What was the first ever distro you installed and used?

Slackware with some version of FVWM. Installed from a couple dozens floppies. (yes, I am that old :-( )

What made you choose your first distro diving into the world of Linux?

It is the only one available for download at the time as floppies.

Red Hat back in the 1990s. I had to buy it from a local stationary shop because being in a small, isolated country and the internet being in it’s infancy, it was all I could find. Came with a manual bigger than a phone book and cost about the equivalent to these days $200.

SLS

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System

I used to have to head into University to use the Sun Lab ( Sun Microsystems workstations ) to download all the floppy images. Took forever.

I would copy the X configuration from the Sun machines so that my 486 at home looked the same. For some reason, that made me feel like my PC was a “real” UNIX workstation.

I kept hearing mutahar (someordinarygamers) talk about virtual machines and eventually i managed to get a laptop so i tried making one and Ubuntu was my pick (cus he recommended it for noobs), i hardly knew anything ab linux then but i figured a vm would be the perfect chance to try it :) . Later on when i first decided i wanted to try rawdogging linux it was cus my friend had an old laptop he never used so i asked if i could have it and he didnt mind. The thing was so slow the start menu (the thing u open when u press the windows button) literally took minutes to open. So i eventually checked its specs and downloaded a few distros trying them out and settled on mx linux cus it seemed to tick the most amount of boxes for me :3 (also i got around downloading linux on my main device later on, been using fedora on it.)

Fedora 38, one year ago. I am on 39 now and had to do a reinstall. It has its problems, a lot of problems actually, but is still miles better than windows in my opinion

I’m fairly sure it was Scientific Linux because that was the distro used in the labs of my first programming course.

The first I tried was Ubuntu 10.10 but for reasons I don’t remember anymore I‘ve decided to rather install Linux Mint 10.

Used Mint for quit a while, then I had my distrohopping phase before finally setteling on plain Debian a couple of years back.

fedora 38 KDE Plasma. still using it today

Debian I think? Probably Debian Wheezy.

Ubuntu back in 2013 (I think?) to get the exclusive TF2 item. Good times! :D

Deepin since I heard good words about it.

It wasn’t good.

I used Ubuntu until PAE became required and then switched to either Puppy or DSL (tried them both, honestly don’t remember which I stuck with). Eventually got a new computer and used Fedora and Arch (btw) for years. I’ve recently switched to Debian on a machine I just don’t wanna be arsed with worrying about breaking.

Damn small Linux. Not really “installed” of course, but was fun to play around with.

I started with Pop!_OS, because it was pretty and I was told that it was made for programmers. I was overwhelmed with the options and couldn’t get Twitch to work properly (because of missing codecs), so I switched over to ZorinOS, which helped me to familiarize myself with Linux. Later I returned to Pop!_OS.

Someday I got fed up with the major version updates, so I switched to Manjaro and later to Arch btw.

Slackware. About 1994 or so.