A roommate introduced me to Debian in 1995 or so. It was pretty awful back then. All configurations were done by simple text files; installing a printer or sound card (depending on the model) could be a real pain.
But from that year on, I never installed Windows as my primary system again. A few years of dual-boot for very special programs; later VirtualBox, now KVM/QEMU. Most of my customers and half of my friends still use Windows, of course, but my knowledge evaporates more and more. Three more years and I'm completely free of that crappy stuff (I'm 62 now). My Windows friends than have to find someone else to solve their "unexpected error", too. My Linux friends will get support as long as I can push a mouse. :-)

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I got a book from Powell's Books in Portland that had a CD of Slackware 'pre-release', and ended up using it (and WINE) to deal with the internet - I had a bunch of old computers that I got from GoodWill in Portland (OR) - they had a G'Will there that we locally called 'the third world' because it sold stuff returned to other G'Wills, mostly by weight (clothes by weight) or you could just buy broken computers that weren't able to work any more (according to the G'Will folks - keep in mind these were computers running DOS B4 Windoze?).

Otherwise, I was using Juno.com to access the internet as it was free and allowed me to connect up in various towns in OR/CA/WA with local numbers for the modem to dial in on - this ended up being a REALLY good deal because, when MS opted for *.html files, DOS wasn't able to run them AND all the advertisements from Juno from then on were *.html files!

So a telephone modem worked pretty well for several years after that due to text files being much smaller of course.

Mandrake was my first. No real choice then . It was either that or RedHat.

Love looking at all the distro's, people have tried. And seeing all the distro's I've tried. Thanks everyone.

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Mint 13 Cinnamon

Caldera Open Linux in 1998

Red Hat 3 in 1996...we we're testing as an alternative to Solaris.

Redhat (v. 4 or 5? around 1997)

Now (and for the last 20 years or so) it's Debian on servers and Ubuntu on my dektop.

For me it was Slackware in 1993 - not sure if it was pre or post 1.0 - but I didn't stick with it long. I tried RedHat and a couple of others after but I kept coming back to Slackware at various times all thought the 90's.

Mine was Yggdrasil - can't remember the version it was so long ago - early 1990's.

Can't vote yet, but my frist Linux was Mint, most likely 15 or so? I'm fairly new to Linux world, only started in the last few years.

First distro I tried was SUSE. Came with PCmag in late 1990s. Remember it used YaST. 5.1

Then came Mandrake, but settled on RedHat until Ubuntu came along.

Red Hat 5.0 (1997). I have the original 2xCD. 2xFD. and tha fat manual. Nice

It was an early Slackware, on 3 or 4 floppies. Only ran it for a short while, as my wife wanted me to reinstall Win 3.1...

Christmas gift. . . openSUSE 10.1 in the box.