First was FreeBSD 4 (early 2000’s) and FreeBSD remains my go-to for server environments.
I dabbled with desktops, mostly Kubuntu, but EndeavourOS is where I finally felt at home and got serious about moving my desktop to Linux.
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I’ve gone thru so many distro’s it’s hard to determine which one was first. . . . . I think maybe ‘Mepis’ was one of the earliest that gave me the most stability, but I could have started with the earliest ubuntu? I don’t really remember. . . . my mind is gone. . . such a long time ago. I’ve gone thru about 25 different disto’s over the years. . . all the big one’s and alot of the up and coming smaller ones. My favorite distro now is EndeavourOS. It’s in a league by itself now.
Rich;)
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First Linux system I can call a success and useful for my home computer needs: Caldera OpenLinux 2.4 from 2000.
All-time favorite Linux: Mepis, or Simply Mepis, from 2003.
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It was the year of the Lord 1999…
Mandrake 6.0 with Gnome 1
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Slackware 1.2, circa 1995/1996.
I feel old now.
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I guess I tries SuSe Linux in the late 90es but not really remember anything. First “real” usage was Debian with KDE3 in 2004/05 smoewhat like this.
Now happy with Endeavour (KDE 2x and Gnome 1x) (and K/Ubuntu for my wife’s work computer)
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I vaguely remember Opensuse 10 and Knoppix from magazine installation CDs. Then Ubuntu lucid Lynx forward.
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My first ever contact with Linux was probably CentOS many years ago, which was on my mother’s work Compaq. I was a kid and I really liked the system font LOL. A few years after I remember installing Ubuntu 12.04 with inadequate USB internet adapter, near-zero knowledge, and absolutely no guidance. The internet wouldn’t work if I didn’t first boot into Windows then into Ubuntu. That installation didn’t last. 
As for my favorite, in theory it would be NixOS. Really like the idea of having an OS with declarative configs. But the language is rocket science to me and I have a long way to go before I even start learning Nix. I’m currently exploring “immutable” or atomic OSes and as a regular non-dev user I highly like the model so far. I can get behind Silverblue, but it has too many things I don’t need and I still need to layer many things on top of it, so I opted for Bluefin instead.
Conceptually I’d love if I can set up my own OS packages (mostly DE, minor terminal stuff, fingerprint drivers, power & performance utilities), “freeze” it and let it run, self-updating in Silverblue style. But that’s pretty much NixOS. 
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First taste of Linux was Redhat 5.0 in 1999. I istalled it from a cd. I booted it up, and the screen said, “Local host Login”. I had no idea what that meant. It took me 3 days before I found someone who told me to just enter root. I got as far as x windows, played around a bit, and went back to windows like a good little windows monkey. I ve since swore off winblows, and prefer EOS now as my daily driver.
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OpenLinux 2.1 here wow that was so long ago. Linux and I have certainly come along way since those days.
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first Distro: SuSE Linux 8.2 in 2003
current favorites: Fedora 40, Endeavour OS
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I’m with you buddy! Stand strong (“ohhhh my back”)!
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First that simply worked for me was Knoppix, either 1.4 or 1.6, circa 2000/2001. Stayed mainly on Windows 2000 though. Ubuntu 6.06 allowed me to switch permanently. Currently enjoying Endeavour best, of course!
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Thought to jump in and share my experience as well.
My first OS was Windows 98SE (emphasis on OS). I never knew about anything else because Linux was an alien system where I live (still mostly is). I stepped into the world of IT using that mentioned OS and stuck with it until Windows XP.
I used to be a CD collector (yeah … CD’s internet was 56kbps over a dial-up connection). Came across Red Hat Linux while I was browsing through a CD shop. Had no idea what it was bought it just because I was curious. Used my university T1 line to research about it and that was my first stepping stone to knowing what is Linux.
After a couple of days of reading, I installed it on my computer after whipping out my Windows XP and I was overwhelmed. Mostly because I had no idea how to work with it (Did not understand the terminal. I blame Windows for this one).
Got rid of it and just stuck with Windows XP (trust me I hated it but also liked it). Time went by, I started my career in IT and then found out Caninical was sending out Ubuntu CDs for free when requested. I requested 100 CDs just as a prank and lone be held they sent it to my country no questions asked.
One can say Ubuntu was the very first true Linux distro I used as a daily driver. If I had to write this back then Ubuntu would have been my no.1 choice. But Canonical ruined it for me by introducing Unity.
Tried Linux Mint for a while, but for some reason, I was unable to like it (and still am). Tried Debian it was too big for me at the time. So, I was left with nothing (knew about Arch but didn’t want to meddle with it). Went back to Windows.
My work mostly revolved around Windows based systems so I stayed away from Linux. Because I’ve gotten into my groove which includes using any system that just works for me and works with me.
Eventually, my natural curiosity got me back to searching for something good. I found MX Linux and I read that it is being created by the MEPIS people and the Antix community. I liked the idea of having a balanced distro. Installed it in VM and gave it a try and I liked it from the start. It is a rock-solid middle-of-the-bunch distro that I would recommend to any Linux newcomer.
Even though I liked MX Linux I didn’t want to make it my daily driver. Then I thought it was time to pull up my sleeves and start building the distro the way I wanted. That’s how I started learning about Arch Linux. While experimenting with Arch Linux I came across this beautiful creation.
Tested it for a while in a VM hosted on top of a Windows 10 computer. All my tests showed me this is a good base and stable enough to use it as my daily driver. I could have just installed Arch but I didn’t like the whole terminal-based setup thing.
After all my tests decided to install Endeavour on my system saying goodbye to Windows 10. And I became a contributor and a mod (I am a fallen angel 
). Now I use 
as my daily at home and I love to use VMs so it’s my main hosting computer.
But I don’t have a favorite Distro/OS. I am old enough to use whatever works for me and whatever makes my work easy. I use Windows at work because I’m a .net developer.
I use at home because it just works for me. It’s awesome when using VMs. I’m not a free software fanatic, I use anything that just makes my work easy.
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My first distro was Redhat 1.0 back in 1994. After that I became a distro whore, hopping from one distro to the next. I stopped when I came upon Manjaro, which I really liked… except that it took too long to get updates, even for a rolling distro. Then, while surfing the Net, I came upon EndeavourOS. I felt like I had finally arrived home. I LOVE this distro and have been using it for ever since. I don’t look back anymore.
Cheers mates
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My first attempted distro was Red Hat (around a dozen floppy disks as I recall). I couldn’t get it to install so I switched, probably went to Mandrake. I’ve tried several different distros over time. I would recommend Mint for beginners. My preferred distro is Manjaro w/ XFCE, but I do like EndeavourOS and am running it on a couple of dual-boot machines.
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Unity is back as an official flavor.
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When I was a broke high school student, an incident happened to the only modern Windows disc I had, an XP disc, so for a short time I used Linux Mint.
Then in college, I had to do a 5 week segment of Linux but we used the latest Ubuntu at the time. That was back when they transitioned from Gnome 2 to Unity, as our old PIII computers in the lab had a hard time supporting it, so I opted to put as much RAM in my laptop as I could at the time, and VM my projects.
Now I’m on EndeavourOS for my PC’s and Debian on my servers.
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TIL there is a unity8, that’s wayland compatible(I think), lomiri https://ubuntuunity.org/posts/ubuntu-unity-2404-released/
There were some fork projects of unity 8 which used the MIR display server, but they have all been abandon. I don’t know what the current developer plans for the future.