Ubuntu, it was so easy to switch from XP to Ubuntu.
Was introducted by some friends from back when I was at school, they used to boot off of USB and run Damn Small Linux. Tried a few distros here and there before I got to Ubuntu, but it was just what I was looking for and haven't turned back since.

0.95 slackware it was for a small company servers, it was so bad I persuaded them to switch to solaris and sun servers. I didn't have anything to do with linux until 4 or 5 years later when redhat 4.2 came out and had a sparc edition it was pretty nice but I lived in rpm hell until 2000 when I was introduced to debian and found out there was a better way, been on a debian or derived from debian system ever since. I've tried many other distros, gentoo is pretty much the only other one that is as nice as a deb based system (imho).

Xandros, the free one, was my 1st. I've tried all the popular distros. Fedora & Mepis are my current favorites.

2005 - fedora core 4. absolutely hated it.

Gnome got in my way and I just couldnt do anything with it, row upon row of menus, and options as far as the eye could see. what a nightmare.

I was trying to learn all the basics, like compiling from source, but nothing would work.

then I had a look at Vector linux (& fluxbox) and I immediately got an idea of what I could do. great starter distro imo.

stuck with that for 6 months, then went to Slackware 11 (& fluxbox) and been there ever since, love it.

SUSE 9.3 - my first "full-time" distro. But the very first distro I had running on my PC was Knoppix in 2003 - off live cd from some Windows-centric magazine ( thank you very much ) . Then I had a couple of tries with Red Hat without much success. Then in 2005 I tried SUSE 9.3 - 2 months later and ever since I haven't had Windows installed on any of my machines!

These days it's Debian (and Kubuntu on one laptop where Debian wouldn't install).

Ubuntu. Then Debian. Now I'm runninf Debian testing with fluxbox and gnome so I can use network-admin. I'm going to try out gentoo (probably won't use it, don't want to compile everything) and arch in a VM soon.

2004 RHEL 4 on Gnome and that was the last i used of gnome .....dude that distro sucked i didnt have a valid subscription so i guess thats why it sucked. Then i moved to FreeBSD and that really opended my eyes to what linux can do. Now am toying with FC7-8 and Debian which is pretty cool!!! Now KDE rocks all the way!!

I never owned a Windows PC.

I have Linux since 1999: That was Mandrake 6.1 powerpack.

Before that, back until 1995, I used Unix:
- TWM running on X terminals at University,
- Mint/MultiTOS running on an Atari STE at home.

Yves.

Started with Redhat 6.1 from a magazine. Then switched to Slackware 7.

Red Hat 6.1... the first I used on my main machine was SUSE 9.3 from a book.

Slackware 4.0

First succesfull install was Redhat 5.0 for a short time I even go on the internet with it. The modem was a 1.44 kb. It was blazing fast lol.

Then it died a horrible death. Lots of smoke and sizzling.

Next came Slackware 3.5. It came in a book by P.V. and 2 install disks, one for install and second for programs.

My first distro was Suse. Don't recall the version, but it was eight years ago - and it was a complete flop. Had I been more patient and took the time to learn it probably would've worked. I did get it installed and actually used it for a week before I just gave up. It was about then I heard of Ubuntu...and it worked great, don't recall the version but it was either the very first or second.

Since, I've used about a gazillion distros, or so it seems. Currently I run sidux. Windows is long gone.

I guess I would have to say my first distro was Suse 7.1,

IIRC, I started with Red Hat 8.0 in 2002.

Then I distro-hopped in this order: Mandrake, Fedora, Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu.