What was the first distro you used

Raspbian

it came pre installed on a raspberry pi computer i purchase

it did not know it was gnu/linux at the time or even "linux"

Fedora Core.

My first distro was Ubuntu.
After a while, someone mentioned RMS on the forums, so I listened to one of his lectures.
Later on, I waddled over to Trisquel.

Crunchbang, loved it.
I wasn't even aware of free software and privacy issues at that time.
After a while, I found a superthread about security that led me there eventually.
Here it is, if curious:
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=24722

Previously I tried Ubuntu (I hated the Unity UI) and Debian, but very superficially.
I can't say I was hooked.

It installed Red Hat 9 in 2003... but I almost did not use it. Same thing for Mandrake 10.1 after it. I really made GNU/Linux my main system in 2005 when I installed Gentoo. I used it for about two years. I then tried several 100% free GNU/Linux distributions (here only listing those that stayed on my disk several months, I am not sure of the order): Gobuntu (defunct), BLAG (almost defunct), gNewSense and Trisquel (that I have been using as my only system for 5 or 6 years).

I am not sure of any of the dates above. There is a one-year margin error. :-)

First serious was Gentoo. Around 2000/2001. Dont remember if I tested anything before that.

The first distro I tried was Arch. It was waaay too complicated and ruined the idea of GNU/Linux for me for a long time. Then I tried Ubuntu and it was a little bit easier. I went back to Arch for a long time after I learned a little more about how to get everything working. Then I used Manjaro because it gave me the simplicity of Arch without the nasty installation routine.

After that I really became concerned with using libre software rather than just "open source" so I switched to Parabola. I still have Parabola installed on a netbook I use as a photo server, it's great. I ultimately switched to Trisquel as my distribution of choice because my fiance likes to use my computer and Parabola was much too complicated for her to use. She wanted something that would "just work" and Trisquel does a good job of that for the most part. Now if only I could get her to use Trisquel rather than Linux Mint on her laptop...

Ubuntu two years ago. Didn't like it much. After two days I removed it and installed Mint and boy oh boy did I fall in love with GNU. But back then I didn't know it - I thought it was linux..

Knoppix was my first GNU/Linux OS.

I first started using GNU/Linux about twelve or thirteen years ago. One of my cousins was using it a lot then, and one day when I was over his house I saw it on his computer. I forget what Distro he was running, but I remember that I thought the coolest thing about it was how you accessed the menu.

Instead of having a start button like Windows, you just right clicked on the desktop and it popped up under the cursor. Thinking back on it, this sounds like such a silly feature to get so excited about. Anyway, he ended up burning a copy of Knoppix for me because it too used OpenBox, and the rest, as they say, is history...

-Don

Acutally, now that I think about it. I am not sure if Knoppix used OpenBox back then. I do recall it being a dark themed OS, though. The important bit is that I know that is the one he gave me. I might even have the CD in some box around here.

I started to get serious with GNU/LINUX about three years ago, When I substitute my old laptop win95 with Trisquel 5.0.

Due to my personal and current dislike, and knowledge of our current trisquel version using systemd, I moved to the libre Debian 7.5.using only sysvinit as default only.

It is all cool with me, if you disagree with me.

Not saying trisquel is bad but in my opinion systemd is nasty.

I'm I using trisquel in any of my PC's? the answer is NO! BLAME IT ON systemd!!!

But, I will not sale or trade the freedom, that I learn to understand and live with while using Trisquel 5.0 in my humble beginnings. I got wiser and smarter!

This is just my opinion.

systemd. meh..

wattOS (wattOS R4 has the best default Isolinux and desktop wallpaper out of any OS, past and present, and possibly even the future)

Windows XP XP XP

Mandrake 7.1, I think. A long time ago...

* Slackware
and not installed but at the same time
* Knoppix

Started with Mint, but didn't like it. Loved Ubuntu though. Then hopped to Trisquel, which is where I still am.

Horrified with Windows 8 and willing to try something new, I decided to give 'Linux' a go. After some research, I settled on Debian (which to this day is my favourite distro), installed it, and used it with GNOME Shell for some time. Very quickly I became a distrohopping addict, which consumed the vast majority of my time and interfered with the normal functioning of my life (relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/456). In the space of a few months I had worked my way through BLAG, PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, LibertyBSD, Fedora, and Arch. Unimpressed by what I saw, I returned to Debian for a while. I then switched to Trisquel after the FSF radicalised me, which is about when I joined the Trisquel community. Trisquel was probably the single distro I used uninterrupted for the longest period of time before I went back to my first love, Debian (main).

My GNU adventure has come full circle.

Debian Woody, tons of distros, now Trisquel, and sometimes OpenBSD .

