What Was Your First Linux Distribution?

[combuster]

Red Hat 5.2 Appolo back in '99, mandrake from 2002 to 2006 and later on a lot of distrohopping, now I'm archer and I'm planning on sticking with arch...

[Jorophose]

I'm not a very long-time linux user.

I started with Xubuntu 6.06. Was totally awful. At least compared to more modern versions of Ubuntu. But I guess it wasn't all bad considering it was Xubuntu's first clean release.

I'm so glad LXDE exists now, though. A lot faster than Xfce.

[Xavier]

Hand-built distro on my Amiga around 1992 (based on RedHat if my memory serves me good). Boy it was a pain to install !
And if you cry about missing drivers today, think about it: I didn't even have working IDE drivers back then !

[masinick]

First: Slackware, 1995.
First with Broadband network: Caldera OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4, 1999.
Favorite once I started using Linux daily: Mandrake 8.0, until I found Debian in late 2001.
Favorite distros today: sidux, antiX, and SimplyMEPIS, all Debian based.

[Neo_The_User]

My first linux distribution that I used was Fedora Core 4. I think I was around 10 or so. 16 now and I roll my own. I hate all them other distros. Don't cut it.

[Darksurf]

My first linux distribution that I used was Fedora Core 4. I think I was around 10 or so. 16 now and I roll my own. I hate all them other distros. Don't cut it.

I remember using slackware on my old Pentium 1 in stead of windows 95.
It was my first distro. windows 98 was out and instead of upgrading I tried slackware. I did well and learned a lot using slackware. Its never the distro that doesn't cut it, its the user. Try slackware and see how long you'll last using it. I used it since 1999 all the way to slackware 11.

Eventually wanting ease of use coupled with wanting the bleeding edge pushed me to try several other distros, didn't care for any of them, always going back to slack, but eventually found RR64 (now called sabayonlinux ), and have stuck with it ever since. Waaay better than any distro I've ever tried, including fedora/redhat.

[cubdukat]

The first for me was Fedora Core 4, but I screwed up the install, so I never really got to try it out. My first working install was SuSe Linux 9.0 from a copy of Linux Format.

But Ubuntu was the first time I actually was able to figure out what I was doing in Linux. I rotate every so often between different distros, but I always come back to Ubuntu.

[masinick]

The reason I started using it was my Corel rep told me about their endevour into linux and sent me a few copies for evaluation. Your right it was a decent distro for the day. Very refined for a first attempt. It ran a small mail server for 4 years until the old beast of a K6-II finally died (fan failure). Too bad, it had my best uptime by far. Now I use "in the can" solutions for ease of enterprise deployment like suse (Ya, ya cue the boo's and hiss's, hey it works and it works well).

When I first tried Corel Linux, I had hardware compatibility issues with it on the hardware I was using at the time. About a year and a half later, though, I tried some more "Linux friendly" hardware with two distros that I believe both descended out of Corel Linux - the Xandros 1.0 that was mentioned earlier, and, courtesy of Debconf 2 at the 2002 conference at York University near Toronto, a copy of Lindows.com, later called Linspire.

My Linux story begins WAY before that though. I was doing Linux in 1995, and may have tried it even sooner, but before that, I did not own my own home computer - Linux was the reason I bought my own system. I used UNIX workstations heavily from 1982 until 1998, and again in 1999-2001, though in this decade, the only UNIX I have touched is an occasional Solaris server; now use Linux almost exclusively at home.

[itman]

Probably SuSE-5.3 on Kernel 2.0.36

[mcgreg]

My first and only: Debian Sid - since 2002. Debian FTW