Slackware. About 1994 or so.

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 Cinnamon (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).

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

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.

I started with Pop!_OS, because it was pretty and I was told that it was made for programmers. I was overwhelmed with the options and couldn’t get Twitch to work properly (because of missing codecs), so I switched over to ZorinOS, which helped me to familiarize myself with Linux. Later I returned to Pop!_OS.

Someday I got fed up with the major version updates, so I switched to Manjaro and later to Arch btw.

Gentoo. I figured I could learn much more that way. It was true. The Wiki was excellent. Still is as far as I know.

For me it was Ubuntu on a laptop in early 2000 my family was going to trash because it had viruses on it.

My first distro was PopOS! But these days I’m finding myself liking Tumbleweed the most, and I have tried a lot of different distributions…

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.

Void. I was so excited when I booted into TTY. A blank canvas like never before.

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.

The first distro I tried was Red Hat 5 back in the late 1990s but I never got a GUI working so I guess the first one I used properly would have been Mandrake iirc.

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.

fedora 38 KDE Plasma. still using it today

I started with trying distros in live mode out of general curiosity. My machine had a ton of data and didn’t support dualbooting so I didn’t want to install something. Then my Windows license broke and I decided that pirating is not great so I wanted to install a distro. I liked Manjaro the most(I know I know but hey back then I didn’t know about its issues) but couldn’t install it because of a wrong boot device mode (lol I was an absolute noob then). So I flashed KDE Neon and installed it after finally figuring out the BIOS/UEFI stuff (was too lazy to reflash Manjaro lol). It wasn’t much of a conscious choice. I just installed one of the KDE distros I liked pretty much the same after I couldn’t install Manjaro but that probably saved me a few hours of troubleshooting so that’s good. KDE was a requirement though. I did want a Windows-looking distro so my older family members could use it. After that I tried many distros. Now I’m on Cachy just because of the significantly smoother experience (optimization rules!). It’s unstable though so I don’t recommend it

My first ever Linux experience was with the crouton project on a Chromebook in school (Ubuntu 16.04). A buddy of mine figured it out and we all wanted to play Minecraft during class. Thing is, I ended up enjoying tinkering with the OS as much as I did playing Minecraft… so now I’m stuck trying to learn NixOS.

I first installed mint on a pc, but only for homebridge. First distro I really used was openSuse tumbleweed and after that I shortly switched to Arch because I liked the way the AUR work (using yay) better, than the community repos of openSuse.

I still recommend openSuse TW to anyone that wants to try a rolling release distro. You don’t even need the Terminal in that distro.

SLS (Softlanding Linux System) was my first.

Knoppix 3.2 Live CD 2003

Fedora 6 back in 2007-8 as a part of my CompTIA A+ training. It wasn’t required but my instructor wanted some of us more advanced students to experience a life outside of Windows.

Red Hat 5.0, 1998.

Kernel 2.0.36 represent 🤘

I ordered a laptop (five years ago) that had Ubuntu/Gnome preinstalled, but soon replaced it with Debian/Mate, mainly because of what I read about it on Distrowatch. My new laptop (one year old) shipped bare metal and runs Fedora/Cinnamon.

Damn small Linux. Not really "installed" of course, but was fun to play around with.

Slackware, 2005

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).

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

Ubuntu, 2005

My first, I’m pretty sure, was Ubuntu but for playing around with.

My first one that I stayed with and kept as an actually OS was PopOS. Haven’t changed since. Works well and does what I need. Can’t wait to see what Cosmic has in store.

IIRC it was Ubuntu 8.10

My real first time using Linux was with Pop!_OS in April last year.

messed around some with slack 0.99. but first one to actually see some regular usage was buzz.

Ubuntu 10.10 on a Dell Latitude D505 with an intel core 2 duo and 512MB RAM running Windows XP. It was a school laptop that i cracked the admin password for and installed virtualbox. It ran like crap!. I knew it wasn’t ubuntu’s fault and later always booted from a nub sized USB that i always had plugged in with persistance. I can’t remember the name of the OS at this moment, but it was made for low-end hardware and was specifically environmentally friendly with a green leaf as its logo.

I think it was Mandrake Linux for me.
It no longer exists though. ...I guess I'm old.

Debian I think? Probably Debian Wheezy.

Edit: All thanks to my college professor.

It was slackware 2.0.

It was the only distro I could get my hands on because who would download a distro on dialup. Also there were no CD burners nor USB sticks yet. So whatever your friend had on CD waa the option. I guess the only other possible option would’ve been red hat back in those days.