Puppy 2.1x frugal dualbooting inside of Windows 95 on a Compaq 1540DM running a 16bit wireless B Netgear pcmcia card. My first computer also (wife gave it to me).

Yellowdog here, on a mac powerbook g3 'wallstreet' edition, didn't even have a cd burner, i faked the install by 'burning' the iso to a hard drive partition, still not sure how it worked... oh well.

Slackware 10.0.

It was an accident. I tried to install something else first--can't remember what, and it didn't like me, so I wandered off looking for something else and stumbled into Slackware.

I've never really left. Wandered a bit, but never really left.

Slackware 3.3 (I even got X!)

I have worked first on NOVEL 4.1 and 4.2 and parallel on linux6/9

Why is missing Mandriva - a great successor of Mandrake a predecessor of Mageia? But seriously, when I learned, that Linux is Open Source and free of charge, I wakled through several distributions: Ubuntu, Fedora and so on, and stopped my attention on Mandriva and OpenSuse as my favorites.

I've added Mandriva and Linspire.

--jeremy

First was Mandrake 10, but I played with it for about 2 days, only GUI, not any console.
The real experience came about 2 years later after that with Slackware, and I'm still in love with it. The major things I've learned about UNIX was with the help of Slackware.

My first distro was Caldera eDesktop

Linux was young and didn't support many of my hardware so I dual booted windows95 and caldera. I though linux sucked at that time because of the lack of hardware support.

Today, linux is awesome and it kicks a$$ and that's why linux is my main OS on my system. Currently using arch and PClinuxOS 2013

Slackware 2.x... 'cuz NetBSD (which a friend was running) seemed too hard ;) I still have (bad) memories of trying to get basic things like ppp (modem), XWindow (fvwm), sound and printing working.

Red Hat was my first, and when its free-subscription ran out I decided to dive into the operating-system waters with this OS ... experimenting first with Linux From Scratch, then Gentoo.

These days, I run my Linux-es as virtual machines under OS/X ... with one notable exception, "Old Dobbin." A laptop, originally bought with Windows-95, whose video card don't work so good anymore (okay, okay, it's blind), but which still runs (Gentoo) and has an uptime, as of today, of 207 days. Even though it's quite a small machine, with a fast-and-efficient Linux configuration that's tailored to its exact hardware with no "fluff," it is, well, "positively zippy." Microsoft Windows is a dim and still-unpleasant memory.

My first experience with Linux was when I bought a Caldera box with disks and a manual and tried, unsuccessfully, to install it instead of Windows 98.
I then didn't use Linux for a couple of years until I picked up Mandrake from the front of a magazine and managed to install it -- it is that which I count as my first distro. Then went through a period of distro-hopping through Mandrake, SuSe and Fedora before settling on Ubuntu, then Kubuntu. I even bought a PC with Kubuntu pre-installed from a now gone sole trader here in the UK.
I went off Kubuntu when KDE 4 came along and went to Xubuntu then Debian. In the mean time I bought a netbook with some horrid version of Xandros or something on it and changed that to Mint which I ran on it until fairly recently (it's now on Sid).
Sadly I managed to throw out the Caldera disks and book a couple of years ago.
Having a high[ish]-speed internet connection has certainly made life a lot easier for those wishing to try, and use, Linux and not just because it meant the death of the dreaded Win-MODEM.

rrow at present, I have the distinction of being the only person insofar to say yellowdog

I had actually tried YellowDog early on, on old Mac PPC hardware, but I can't say it was my first. Probably more like my fourth. I think it was Red Hat > Mandrake > Corel > YellowDog. SUSE may have been in there somewhere, though.

Mine was Redhat Linux 4.0 in the days when lRedhat was community-developed. I bought the Redhat book and tried it. Didn't find it particularly user-friendly. Later I moved to Ubuntu and never went back to Microsoft.