what was the first linux distro you used

[kmathern]

I believe it was Mepis 2003.10, an October release.

I think that was the first Mepis version I tried too. I first read or heard about it in early 2004. It was the one I started getting an understanding about how things linux related worked. The Mepislovers forum that CBlue (Donna?) set up around that time also helped me learn a lot about linux.

[Siles]

The first distro I used was Coral Linux. It did nothing useful for me so I played around for a while and then dropped it. One day wandering through Barnes and Nobel I found a new book "Point and Click Linux" by Robin Miller (SimplyMepis). It even had a live bootable CD. So, I booted it a few times )and then installed it as a dual boot with Windows.

Pretty soon I found I was using it more and Windows less so I eventually deleted all the MS software and even continued for a while to write my Windows monthly column for User Groups on it. No MS tax.

Since then I have stayed with Mepis and then MX, I have a completely Updated MX 17.1 and my wife has MX 16. Never really seriously tried other distros as my needs were always met by Mepis. AND it JUST WORKS.

Siles

[Dieselrider]

My first time was Mepis 6. Windows was all I knew. We had purchased a computer from a acquaintance who turned out to be a shyster and had put pirated software on the system. We were unaware of this and didn't find out for a few years. The system was slowing down and I ran C cleaner on the system. It removed whatever bypass he had put on the system and I started getting pop ups from Windows. Apparently he had done this to several others and they too started having issues. Not feeling like buying something I figured we thought we had, I started looking for alternatives.

Found Mepis and had a heck of a time learning a new system but, I am so glad I stuck it out and that Warren and the folks on here were so patient. I have played with a coupe other distros (Puppy, DSL and Mint) but this distro just fits.

I remember the 1st computer we had was an old 8088 (IBM or Intel)? Had an 80 MB hard drive and everything was DOS.

[arjaybe]

I tried a few late last century, notably Red Hat and Debian. In 2001 I installed Libranet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libranet When that folded (RIP) I came to MEPIS in 2003. I always have a few different distros installed, but I'm always using this one.

[NGIB]

Started with Ubuntu in the mid-2000s and looked at just about everything. I've spent a lot of time with Buntu 16.04 (a heavily modified Lubuntu with XFCE), PCLinuxOS, Manjaro, and of course MX. Linux was just a hobby and a toy until Win 10 - then it became a necessity to find a distro that meets my and my families needs. I still dual boot with Win 7 as there are a few things I need Windows for (Turbotax is the biggie). Right now MX is my daily driver but I will continue to look at others...

[jbMacAZ]

My first linux was the Knopix liveCD back in the 2000's. I got it running well enough to discover Frozen Bubble but then set it aside. It wasn't until 3 years ago, that I installed Ubuntu 15, which lasted about 6 weeks until I upgraded to Mint. At the time I didn't realize that Mint was ubuntu 14 based! This time I was hooked (thanks Windows 8.1) Eventually, I got tired of stale packages, so ...

[j2mcgreg]

Started with Red Hat in 1996 but it wasn’t stable enough on my rig to be usable. Moved to Calera in 97-98 and it worked fairly well, but updates became few and far between and then non-existant. I then alternated between Mandrake and Suse between 1999 and 2006. Mid 2006 I switched to Ubuntu for about a year but back then something was always broken and then never fixed in the next release (or replaced with another ‘cutting edge’ application). In 2007 I switched to Mepis and I have been here ever since.

[k_sz]

• The very first GNU/Linux system i've seen was a Slackware circa 1995 in Sophia Antipolis (University of Sciences in Nice) ;
• the first i've used (mainly as a tool to recover data from Microsoft partitions, beside UBCD and CG's testdisk) was Knoppix in 2002 (my fist personal computer ^^) then its defunct french version (Kaella) that's the way i've discovered the delicious anxiety of messing with consoles & parted - booting from a CD was a kind of magic ! I remember people being afraid of a alleged disparition of their beloved M$ OS (me included, at first);
• the first i've installed was Ubuntu in 2005 (i was working in a theater and well... among other stuff, i was in charge of the easy technical maintenance which included OS (re)installation, the theater had no money to buy M$ licences so i had to look for Windows XP's best "unofficially modified" editions... I was fed up with installing this warez so i tried Linux propaganda there but no success, especially because of - loafers best argument - the "differences of ergonomy between OpenOffice's Calc & Writer and M$'s Excel & Word").

[LnoyBoy]

For me, it was SimplyMepis from the point&click linux book.

But I had crappy dial-up, and the debian repos were all messed up at the time, so I would wait hours for updates that broke my system.

It's a wonder I didn't give up on Linux.

Ubuntu would mail you free disks at that time, so I gave it a try. It was a completely different experience using the ubuntu repos.

I came back to Mepis when Warren switched to the unbuntu repos, and have been with Mepis/MX/Antix ever since.

[ian.d.brunton]

For a summer job in 1998 I had to learn to telnet into a Linux server and edit homepages with vim. I don't know what distro it was. I think it was shortly after that that I tried out Red Hat on my own computer. It wasn't very easy at that point (and I was young enough to be impatient about it). I think it was in 2009 that I tried Ubuntu, and that got me into Linux full-time ever since then, and I've distro-hopped several times (openSUSE, Debian, Arch, Gentoo, Slackware, and now MX).