I started with Ubuntu 10.04. Great distro, it was still made under the Ubuntu Manifesto, even with the problems we know that Ubuntu always had (kernel etc), but it was nice, very fast and capable of everything. I miss the sound that it played when booting up.

When I decided to move to a newer release decided to go with Linux Mint, since Ubuntu was becoming at that point something I didn't like. Ahhhh Maya, I still remember her name ^_^ It sure was nice, having a modern (at the time) distro, while retaining the same user experience Ubuntu 10.04 had given me originally.

After that I moved on to Trisquel 5.5 and later 6/7. It was all about freedom, something that I felt was lacking back then. I loved how it was tightly integrated with the community (the forum updates appearing every time I booted up the PC) and the fact that I was getting the Ubuntu experience with a free distro.

After that Debian 7, Whezzy. It was a matter of using security and privacy, Trisquel was having some trouble at the time (updates were coming late, we had the google DNS "scandal") I felt I needed something more reliable. And apart from the fact that Debian 7 was slow (in my machine) and required a large amount of work to properly configure, I felt it was very stable and I knew that the software was secure (timely updates, older versions that had been tested to death, etc).

Along the way I have used: TAILS, Puppy Linux, Vector Linux, Damn Small Linux, and a number of non Linux OS (Kolibri, FreeDos, etc).

Right now I have been trying to decide what to do. I want newer versions of software and feel the need to "clean up" my PC doing a full install again, and have been trying to decide what to do... Debian 8 or Trisquel 7. I will more likely give it a go with Trisquel.

All the GNU/Linux and other Free OS'es i've used: Debian, Lubuntu, Ubuntu, ZorinOS, FreeDOS, Tiny Core, Many others

Wait...I've just realised my first distro was actually Mandriva - I was in 4th grade when my school started using it (and it had KDE3!)

The academic year after that the school moved to Ubuntu Jaunty, which they used for ages (Jaunty eventually got terribly long in the tooth - terribly long) until a few years ago before moving to Precise.

Debian 4

I started with Ubuntu. Then I researched open source for a school project, and found gnu.org. Once I understood the principles I tried BLAG, then stuck with Trisquel :)

BLAG is where I discovered anarchism.

1st Pc in summer 2013 (with no real previous experience what so ever internet pcs ect) squashed XP immediately and installed an orange called Ubuntu..for about 10 to 15 minutes till it froze.......lol

The 2nd was Toutatis 6 ..but i could not figure it out,it seemed bare,the 3rd was gNewSense 2 (15 minutes install!!)and i loved it,was unfortunately obsolete,but remember upon first install i could not get in,i didn't know that one had to press Enter on the keyboard to get in after the password...found that out on 3rd installation.

Afterwards i whent into a distro hopping frenzy to explore and learn what were these mysterious Gnomes,XFCEs & LXDEs..i really liked Gnome 2.3.settled a bit with a Debian & Xubuntu

BLAG 140000 was decisive then BLAG 160000,Freedora 19/20
(Fedora with Libre Kernel from the FSFLA) , GdNewHat & the latest 200000 BLAG Alpha.
Fedora based is too hard for my low knowledge & experience.

As of today gNewSense Alpha Ucclia runs like a charm + stable on my old box with Gnome in fallback mode is very much like Gnome 2.3 & XFCE as other Environment
Voila!

I tried ubuntu for some weeks, after I used parrot os (<3) for a year and last summer i tried arch(then became parabola), trisquel, devuan (<3), and hundreds of distros. Now I use parabola (<3 <3) and openbsd (in a vm) and I'm trying to compile lfs

gNewSense. I was trying to improve my privacy, reading a lot of forums, and unsurprisingly i somehow found myself in GNU's website. ...and there was light

Ubuntu GNOME

My first distro was Ubuntu 9.10!

From there I moved around some Debian based distros (Mint, Crunchbang, Bodhi, etc) and tried my hand at other distros such as Arch, openSUSE, Slackware, and Fedora. I wasn't very happy with any of them (except Slack). So I finally tried Gentoo and really enjoyed it.

After using Gentoo for quite some time I started learning more about Free Software. Gentoo has some nice features that allow you to only install Free Software, however, their deblobbing method for acquiring the Linux-libre kernel was rather annoying and took forever. Thus, I switched to Trisquel.

Well, the first distro I installed was Xubuntu, the computer I used (and I still have it) was a sh*t.
Then changed to Ubuntu.
And now I´m using Trisquel.
There´s should be a book call "The huge Debian family", I like debian distros only because of APT and dpkg.

