Linux

Yggdrasil in 1993. Why? Because it was the easiest to install at the time, and came with one of my books in college.

Red Hat back in the 1990s. I had to buy it from a local stationary shop because being in a small, isolated country and the internet being in it's infancy, it was all I could find. Came with a manual bigger than a phone book and cost about the equivalent to these days $200.

My first was Mandriva, it was around 2008.

Pop!_OS in mid 2021. Switched to Fedora GNOME in mid 2022, haven't looked back, but am looking forward to Fedora COSMIC.

Slackware 1.2. It was easier to install than Debian at the time.

I started with Crunchbang in its final years. It was a great introduction to Linux, to be honest. It was also a very solid distro, as it was Debian-based.

But, sadly, it eventually folded. It still has a spiritual sequel in BunsenLabs but, in the meantime, I'd moved to Arch (btw).

Slackware. 3.x. I was studying computer science and wanted to have a similar system at home as in the lab.

Debian Sarge which was testing back then. Woody was stable.

Ubuntu back when it was decent lol. I picked it because everyone said that was a beginner-friendly distro, and I had already used it anyway as my parents had an Ubuntu ASUS laptop when I was little (though atp I didn't really remember much from using that laptop).

Fedora 38, one year ago. I am on 39 now and had to do a reinstall. It has its problems, a lot of problems actually, but is still miles better than windows in my opinion

Arch was the only thing I could get working on my E200AH when I started. It's a weird SoC x86_64, with some non-free drivers. Now I can run anything, but the default with arch was figuring out what to do... Debian installer didn't have a mouse and the keyboard didn't work right and I just got stuck. Arch installer dropped me into a TTY and made me figure it out

I used Ubuntu until PAE became required and then switched to either Puppy or DSL (tried them both, honestly don't remember which I stuck with). Eventually got a new computer and used Fedora and Arch (btw) for years. I've recently switched to Debian on a machine I just don't wanna be arsed with worrying about breaking.

Lubuntu was the first distro I remember installing on a low-end netbook.

I'm fairly sure it was Scientific Linux because that was the distro used in the labs of my first programming course.

my first time installing linux was ubuntu, because it was what i'd seen a friend using. i meant to install it to dual boot with windows, but instead ended up wiping everything from the family PC, which was very distressing, and my dad quickly reinstalled windows. this was back around '06 i think.
in '08, i first installed linux on my own system and actually got to use it. i'm not sure what i installed first, cause i did a fair bit of distrohopping, but i settled on ubuntu mate for a while.

Ubuntu back in 2013 (I think?) to get the exclusive TF2 item. Good times! :D

The first I tried was Ubuntu 10.10 but for reasons I don’t remember anymore I‘ve decided to rather install Linux Mint 10.

Used Mint for quit a while, then I had my distrohopping phase before finally setteling on plain Debian a couple of years back.

My first distro was PopOS! I choose it because I heard it had Nvidia drivers pre-installed into the image which sounded nice, also having the support from a bigger company that know Linux. However, I've distrohopped a lot since then, probably 2 years ago now. These days I'm finding myself liking Tumbleweed the most, and I have tried a lot of different distributions..

I’m on a similar path to you: Started with Ubuntu because a friend of mine had also dabbled in it, plus it has a large online community. Switched to Mint shortly thereafter, where I stayed for a while (more than a year). Currently on Fedora for the more recent packages, but sometimes I miss the familiar look & feel of the Cinnamon desktop environment (came from Windows and still use Windows for work).

On my gaming PC, I’ve gone from Windows to Pop_OS! to currently on Nobara (again, for the more recent packages).

ETA over Christmas of 2023 I installed Mint w/ Xfce on my mom’s new (used) laptop and themed it to look and feel like OS X. She knows it’s not a Mac, and I had to teach her some new workflows, but more than a year later she’s getting along well with it. Saved her a grand in the process.

My first non-family PC was a Acer netbook with Linpus [Lite] Linux. I was 12, so my first priority was trying to get Rollercoaster Tycoon to work. Eventually I realized how silly that prospect was and instead managed to install Windows XP via a bootable USB. I used XP for a while until Vista came out, and then I gave Linux Mint a try and really liked it. These days I'm using NixOS and Fedora.

Linux Mandrake in 1999. It was a bit rough and featured a very ugly KDE. I didn't use KDE again until about 18 months ago, and it is now my desktop environment of choice.

I think the first one I installed was Debian back in '97 when I was 12. I think my dad helped a bunch, but I can't really remember stuff from back then very well.

My initial thought was that it was gentoo which I used as my principal OS for close to ten years. I don't know how many times I reinstalled, but enough that I basically had it by memory. Taught me to keep my home dir on a separate partition.

These days I mostly live in windows because AutoCAD is a part of my professional life, but I dual boot popos on weekends. Unless kernel updates break my displaylink docking station...

My very first linux distro is Zorin OS since it is Windows like and heard it is more light weight. After using it for a while, it didn't feel like more light weight to me so I switched back to Windows.

After some years later, I decided to ditch Windows completely and used Ubuntu 20.04 for about a year. When I broke Ubuntu after using about a year, I switched to Arch and still on Arch to this day.

Deepin since I heard good words about it.

It wasn't good.

debian in 2007. still using it alongside mint

My first distro was Ubuntu because it is a beginner distro and it looked interesting.

Ubuntu 11 netbook remix. Currently on Fedora Onyx on my laptop and Kinoite on Desktop.

I'm pretty sure it was Debian in the early aughts.

Mandrake.

And then to Debian and to Ubuntu for a good time. Now using Arch mainly to avoid Snap & Flatpak.