Mine was Fedora 7, running GNOME 2 as the default desktop environment, with the classic Fedora look before the modern redesigns, and it used YUM as the primary package manager on top of RPM, which at the time felt both powerful and occasionally slow depending on mirror response and dependency resolution; installation was done through Anaconda installer, and getting a fully working system often meant manually dealing with NVIDIA/ATI drivers, multimedia codecs, and tweaking repositories like Livna or Freshrpms just to get basic desktop usability, but that process is exactly what made it memorable because you weren’t just consuming a system—you were assembling it piece by piece, learning how RPM dependencies, kernel modules, and system services actually fit together under the hood, and that experience set the foundation for how I understand Linux today.
So, I started with Debian Linux (server). I had a forum that was racking up massive hosting bills back in ~ 1999/2000. My father was on my case because I was using funds from my salary with an IT company to keep the forums alive. It was hosted on Windows either IIS 4 or 5.
But in my search to bring hosting costs down. I had my first Linux distro experience. Moved from off Windows server to LAMP and then eventually replaced Apache with Litehttpd. Most importantly, it cut costs by more than 1/2!
On desktop, Mint briefly (excluding Linux servers at work with DEs, RHEL, openSUSE, etc). But I almost immediately jumped into Arch Linux and enjoyed the steep learning curve. So Arch always felt like my beginnings. So many times I would wipe and start over back then. Lol Sometimes 10+ times in one day.
Now after fully exploring many distros on server and desktop, I prefer Debian (and Debian based) in almost every scenario.
I considered merging this topic but it’s not quite a duplicate. And honestly, unless both topics are currently active its not a big deal. But for a similar discussion, also see: What was your first Linux experience?