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 Lighttpd. 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?
I believe my first distro was Ubuntu 12.04. This was at an age where I just started tinkering with computers, and I desperately wanted to make my laptop faster. This led me onto the Internet, which of course suggested to try out Linux. I remember being in awe of the graphical interface of Ubuntu. I think I mainly used it for document writing and playing Minecraft back then
Xandros which I bought the CD off of Distrowatch and dual booted with Windows XP.
I had no clue. You had to download and install tarballs for software and I tried to mix .deb and .rpm files. I got a few extracted but the updates were also tarballs and I was never able to get them to work. LILO the boot-loader at the time kept disappearing and I had to keep reinstalling both Xandros and XP so I gave up. My second try was Zorn 5.2 at which I was successful enough to move from Windoze to Linux.
I remember going in Barnes and Nobles and looking at a PC Magazine and it had a CD of Ubuntu in the pages you could cut out and install. That was a long time ago. I wasn’t brave enough to try Linux yet then. It would have been around 2005.
Ubuntu’s free CD distribution (ShipIt) began in 2005 and Canonical also mailed Ubuntu 4.10 CDs; magazines and cover CDs commonly included Ubuntu around 2005–2010. The inaugural Ubuntu release (Ubuntu 4.10) was on 20 October 2004, and Canonical’s ShipIt program (free CD mailings and many magazine giveaways) started in 2005 and was phased out in 2011.
Ubuntu here.Not sure if I started with Breezy and went to Dapper but I know I joined the old Ubuntu Forums in 2007. Admittedly I didn’t start using Ubuntu full time until Lucid.
Like I said in another thread I fiddled with a few other distros but have never used anything other than Ubuntu as a daily driver.
It was much more efficient than Apache 2.2 especially when using PHP. But once Nginx came out, that was even faster! So switched to Nginx and still use and support mostly Nginx today, along with Apache 2.4.
Apache 2.4 with mpm_event and even mpm_worker is very fast. But was not available during those years.
