Mandrake or Red Hat back in 2000 (can't remember which was first, I tried both in a short period). Got 'em both from the book store with a couple "Users Guide To..." manuals that came with discs of each.

Patient.

Linux Mint 9>>>actually i use manjaro xfce

first linux distribution
 

I started with SuSe 12 years ago, then went to Red Hat, then Fedora and now with Ubuntu.

I started with Slackware 8.0 and have tested other distros during the years, but mainly stayed with Slackware until Mint 8.0 was launched. I have used Mint since then.

Mine was the 'gNewSense' Ubuntu fork, I was NOT happy with gNewSense and within days migrated to Ubuntu 8.04

... currently using Ubuntu Studio 14.04

slackware x.x early 2000ish.

Back then Mandrake was awesome!

which distro
 

Actually, my first distro was Knoppix on a CD inside a pc magazine, well, it registered, but was soon forgotten. Xandros was next. Since I paid for it(!!!!) I took it seriously. (well maybe that is what it comes down to, as soon as you shell out bucks, your attention span changes). Still, did not last. And Then There Was Linux MInt Katya! Everything changed, hey this is usable!! Never went back to Windows after that. Today I have Debian wheezy and LMDE. Great functionality in both. Start from SSD with the HDD being the home directory, I am not pursuing any great changes at this point.

Slackware 3.x sometime back in the mid 90's. I never got online with it though. That didn't happen until Caldera in about 2000. Kernel was 2.2.x and you could play tetris during the install. Connecting to the internet was still a problem though. For installs, it never got better than Ubuntu for getting online fast but I still miss Caldera. Too bad they got involved with SCO (then everybody went insane) and here we are. Tons of buggy, bloated code and a never ending stream of updates. Sound familiar?

Started playing with Slackware in the mid 90's off of all the floppy disks.
stayed with windows for a while until the early 2000's and XP drove me away from windows. played with a couple distros such as redhat but came back to slackware.

I began with Red Hat Linux 7.0 back in trade school.

First Linux: Borrowed Linux Universe 2nd edition [1] from a friend of a friend in 1996. It is basically an English translation of Unifix [2], which uses a layered filesystem similar to what Puppy Linux does. Gradually replaced all installed software with newer versions compiled from sources, which was quite a rabbit hole to go down, for someone coming from DOS and Windows. It is still possible to install Linux Universe in VirtualBox [3], but kind of pointless. For example, it includes a beta version of lynx that is incompatible with most of the web because it doesn't understand HTTP 1.1.

[1]
http://www.amazon.com/Linux-Universe.../dp/0387946004

[2]
http://cd.textfiles.com/infomagic/im...O-5.html#ss5.3

[3]
http://blog.krisk.org/2012/07/my-linux-story.html

Suse forever?
 

First Suse (9?) back in middle school, someone gave the CD-set to me and told me to try this instead of Microsoft.
Got acquainted with Fedora in high school. In that time Ubuntu CD's could be ordered in bulk to distribute in your personal network (do not know if they still do that?), but never really tried it. I am sure I still have those original Suse and Ubuntu CD's somewhere :-)
Changed jobs and came from a complete Microsoft box into a mixed Win-Solaris environment. Refreshing for me. At the point where we would deploy a new environment and virtualize all systems I pushed for RedHat based on multiple arguments. 5 years later and some upgrades + version further I am still convinced about the made choice.
Now I should know better, but over the time the major constant is Suse after Suse version at home (in a basic workstation but still...). I did try to move to CentOS for my home use 3 years ago but to my surprise hardware support was worse, and ended up again with OpenSuse.