Redhat Linux 3.something
An employee of the local computer store and ISP
burnt me a copy when the one on the rack I had
seen the previous day had already been bought.
It's been my OS ever since. After many upgrades
and distros of course. Currently using the latest
Ubuntu and linuxfromscratch 8.0.

What Was Your First Linux Distro?
 

My very first distro was Ubuntu that I received as a gift through a magazine. I stayed with Ubuntu until they changed the desktop which I didn't like. So, I looked around and came across Linux Mint and I've been with Mint since version eleven. I will stay with Mint as long as it suits me, presently Linux Mint 18.3.

Red Hat 2.0 in 1998. Switched to Slackware in 2001.

first linux distro
 

My first distro: Kurumim Linux, a Knoppix based distro.

first distro
 

Kurumim Linux, knoppix based Brazilian distro of one man: Mr. Carlos Eduardo Morimoto.

First installed Linux systems were RedHat 4 & 5, plus Debian 2.1 - I continued with Debian based distros right up to today, whilst I did have Slackware for a while, alongside, but was never really happy with it.

(I also keep in touch with BSD, mainly OpenBSD.)

Mandrake 9.0 & Fedora Core 1*

I still use Fedora Core 1 and dual-booting with Syllable on a Compaq Armada M300.

Mandrake 8.1 I chose that over SUSE since '8.1 was newer than the then current SUSE. Tried various distros until settling on Slackware sometime around 2004. That was the end of Win-d'ohs for me.

Mandrake 7

Mandrake 8

I am shocked the Ubuntu isn't in the lead. Still, really says something about the generations here. Obviously Slackware was more important to its time than I realised.

EDIT: Ubuntu for me. Well technically Fedora but, as far as I can recall, that was an outright failure and doesn't count. So Ubuntu Hardy Heron which I then ditched for Windows, with Xenial Xerus being my proper entry-level edition.

My first linux distro
 

UMSDOS, Dec. 1994, followed by Slack and then by Debian. I like to try, and have tried many distros, including deepin (this machine), but my main machine is always debian.

Fleeing Windows
 

Mint being the easiest transition from Microsoft is the reason for it's popularity. I did have Ubuntu installed on one of my machines. It works fine but feels more foreign to the Microsoft user. Hey, at the end of the day, it is more important to be a Linux user than being loyal to a particular distro. Yes?

Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa

My first Linux distro
 

My first Linux distro was Red Hat Linux 5 (.0)

Redhat Linux 4, IIRC. I actually bought the boxed set at Best Buy to start testing our applications system on an IBM Netfinity server. I worked with the IBM Development staff on an early port with the RAID card for a Netfinity server with dual Pentium CPUs (I think that was the 9900 model). It supported 6 SCSI drives and we used a DAT drive for backup.

Corel
 

Approximately 1998.

First look at Tilix, first HDD install: Debian etch.

My first Linux distro was Slackware 3.1(?) in 1996. Used it mostly ever since then, both for work and home. Also have used various versions of Redhat, Fedora, Ubuntu and most recently CentOS (for a Linux sysadm class). Always seem to gravitate back to Slackware (using fvwm as my windows manager...). Have lots of bash & perl scripts, many that will do things that other distros and/or windows managers have included in them. Love the challenge of figuring things out for myself!

One further comment about product development on Linux platforms (or product development in general): unless the product being developed is for one distro only, I'd highly recommend developing or at least testing on at least two platforms. In my last job, I was on a team of ~15 developers working on a product most of which was developed initially on Slackware, then Redhat, and ultimately Fedora Core. I was a rogue element who insisted on also developing & testing on Slackware, while most others (~15 developers) were on Redhat, and then Fedora (although another developer did his development on a Suse distro). And even though most (~95% or more) of the development was done on Linux systems, our target platforms were various flavors of Windows (Windows XP, 7, 8 & 10) as well as Mac OSX & later Android systems. (I had very little to do w/ the porting to or testing on Mac OSX & Android devices...) My experience was that code developed on one Linux system often performed different than it did on another Linux system. Often this was due to each distro's configuration of build tools (gcc, etc.). Also, code running on Linux systems often produced different results than the (mostly) same code running on Windows systems. (At one point, when Redhat output differed from Slackware output, I looked through the assembler code produced by Redhat gcc vs that produced by Slackware gcc -- both using the same gcc version; Redhat gcc had optimized out one whole non-trivial section of code...)

So... unless you're developing for one specific target platform & distro, it's useful to develop/test on multiple platforms & distros. Makes the sysadmins' jobs more difficult, but ultimately can produce more a robust product.

Pretty sure it was Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). I got the install CD when they still mailed them for free.
I didn't have an internet connection so i could only play games that came in the CD.

Mandrake 9.1 was my first install, so I guess it must have been somewhere between 2003-03 and 2003-09.

Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)
 

Thanks to a LINUX magazine subscription I received a free UBUNTU 7.10 disk (I still have it) and installed it
on a very low powered DELL desktop. It worked and I was hooked.

