It was MCC-interim, with kernel 0.96c I had a student set up a computer with it; I have no idea where he got it. But I had to boot windows (3.1 at the time) first to set the monitor, and then soft-boot into linux using the minix launcher. The date has been lost in the mists of time, but probably in the Fall of '92.

Really to much time ago, as a student, first Linux Distro was Slackware, with time sharing for other tools as Xenix systems, Unix System V on HP 9000 workstations, or RSX-11M/VMS on Digital MiniComputers PDP11/VAX.
After a couple of years, Linux is today best resource to run on Servers, maintained distributely by comunities.

Regards.

Santiago Frias.

Was Red Hat. Can’t remember the version, maybe 3 or 5.

Back in '93 got a "Plug-n-Play Linux from Yggdrasil". Still have the Linux Bible from then. Quite a book, gazillion pages, wish there's be a newer version. I quickly ('94) migrated to Slackware fror everything, especially servers. Then Linux got to the point where so many distros out there and no two the same, confusing where to find stuff. Now on Desktops I use Mint, servers still Slackware, command line only.

Looking at the poll result, nice to see the top one is Slackware.

George Csahanin

A friend and I were running a hobby ISP, and we were hanging out for Red Hat 2.5 I think we put it on a 486 DX100

Slackware 3 (from CD bundled inside of The Complete Linux Kit book).

It would have been with SunOS and HP-Unix. I turned to Linux when I wanted my own, and Ubuntu is the easiest starting place for that...

Back in the days of few really good Linux distros IMO.
But I have to say, I got SuSE because I was using HPUX at work and wanted something at home that would let me learn the ins & outs of command line & admin.

In January 1999 I came across an Australian computer magazine which had 2 cd's attached. One was Red Hat the other was Caldera. I could never get RedHat to load but Caldera did. I learnt so much from those early days about partitioning and computer security. Since then I have used many different distros but for the last 5 or 6 years I have settled on Mint.

It was Slackware 3.5, a friend on IRC sent me all the tgz files via DCC send on dialup (it was 50 some megs) to make sure I got the right ones and I downloaded my bootdisk and rootdisk and wrote them with rawrite. I didn't install that "ugly X Windows shit" (as I called it... screenshots of window managers were ugly back then lol), I just wanted a unix shell on my computer.

I didn't want to repartition, so I installed it using the UMSDOS overlay :-)

I didn't get into Linux again until 1999, I installed Corel Linux because it was somewhat like a Windows NT environment. I learned to compile a kernel there, because I wanted to get my parallel port zip drive working.

A few iterations of Mandrake (7.0 was my favourite)

Then, I saw a Slackware 7.0 book, with installation CD in a bookstore. I grabbed it, and installed it and Slackware became my favourite distribution. I think I was using KDE 1.1 back then, or something like that.

My first distro was Kurumin (2003-2008), based on Knoppix and Devian, with KDE.

https://byteria.blogspot.com/2016/08/kurumin.html

Ubuntu

I installed Linux Mint 17.x, many years ago. I had gotten tired of having to pay for OS and productivity software that soon became unsupported and obsolete.

I was so happy after having installed Linux Mint 17.x. Not only did I get a very efficient and robust OS, but I also got a ton of great productivity software , included in the package.

I'm now running Mint 19.3, and I have never looked back!

Mandrake 1998

Based on Red Hat, decent installer, seemed to work off-the-hop. Not a bad introduction.

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Slackware 0.92; it boots only from Adaptec Scsi controller...