Suse Linux, but I just install the distro two times.

When I went for a distro I picked-up Ubuntu base on the meeaning of this Zulu word and the philosophy behind this word promoting humanity and work togtether. I started with version 7.10, currently running 13.10 with KDE and have always been satisfied with my choice.
I have the opportunity to work with other distros such as Puppy (slow machines), Fedora, Mint but still stick personally to Ubuntu.
Whener I have the chance to acess a PC (kids, friends) I install Ubuntu as dual boot.

My first distro was a Debian 1.?, in the nineties ...
I use Debian since all that time (4 "real machines today and many virtual), I have also a Suse machine since 5/6 years hosting some VM.

My first distro was mint 8. I have tried others such as ubuntu and red hat but seemed to have hardware issues. Usually video related. It seems to be an Acer thing. Now on Mint 13 and things are working good knock wood.

Had the info magic cd's but a very early Slackware was my first actual install. Kernel was 1.2.7. Did have the first release of Deb. but never could get it up. Sometime in early 93 I believe. Hard to recall things for some reason. Used the Caldera release until it retired and then went Fedora.

First distro I ever installed on my hardware was Crunchbang, but couldn't do jack with it due to the computer installed on it at the time being around 14, 15 years old and using a 266MHz PII for its CPU with 128MB RAM and a 10GB hard drive, however the distro I actually started using was Ubuntu, as it came installed on the computer I got now, ran Ubuntu for six months, and it's nice, however I was getting a little tired of the bitrot, then I switched to Fedora for three months, liked it a lot better than I did Ubuntu as far as bitrot goes, but its short release cycle and the fact that it's not a roller unless you wanna risk it all and go rawhide was a deterrent, which then led me to the distro I'm currently running, Archbang, and it pwns both Ubuntu and Fedora, IMO, due to being both bleeding-edge, and rolling-release.

I wanna upgrade to pure Arch on my first computer build, however, and maybe give Sabayon another shot at some point to start to get into Gentoo-based distros before going into Funtoo or pure Gentoo, however I would need to get another computer with at the very least an i5 before I start to get into Gentoo-based distros, because even in Sabayon, there *will* be compiling in Portage, just not as much as in Funtoo or Gentoo, since it doesn't rely completely on Portage like Funtoo or Gentoo do.

Of course if I need to run a stable distro for a production machine, it would be either Debian Stable or Ubuntu LTS for a workstation, or CentOS for a server.

I've also played with Manjaro a little bit in Vbox in the past, it's a nice concept, however I just don't like it as much as I do Archbang or Arch.

The first distro was SuSE, then have walked a short step into Red Hat, a longer visit in Ubuntu from 9.04, but after the experiments of Canonical with Unity I became tired and made the transform into Mint (LMDE).

I started out with Slackware way back in 1992 (at version 3.0 if I'm not mistaken) mainly to learn Linux. Never changed back. I've tried other distros on old machines (including Arch, which came quite close to the Slack-experience), but never felt the real urge to change. It works good, it works fine and sometimes it even works perfectly.

I first started using Slackware Linux 3.0 wwaayyy back in 1995.
In fact I still have the Walnut Creek CD here!
Back then the kernel was 1.2.13 & 1.3.18.
It is so funny reading the recommended h/w for running: 4MB ram with 12MB(!!) of disk space! 8MB recommended with 40-250MB of h/d space for XFree86 X Windows System (v3.1.2)!

And it still has the same look and feel for the installation!!

If I have time I should try to install it on one of my PC's around here.
Anyone have the versions 1 and 2 binaries?

By the way wasn't there a Minix (???) Unix-like o/s also around in the mid-80's?
I recalled using it at university as a learning tool into operating system designs!
I believe it preceded Linux even was the inspiration for it!
But I never installed it, but maybe others did, and might want to vote for it.

It's still around:

http://www.minix3.org/

First Slackware 2.0, 4 cd Developers Resource set from InfoMagic

Current Slackware 13.37 32 bit, downloaded

Thanks to Linus Torvalds and Patrick Volkerding and
countless others down the years and to the many others
who will so willingly help in the future.

Mandrake - on a store bought magazine cover

Mandrake 7.2

gNewSense 2.3