Recollection is very foggy! First install was an early version of RedHat -- whatever was around in 1996; and I can't remember whether I installed it from floppies or CD, but I remember thinking that nothing was for free and buying the hardcopy manual complete with installation media (IIRC, from Microsoft!) Back in the '80s, I remembered discussing computers with an engineer Lt RN who said something along the lines that you didn't know anything about computing until you'd mastered UNIX or VMS and Linux was about as close as I was going to get even though GNU. Back to the install -- it went flawlessly and I got the shell prompt without issues but spent the next couple of weeks trying to get X working! Once I accepted that Open Source was for real, that you could get all the answers online usually quicker than you'd find them in an expensive book, and there were distros easier to use than that early version of RedHat, I got to try Mandrake, Corel Linux and a few distros I can't now remember in a space of a few months.

That time Linux distribution used to come with books. My first installation was Ubuntu. I had a general idea of how to install. So I did it.

Was using XP and used to it, and it was going out of support. A friend suggested Ubuntu I tried it and it worked but everything was hard going (to me ).
Later tried Mint and although Ubuntu at heart its fabulous. The best thing about Linux is that you the user make the decisions.

At the moment I am trying to sort out my Mother in Laws win10 PC that randomly disconnects from the wifi. So far I have found that it powers down the wifi dongle to save power, it also powers down the USB devices for the same reason (a double whammy) Win10 never asks if you want this "help" and I have not got to the bottom of it yet I would build her a Mint PC but at 90 I think she would struggle the change

Sometime in the 1990s, birthday present from MOH. Suse Linux 7.1 Professional KDE. Came on 24 CDs, with approximately 4000 applications! Installed on a home build Pentium MMX 200 MHz, 32 MB RAM, 32 MB HDD. Ran like a bandit after many hours searching (using Windows) for drivers and dependencies. Never did manage to get online - WinModem, so would never work and only dial-up available. Didn't have time to pursue, so ended up on the "Round Tuit" pile.

Now running OpenSuse Leap 15.1. Installed like a charm, all drivers automatically found

It was 1997 and I used Slackware which I got from the back of a book on Linux, the desktop was Fvwm I think I configured the heck out of it to configure it I had to write m4 macros, I've forgoten how to do m4 since, quiet fun, but I prefer something ready to roll now, I want it to work so I can get on programming, I configure like mad though

I remember fondly thanking the humanity for postponing the mass racket sale of basic amenities like air, water or sunlight.😁😁😁

Bought a magazine that had some floppies on it. No Joy (Yggdrasil). Many nights wasted trying to get some to run but a few did ,I wanted this but tried as live user, as I did not have courage to 'break' my working Windows machine
Then a magazine gave Knoppix Live Linux floppy, Ran on my old Windows machine without removing Windows. Joy. It was a wonderful feeling.
This was after using a BBC machine in 1982, (dial up ) then a fourth user hand me down Intel machine which ran Windows, then success with Knoppix in 2002. Then tried others; Ubuntu (I was not happy with this) then went to SUSE, it worked well, I have stayed with SUSE. openSUSE15.1 now, and Ubuntu and Mint and Debian. Some very old machines I have will only run Debian.
I now use Windows only for helping others, and run as my main system openSUSE 15.1 on a USB external hard drive on main machine and a spare [leaving Windows alone] and install Linux distros on other machines.
Very happy with Linux.

I hate microsoft. I have always hated microsoft. I hate Bill gates.

The reasons are they have been releasing buggy software, were slow on the fixes, and they are fully full of global surveillance sub-routines.

Everything that is chiseling away at tracking you, is busy ticking away under the hood.

Linux was the one true path OUT of the microsoft Crapware (tm me).

The early stuff was awful.

It was all that neck beard coding bullshit - where all the programs and part of the install had to be gotten from all sorts of sites all over the internet.

And you had to code to install, set up and make anything run.

Slowly by slowly, it's evolved into full operating systems AND all the necessary onboard gear to make it run.

AND thanks to me and my fighting like cats and dogs with these occassionally utter idiots, Linux now has the Alt-F2 - for the XKILL program killer, when the system is more or less intractably bogged down, AND Open Office and now Libreoffice, have font embedding - though it needs improvement, amongst many things.

Bugzilla, Libreoffice, Ubuntu etc., and their teams to life banning retards are still at it, proving that you don't have to be smart to develop software, only persistent.

I got a cd Suse 7.0? from an intern, it was I guess 1997.

Summer 2001, or possibly a few months earlier. I was very comfortable with DOS, and couldn't see the point of Windows other than that it was better supported. Someone gave my Dad an old magazine coverdisc with a copy of Red Hat 5.2, and I gave it a spin on his 220MHz Pentium.

The installer was much quicker than Win95's effort, then came a nice graphical desktop. Everything worked, fast. The scroll bars on applications reacted differently to different mouse buttons, adding to the feel that this was a mature OS that had been designed to be used. Digging around the menus I found I could switch window managers easily - Windowmaker impressed me most. Sadly Windows 95 was needed for work and the install didn't stay.

My first production install came the same summer: I built a PC around a second-hand base unit, bought "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Linux" and ordered a set of Mandrake 8.0 CDs. The user-friendly distro? First it wouldn't install, then it hung every time it accessed a CD, then the desktop experience made Windows look like the Rock of Gibralter. I'd have gone back to Red Hat there and then if I wasn't a poor student with a dial-up connection.

A month of great discoveries followed: One, a working alternate installer; two, Linux forums on the web were both helpful and active; three, how to get Mandy to boot to the command line; four, X with Blackbox was as fast and stable as the command line but prettier. By then I was well and truly hooked, and deleted the DOS partition soon after.

My first encounter with Linux was Zipslack8, it installed into a DOS partition, & was very DOS like, as it was command line only, but at least the programs did things that you wanted.

The next encounter was a full install of RedHat 4.2 & 5.0, quickly followed by Debian 2.1. The apt package manager was far superior, so I stuck with Debian, & have used Debian & Debian derivatives ever since, & from 1999 have only used Linux, & occasionally BSD.

I did not install my first Linux. A friend of mine installed it for me. To be exact, he installed it in his own machine and then transferred the disk over to the machine he was building for me. It was Red Hat 6, text mode only. He gave me a floppy to boot it with which didn't work as it had the wrong root device set (he had repartitioned the drive at some point). In addition, he had forgotten the root password!

If that had been Windows, nothing could have made it usable. However with the aid of a Knoppix CD supplied by the same friend, I was able to set a new root password and rdev the kernel on the floppy. Anyone remember rdev? The Red Hat installer Anaconda reidentified all my hardware (which was of course quite different from the hardware it had been installed on) and I was good to go. Later he installed X and fvwm for me. I never went online with that machine.

Later I bought a second-hand machine whose owner threw in an Ubuntu disc and I installed that myself. I don't recall any problems with it.

It was back in the Windows 3.1 days, I had just changed from DOS to Windows when I discovered Linux. I remember thinking, I just left DOS and this feels like going backwards, so for quite some time I was running both.

As time went by and Linux improved, my Windows sessions became less and less, until I finally dumped Windows completely. I still have a box running Windows, but it only gets booted to help someone else sort out a Windows problem.

I have managed to convert my partner Valerie to Linux, having a harder time with the kids.

Lots and lots of floppy disks.

Can't remember the year, too long ago. But do remember it was Red Hat and I was very impressed. Red Hat 5 I think, might have been an earlier version. It installed without a hitch, even the modem worked. Thia was during Windows 3.1 and early 95 maybe. After a few fores into other OS's I have stayed with Linux ever since.