Mint 14 w/Cinnamon. At 39 yrs old, I was a very late comer to Linux, but love it none the less. After seeing how ridiculously time consuming and complicated the upgrade from windows 2000 to windows 7 was on my parents computer, I decided to sh*tcan microsoft and haven't looked back. I've been using Mint now for about 7 months and have been thoroughly impressed with what a mature, stable, well intergrated, & well maintained distribution it is. I just recently did an upgrade to Mint 15 without even needing to do a fresh install. (I cloned my drive first of course just to be safe.) I timed the entire upgrade process to 1hr and 58min, which included upgrading all the extensive packages I have installed as well. Fantastic. And if it isn't enough that Linux is more adaptable and easier to work with in just about every way, it's also much much easier to find online help when needed, because of the extensive tutorials, and forum activity. Couldn't be happier.

I have tried Slackware on several occasions and cannot understand why folks think it's the best thing since sliced bread. It's a complicated install with fiddly tweaks, not always easy to follow for a beginner, and while it's maybe good and stable it is one of the most difficult to setup. I have been an Ubuntu user in the past (pre Unity) but moved to Linux Mint three years ago and am completely satisfied with the ease and stability of the distro ... I have tried others but Mint is for me :-)

Sigh, actually it's better than sliced bread; get your facts right!

The advantage Slackware has is that the entire system is presented. None of it is hidden behind "wizards", with undocumented configuration files, services that hide their configurations, and is completely under the control of the administrator.

I respect the way Slackware works, but I've never found anything that appealing about it. If I were to ever stay from Debian, it would probably be for Arch or Gentoo.

I have to agree with this. While I still consider Slackware to be the ultimate Linux, it is hard to use for an average Windows-transfer-to-Linux user. I am still running Slackware 13 occasionally (among others) but Ubuntu and/or Mint are just easier to use for a non-linux geek.
Having said that I also use Solaris and PCBSD (not linuxes) just to see if I can work with it and I can but I have to admit it is just for fun. I think the average Linux user is better off with Mint/ubuntu because those OS's get more people into Linux than Slackware ever could.

Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal
I got to hand it to Ubuntu, that version was really buggy but it didn't make me shy away from linux.

Ubuntu 6.06. I've stayed with the LTS versions since. I have tried a few others along the way, but keep coming back.

Slackware 2.1, oops, didn't finish downloading and 2.2 was out. Got the base onto my 5.25" disks and installed it and decided that 386sx16 was better as a windows workstation after all. But I had a 486 with 16MB running Netware, so decided I should try it there. Downloaded 2.(2/3?) for 3.5" disks, and ran that for a while as a file and FAX server. That system had to be re-purposed for Windows/NT, which became my file server for a few years. NT proved comparatively unstable, and a poor FAX server, and I finally got fed up with it. A number of other distributions were tried as a solution. Caldera was a near miss, but after the second round of dependency hell, I gave it up. So in 1998 I went back to Slackware, and have had at least a server running it ever since. My personal desktop became Slackware at 7.0...

Mine was SusE 7.0

I saw the big box set at a computer wharehouse store and bought it. It just worked perfectly, and having all the software on DVD and CD meant no downloads which was a bonus at the time.

Rats, I noticed Yggdrasil after I voted for Slackware.

Obviously, you haven't tried toasting a Slackware DVD. :)

I voted Slackware incorrectly. I should have voted SLS. I still remember the huge number of discs involved and how it used to fail the install on disc 26 or 27

Mandrake didn't stick.
 

Moved on to Ubuntu Warty Warthog for a few weeks, dual booting with Windows 98. Later tried Hoary Hedgehog, Breezy Badger and Dapper Drake, which found the most use, but still dual booted.
I then gave up on Linux until Hardy heron, which I found much more useable. Still dual booting with Windows XP, but found that I used Ubuntu more than Windows. After a while I moved over entirely, and now only keep a Windows partition on my laptop for emergencies when I can't get Linux to work on a specific function, such as legacy hardware or proprietry only software.

Suse 3.1