It was 2011/12, and it was Xubuntu.

I'd been dabbling in re-installing windows on hand-me-down laptops for a while.

My girlfriend had written her thesis on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
I thought this was a sweet desktop (gnome2 at the height of its development, with those beautiful humanity themes), and it had a torrent client built right into it!
I wanted to install the current version 11.10 (I had no clue about what LTS meant back then) and was utterly disappointed by the switch to Unity.
So I went to Xubuntu straight away ;)

I voted Ubuntu.

My First Distro
 

Hello,
My first distro was Slackware where the kernel was 0.9. I am not sure what version that would be.
Micah J. Kimbrough

Caldera Network Desktop in the late 1990's. Switched out to Debian after it folded into SCO

I think it was back in 1998 or 1999 when I decided to give Linux with SuSE Linux for my company a try. After bothering with configuration and YaST for a day, our first Linux server was online for the first time. Time was running fast and looking at the clock, I remembered having to pick up my son from the train station. I had to leave. The server connected to the network. Well, it's in the DMZ I thought, and Linux is safe; don't worry the word virus doesn't exist, my colleague said.

The next morning the bad surprise: twenty years ago, after only one night, our server got hacked! Well, it was not a virus, it was a root kit. Never heard that before. We stopped the project and left Linux whenever it played a role to those experts who did a better job.

It took me about 10 years to get back on Linux myself. Today I am a big fan of Linux (Ubuntu/Debian) and use it for all server or container projects and much more.

My First LInux
 

My first Linux was Red Hat 5.2 I liked it a lot

I tried Fedora Core the first time back around 2000 if I remember correctly, and struggled with drivers for my hardware, but loved the tinkering it needed to work correctly. Still use Fedora 30 Workstation today, and it is better than ever. Completely seamless for me, and the app selections are fantastic. I almost use it completely over Windoze today.

That'd be Ubuntu 9.04, IIRC in october 2009. Installed it as wubi, and a few months later I realized I had never used windows since. So I reformatted the hard drive, and installed only Ubuntu, and never looked back. Later on it was Crunchbang, and then Fedora xfce with Openbox.

^ Crunchbang was also mine for a long while; what remained to this day is a simple openbox environment. Openbox' manual tiling capabilities are unbeatable.

Absolutely. I loved #!. Openbox I still love...:cool:

My first distro was GNewSense. Back then I was just a humble Windoze user who had heard a friend mention something called, "Linux". I have no idea how; but, while looking into this, "Linux", thing I had heard of, I had discovered the 'gnu.org' website. It was a strange place that talked about a free operating system and there was a picture of a flying humanoid GNU and a penguin. I remember thinking, "wow!" "I can download this awesome operating system, for free?" "Where do I get it?"

Apparently it took some time before I finally stumbled upon a page with a list of operating systems for download. There was one called, "GNewSense (2.?)", and it had a neat logo of some kind of asian character(s) atop a tree or what not. After some time I eventually figured out how to get this, "live cd", to boot on my machine, and, after some more time, found out how to get past the login screen. For some reason or another it wasn't able to connect to the Internet through my wifi; so, I played around a bit and was absolutely enchanted by this new graphical environment. I was absolutely amazed; but, after that, due to no Internet connection and a limited set of programs, I gave up on it.

Later on, some one at a computer shop told me about, "Ubuntu", when I asked them about this mysterious, "Linux", thing. So I found Ubuntu (10.04 LTS), installed it, and managed to get Internet working on it somehow, even though the driver was buggy. Again, I was met with an AMAZING experience. The delightfully different artwork, logos, boot screens, desktop environment, sound effects were so awesome. Everything was new again and there was so much to learn and discover. At the time I was also teaching myself C programming and the wealth of new tools available to me, for that, was great. The Internet connections would cut out about every 5 minutes and then resume due to a buggy driver; but, ever since then, I've gradually stepped farther and farther away from Windoze.

It may seem silly; but, discovering what "Linux" was and now understanding what, "GNU", is, well, the whole thing was an amazing adventure. Absolutely wonderful. A big thnx to everyone who has contributed to the progression of free software.

Maybe it will be like that in the future if workers ever get collective autonomy over the companies they work for, or form their own. I could see a Walmart or Amazon employee leaving to become a worker/owner at a new company and being amazed. "We get treated like human beings here?" "Amazing." Politics and reality always manages to settle in with everyone else; but, c'est la vie.

Cheers.

My first distro was simply called "gParted", and that's all it was: a bootable CD that loaded just enough stuff to make gParted work. At the time, I had a Windows Vista computer, and wanted to dual-boot Windows XP. I searched for some guides on the web, and found one that gave instructions on how to edit partitions with gParted.

Of course, that was a distro I only used a few times, as it was obviously not meant for every day use. I later got into GNU/Linux distros "for real", as I slowly got tired of dealing with the bloat that makes up Windows Vista and Seven. (Windows 8 hadn't been released yet.) So I tried Ubuntu, and have continued using it ever since.

PS: I also have a computer that runs Arch:D. However, that was most definitely not my first distro.

Caldera.
And I have to say I enjoyed using it.

Fedora 1

My very first was a Red Hat but cannot remember the version.
Got on CD (not DVD) with a magazine (analogic modem was the best!)

Started with a copy of SUSE 6.0, it was a couple yrs old then, a hand-me-down