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.

I'd expected Ubuntu to have a much greater %.

My first Linux was Slackware in 1997 or 1998.... Since, I tried others but allways return to slackware (now using 14.2 and 14 current). Very good.

I think it's difficult to represent this statistically. Ubuntu didn't exist back in the early 90's, nor did most of the distros on the list. Back then, it was Slackware or RH, or Debian. I think Suse existed as well but can't remember.

The popularity of Linux back in the early 90's was nil compared to now, server wise anyway. Since there is no time scale in the chart, the numbers are reflective of when this thread started. If a time line was included, you'd probably see a spike when Ubuntu or Mint was introduced.

My first Linux distro was Yggdrasil Linux

My first distro was Red Hat 5.2 from a magazine cover disk about 1998. At the time I was fairly new to computing generally but had already figured out that Windows 95 had some flaws and shortcomings.... Out of necessity/lack of skills I dual booted the RH 5.2 with Windows for a while but by the time RH 6.2 was available, I very rarely fired up my Windows partition. Have tried a number of distros over the years (currently Linux Mint Mate) but I always think of RH 6.2 with a particular fondness.

gNewSense
... 2006

Found it too limiting, migrated to Ubuntu Studio, and then Antergos.
Was most happy with Antergos.
Now back to UBS 19.04 ... though it's VERY glitchy at present

Red Hat 5.0, 2 cds, 2 floppies, manual. On the shelf today

My first distro was Freespire way back in 2007. Since it's not listed and is the free version of Linspire, I voted Linspire.

Well... my first was a Knoppix, that my friend gave me on CD to copy it. I was the only one in neighborhood who had a 2x/2x/2x cd burner- in 2000 it was something BIG in Eastern Europe :) Some were joking, that I was burning more CDs that time than biggest national AudioCD distributor :D It was a time, when a Celin Dion CD cost something about 2 days of fulltime work.

Then it was Suse, Debian, and after a few more experiments it stayed on Ubuntu.

Started with SuSE or Red Hat in the early years (do not remember which one was the first. I have used both). Then for quite many years Ubuntu before I migrated into Mint (LMDE) until I decided to take the step to Debian, where I reside for the moment.

first linux distro
 

Vector

RED HAT....
 

red hat 5.2 (1998). back then it used LILO as the boot loader instead of GRUB. i was a newbie but i had fun.

Mine was SLES...after some research, I wrote up a PoC for it to be used on our IBM mainframe running under z/VM, for a new application the department was thinking of implementing.

Ubuntu Horey Hedgehog

Yggdrasil back in the early 90's

I chose CentOS which is Red Hat.
When Backtrack came to my world it changed how I see...feel...and became one with the knowledge of Linux.

First distro
 

SuSE 7.3. I've only just given up on SuSE as the "stable" LEAP 15.1 freezes and crashes every twenty minutes on my PC :(

Ubuntu 9.04 for me

First Distro was Yggdrasil Linux for me in 1993, I still have the book, and the disks somewhere.
It was a bit of a bear to configure for your hardware, but once done it behaved well.
Shortly thereafter I switched over to Debian, and have not looked back.
I have tried many distro's on my other machines including the ones at work, but I like to be on stable release at home.

Slackware 2.xxx, i yet use it(v 14.2) toghether to debian and ubuntu currently

My first Linux distro was Ubuntu 9.04 on a 32-bit 486 Desktop, lol !

I believe it was called MCC-interim, but my memory fades. I think it was the summer of '92. The kernel was 0.96c, and it used a minix bootloader (dual boot with windows 3.1).

I started with kernel pre. 1.0 on an 80286 and well before X was born.
Downloaded 40+ diskettes to install and I can't remember which dist. it was.
I had 2 Facit-Twist terminals on serial lines that I used about a year before I fully trusted X.

I have tried a lot of distros, but since many years I use Slackware. When I tried Kubuntu last year, I only had a lot of trouble knowing how f* to configure it for my needs, so it was only a short test before I came back to Slackware.

Same with Redhat - I have no fine control on the system as with Slackware.

Debian

mandrake
 

1st distro i used back in the l8 nineties was mandrake on a partioned machine with win 98se. i remember installation was a challenge and it took a few months to get a handle on it all b4 i removed bill gates from my machine ...

mandrake
 

1st distro i used back in the l8 nineties was mandrake on a partioned machine with win 98se. i remember installation was a challenge and it took a few months to get a handle on it all b4 i removed bill gates from my machine ... i later leaned ubuntu.
now i run machines with mint and deb ian on this laptop on which i type you an answer

Debian Potato, in college 2001-2004.
Small dalliance with Easy Peasy 1.6 on a Netbook in 2012.
Then MX 15.01 in early 2016. Tried many others, always came back to MX. Because it JUST WORKS!

Debian was my first Linux distro -- prior to that I had had experience with vanilla AT&T UNIX, XENIX, AIX and SunOS/Solaris.