My first Linux experience was SuSE in 1999. A beautiful boxed set with a number of CDs accompanied by a very very good book.
I think it was on kernel 2.2 or 2.4 or something (can’t remember exactly)
I grew a bit bored with it because everything worked rock solid 
I still was looking for something to replace Windows 
A few years later, after some distrohopping (Gentoo, Vector, Slackware, Fedora CCRMA) I settled on Ubuntu 6.06
When 12.04 came around and demanded video hardware acceleration, I switched to Linux Mint 
, but some time later Ubuntu-MATE appeared (14.10) 
( I also used Arch on some very ancient pieces of hardware but since they dropped the i686 support I don’t have a usecase for it anymore. On those devices I use Porteus-MATE for the moment as replacement. )