Mine was Knoppix because back in the day Libraries used to let you borrow all sorts of computer software and games and that’s what they had and I was stuck on dialup lol
Damn, how long did you stick with Knoppix?
I had two firsts—I messed around with Ubuntu around high school or so, but I don’t count that because I was only curious and had no intention to actually try and use it for any decent stretch of time.
Second, which I consider the “true first”, was Fedora, and man was it dope. It’s the distro that made me realize Linux is a lot more accessible than I had thought.
Ubuntu 18.04 (2018) -> Manjaro (2019-2021)-> Arch (2021-2022) ->EndeavourOS (2022-present on my desktop) ->NixOS (2024-present on my laptop)
Must have been Suse 6 or 7 (I think 7.0) around 2000, as I got a physical copy as a prize on a lan party and I actually installed it…
But then I needed the space for something else, probably Counter-Strike and custom maps. :D
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.
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Suse 5 or 6. I think. Throw some Debian in there around that same time frame.
RedHat6.
It came on a CD on the cover of a massive tome titled RedHat Linux 6 Unleashed.
It was Fedora. Most of the recommendations for beginners at the time were for Ubuntu or derivatives and I was being contrary just because I could.
RedHat 5.1. Man I’m old.
I also still have a Slackware 3.0 CDROM lying around. Which I actually liked back in the day.
me too with redhat 5 at my first job. shortly after moved to 6 that, as far as I remember, was the first showing the green OK at the right of every service starting instead of a mess of output
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.
Early Mandriva with KDE 3.4 or 3.5 I think, but I can barely remember anything with clarity. It couldn’t have been bad though, since I haven’t used Windows on my own devices since 😉.
From my foggy memory, I think it was good for my then nocoder self, easy to use, stable, relatively lite, and had good looks.
I missed the Mandrake and pre-Fedora Red Hat era, but not by much.
Forgot to mention that I wasn’t exactly young at the time. We just didn’t have reliable broadband internet back then in my neck of the woods. So I had to download ISOs and save them in a USB thumb drive in a uni computer lab.
Ubuntu, I was drawn in with the 3D cube and the ability to play games. The only game I had compatible then was TF2. So I left.
Back to it full time now, almost all games work, and on Mint
I had a machine with multiple OSes chosen at startup with OS/2 Boot Manager, including OS/2 Warp, Windows NT Workstation 4, and Redhat 5.0 which came on a CDROM labeled Pink Tie 5.0. (It was late '90s I guess. I used MSDOS before that. And a Commodore 64 before that) I believe I put a mail server on it (the Redhat partition) while I was still on dial-up (128K ISDN). The mails waited somewhere until I got online and signalled to send them to me. But then upgraded it to DSL. I was still running Redhat 7.3 with my mail server until 2006, even though Redhat 9 and Fedora were out by then. In 2006, I shut it down and bought a Windows 98 laptop to travel around Central America for a year. The Guatemalans laughed at my Windows 98 laptop–they were running Vista. When I got back to the US in 2007, and broke the laptop screen, oops, I bought a $300 desktop PC that had Lindows installed.
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.
Corel Linux. It didn’t last long because it didn’t play my games.
