The post by johnsfine above strikes a chord with me because Mepis was the first distro I successfully installed on my own, and the first distro I really used a lot for more than just feeling my way around Linux (although I'm still actually feeling my way around Linux, a lot of the time!). But after running Linspire, I tried a few Knoppix live disks before I found out about Mepis.

It was a long ago version of Red Hat... don't remember the exact version, though. This was way before they started releasing the enterprise vesion.

I tried Ubuntu for the first time in 2009 which I no longer use. Now, I use Fedora and Debian.

I believe it was Red Hat Linux 6.0 "Hedwig" back in 1999. Bought it with book included, at a brick-and-mortar software store. This was the pre-RHEL, pre-Fedora days.

My first distro was Yggdrasil (seem to be the only one so far), but the oldest physical disk I could still find laying around is attached.

--jeremy

Libranet.

Slackware in March 1994

Markus

My first ever installed version of linux was Turbolinux, around 1996-1997 then i did some real work installs with redhat 6 in 1999 and so on... now at home i use mint 15 x64 and Mageia. Two solid distros.

Slackware 10.0 (the last release that included Gnome), in late 2004.

Somebody gave me a disk with Ubuntu on it about 2007. I stayed with Ubuntu until Unity and then I moved to Linux Mint which I like very much. I am now running Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon which I think is brilliant :)

Slink! Installed with the help of a local wizard, 2 (3?) floppies and a 10 Mb/s ethernet from a pcmcia card.

Mine was RedHat version 7 purchased from a local newsagency. It would install but never worked. I tried others (Mandrake) after that and they would install but never worked properly. I then come across Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) and everything except the wireless worked out of the box. I researched the wireless issue and installed ndiswrapper and I've been using Linux ever since. Now on Debian but had a brief foray into Linux Mint.

OpenLinux from Caldera Systems, around November of 1999.

openSUSE 11.2! Sometime in late 2009 when it was fresh, so i'm quite a newbie compared to most of you guys. My Radeon worked only with VESA driver so moving application windows was painfully slow but i didn't care much then, it was whole new exciting experience.

My first operating system was Fedora 8. I actually started in with it because I forgot the admin password on my Windows XP laptop. I had to install something else after attempting to recover the windows sam file via forensic recovery, and failing. Fedora 8 was the OS of choice because it was readily available, and I've been a Linux fanatic ever since. :D