The first GNU+Linux distribution I tried was Ubuntu 10-and-something, with a fierce battle to get my desktop computer wired connection to work, which forced me to install some might-be proprietary/non-free module. In the same year (2009), before my debut using GNU+Linux, I met a friend at high school which, despite his early age (15 years old, the same age as me at that time), thought almost everything that I know about our philosophical movement. This friend of mine did warn me that he wouldn't help on installing Ubuntu, or any other non-free functional data, but I didn't understand what he was saying at the time because I thought that every GNU+Linux was the same, and so I faced that fierce battle on my own, under the watchful eyes of Big Mother, who treated me saying that if I didn't get our Internet connection to work on our desktop computer (the only one at that time), she wouldn't allow me to use the computer for some time. And so I happened to learn that, at that time, I had to reboot the system in order for a kernel module to work properly, minutes after I would give up on every command line attempt and Big Mother would finally call a technician to install Windows.

My friend helped me on using LibreOffice, and many other free (as in freedom) software.

I and my friend nearly completed high school together, but around 2011, he had to travel and start living on São Paulo. And since I didn't have email, nor a cellphone at that time, I lost contact with him.

Just after my friend's departure, after a distribution upgrade, my computer almost made me flood the house on crying waters as my eyes focused on an initramfs error, which forced me to use Big Mother's newly bought notebook to search for a solution or to a workaround.

Then I decided to manually install the upgraded version, which I did successfully.

All fine, until I read a magazine article about the open source software called Revista Espirito Livre (in Brazilian Portuguese: "free spirit magazine", note that the title is somehow misleading, and still today, they recommend non-free functional data and many services as software substitutes). The article mentioned "the freest distribution" (sic author of the article) called Debian. And so I went ahead to try Debian, and it really stood as my favorite until 2013.

During my migration to Debian, I found out the Definition of Free Cultural Works (the so called "free culture"), and that was the definition of freedom that I carried with me until June 2014. However, this definition almost led me to depression, and perhaps this definition is what made me so far away from my current friends. Because, every time I read it (and oh boy I have read it lots of times) it wasn't clear to me where I could make compromises. So at that time, I came to the conclusion that I would have to deny using/watching/reproducing non-free cultural works.

Until 2014, I have tried some free (as in freedom) GNU+Linux distributions (BLAG and gNewSense), but I always ended up going back to Debian.

In 2014, I switched to Trisquel, but still following the Definition of Cultural Works, until I started paying more attention the articles hosted at the GNU project's website, two of which were transcripts of presentations/talks given by Richard Stallman, where he discusses the moral dilemma of freedom 2 according to the free software philosophy, and also, at the very ending of the transcripts, he clarifies how the absence of the freedom to redistribute non-functional data non-commercially can impact society, and at the same time, explains why the free software philosophy doesn't consider the other freedoms to be mandatory for non-functional data (except when some functional data that uses that non-functional data is supposed to be distributed by a free operating system, according to the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines, where non-functional data must have at least the freedom to be redistributed commercially and non-commercially).

Nowadays, when someone shares a book, or some music, I don't deny the "gift", but I won't pass it forward, as I will discard it when I'm done using it, mainly because I understand that the person who gave me the "gift" is just trying to solve the moral dilemma he's facing. I find this similar to when I want to watch something different from my usual watching habits (government channels and programs from TV Câmara and TV Senado, which are shareable here in Brazil and, at least for TV Senado, has a live stream which can be watched directly from VLC without loading any non-free JavaScript; besides the usual shareable movies and series; and the public domain stuff, of course), where in this situations I try to find series, films and animations which are redistributed by people around the world).

Despite having that fierce battle back in 2009, I don't consider myself as an export, on anything whatsoever. I have some knowledge in multiple fields regarding computers, but I'm not the "definitive know-how guy" on any of them.

Besides, I plan to switch to GNU+Linux-libre GuixSD sometime. Perhaps I'll leave it alongside my beloved Trisquel. :D

I want to use GuixSD because, technically speaking, it solves lots of problems, and also tries to empower the user even more.

I have tried to install GuixSD, but I forgot to learn how to tell its copy of GRUB to recognize my existing Trisquel installation, and besides, I got a strange kernel panic right after leaving GRUB, then I tried to use my GuixSD live USB to change root the the problematic GuixSD installation, but upon doing so, I noticed that the process of using the installed system is somehow different from the others as I couldn't find most commands in the usual places, and so I still need to learn lots of things about GuixSD administration before I can effectively use it. This scenario forced me to use Big Mother's computer to create an initialization USB of Trisquel Netinstall (nothing big since I wanted it quick, just to replace GuixSD's copy of GRUB with Trisquel's copy of GRUB) to recover my Trisquel installation, which I did successfully. :D

Debian "Sarge" AKA Debian GNU/Linux 3.1

Still have the set of CD's that I purchased from Debian way back in 2004