for my servers though.

Some version of Ubuntu around the time they were doing the Ubuntu phone

some 20 years back: Suse 7.0, my first PC, reinstalled it every week, cause me dumb dumb back then and it was not very easy to use as well.

OpenSUSE 10.2 I think. Then Ubuntu 7.04. Stuck with it until they moved to the Unity DE.
Then Xubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Kubuntu...
Recently moved to Linux Mint Cinnamon as I got fed up of more of the base system being Snaps.
I did try Mint MATE but the need for more modern built in features won over the nostalgia 🤣

Rhel 5? Maybe 6. It was regular gnome in the early 2000s, and we had Solaris too, but no app. My first distro on my own machine was Ubuntu

I got to use ubuntu in school, but never really got into it. When I started getting annoyed by windows I wanted to move to debian (which I bonked the install for and never got to work). After some shuffling around I settled with Mint (Cinnamon), which I've used since and like very much.

Kubuntu 14.04 burned on a CD my brother gave me when I started studying programming. Switched a lot along the way and ironically ended up on Kubuntu 23.04. I love KDE.

Ubuntu, which I pretty much only installed so I could also install compiz fusion because it looked badass. Nothing like a 3D cube for my multiple desktops, and windows that jiggle when I move them and burn up when I close them.

Fedora 6. Had to use it to build a server for my A+ class. Good times.

Manjaro GMOME was my first distro on hardware (had Ubuntu in VMs before)

The first distro I used was Ubuntu as part of a computer class at school, but it was preinstalled on a school computer. The first distro I installed on a personal computer was Arch because le reddit said it was le epic hackerman's IMPOSSIBLE CHALLENGE TO INSTALL distro. It installed, and after that I didn't use it because my favorite Windows apps couldn't work.

The first distro I used was Guadalinex, a distro developed by my Government (Andalusia, Spain) for education. I used it at school.

The first distro I installed was Ubuntu.

The first distro I daily drived was Fedora.

Hey, A fellow andalusian :) Guadalinex was my 2nd distro to try, computers at high school had it installed and we got install CDs to try it at home.

They also did courses at the Guadalinfo centers in rural towns, my grandpa actually learned to use a computer there so I installed Guadalinex in an desk PC and gave it to him.

I didn't know about Guadalinfo! I wish the Junta kept promoting Libre software. Sadly Guadalinex is discontinued but I installed it last year in a VM out of pure nostalgia haha.

I sometimes dream about a new Andalusian Distro... illOS.

Btw, I created an Andalusian community here in Lemmy! Is completely empty rn, but I hope that changes in the future.

At least at the Guadalinfo center in my hometown they still use Linux, I think it's Linux Mint, and they keep giving free IT Courses with it.

There's a new Andalusian distro focused for education, seems to be used in schools, but I don't know much about it

Thanks for creating the community! I just followed it, will try to participate soon

attempted Debian and Suse, but first one I got installed and actually used for awhile was a Stage 1 Gentoo build

I first tried Ubuntu because it was the only one I knew of besides arch and I heard that arch was hard. I hated Ubuntu immediately and started distro hopping. I'm on Debian 12 now and it's the longest I've been on a single distro.

Slackware to start with, then redhat which seemed very slick and convenient in comparison. Had to drive all the way across the city to buy it on several CDs from some bloke cos my dial up internet was not up to the task. Then I found Debian and stuck with it for about 20yrs, but I think I had some kind of broadband by that point.

Minix.

But then I wised up and switched to FreeBSD.

Back in 2004, I had a SuSE Linux professional 9.2 on 5 CDs and 2 DVDs. I repeat: SEVEN DISKS!! Even without internet access - which I did not have at that time - it felt like all apps accessible through packet manager. You just had to swap discs when prompted. I just took it out in fond memory... SuSE Linux 9.2

In highschool my tech teacher was handing out official Ubuntu discs . That's when I first heard of Linux . Was probably about 15 of

My first was Ubuntu about a decade ago. Didn't stick with it at the time. I wouldn't choose Ubuntu for almost any purpose today, but I think at the time it was fine. (By "almost" I mean that there possibly exists a good use case, but I cannot currently think of one.)

Centos in like 2008... idk the version, i had to learn how to set up a basic internal http server with a sql database or something from zero. It was fun.

Mandrake ~7. Back them I had dial-up internet, but got the install CD from a magazine.

My first contact with linux was with Ubuntu Server 14.04 when I started my first minecraft project with a friend. We decided to try setting up the server on a VPS instead of using a hosting provider that takes care of all the setup and stuff automatically. That was one heck of a journey, but gave me a good quickstart into linux. Nowadays I use linux as a daily driver at home and for the entirety of my server infrastructure.

Slackware. And it was a bitch to get everything working is all I remember.

Had to use red hat for a cyber security class in college, but I tinkered with Ubuntu back in highschool. I had no idea what I was doing lmao

My first one was OpenSUSE in the 00-years. I was hardly able to get it up and running on my worn out, home-build desktop.

Tried again later with ubuntu (Gnome) on an old Thinkpad and was taken aback about how smooth it ran just ootb.

I wanted to try out Ubuntu and Linux Mint in a dual boot configuration when I was about 10 years old and accidentally wiped my whole disk clean. I recovered all the data that was saveable, reinstalled Windows and didn't touch Linux until avout 4 years later, when I setup Arch on my new laptop. Since then, I've aquired many new devices and always remained true to Arch.

Ubuntu as my shitty thinkpad with Windows XP lagged like hell. It was improvement, but geeks on the internet keep saying that Ubuntu is slow and bloated. This motivated me to distrohop and finally landed with Arch Linux. Prob 8+ years with this OS 😂

My mom brought me a disk of mandrake Linux. I tried it and I was pretty lost.

Caldera, followed by redhat followed by Slackware which I stayed on for quite a while.

I distrohopped at the start, no idea what I started with but the first one I settled on was Solus. Still a big fan of Budgie, and the OS felt easy to use, yet had the possibility to download stuff like Spotify as well.

Some really old ubuntu version running in a folder in my windows partition. It kept crashing and uninstall was just removing the folder. Another os was beos which ran from a folder too.

Mandrake Linux, there was a guide in a computer magazine I subscribed to back on 2003 I guess.

H J Lu's boot/root, followed by MCC Interim, followed by Yggrasil on CD