My first install (successful!) was Caldera GNU/Linux.. 2.1, I think. Mandriva and others were not easy to install in my old Compaq Presario CDS 524, back in 1995 ;-) After some years, I adventured myself with Mandrake 8 and 10, SuSE 9 (used for a year), then Knoppix, Kurumin and Poseidon Linux (first based on Kurumin, then Ubuntu) and some *buntus for many years, GALPon MiniNo in older machines (2 years). I have experimented ("played around") more than 20 distros in order to see how easy they install, how did they manage hardware, packages, etc.
Nowadays, in more than 6 machines (personal + work), I use daily PCLinuxOS with total satisfaction.

more of a novelty for me than something I would actually accomplish day-to-day work on, but I kept plugging. First Suse in the early 2K's, then RedHat, then Mint. Now it's an OS that handles 80% of my daily life -- 92% if you count Android. I basically use a Win10 VM for two applications (Solidworks & TradeStation) and wish I still had Win7 for those. I think Apple going to BSD and the rise of Android helped a lot as it seemed like there was a disconnect with Websites & Linux (fonts, formatting & functions) early on.

That it didn't work...

I had heard about "Linux" but knew nothing about it when I saw, in a computer newsletter, that I could order a Ubuntu disc free of charge. This was in 2007.


I did order the disc and then installed the system onto an old, obsolete notebook (which didn't even have Wi-Fi).


I got the program installed all right but, even with the computer connected to "dial-up" (all that was available on that computer), I couldn't figure anything out and I finally just gave up.


The next year, 2008, I saw a similar article and I thought I'd try again. I ordered the disc (Ubuntu 8.04 'Hardy Heron') and it arrived but I didn't do anything with it.


A few weeks later, my wife's old computer (Windows XP) gave up the ghost and we decided to buy a new one for her.


At that point the stores were selling computers with Windows Vista installed. I had heard that Vista was "bad," but I thought, "How bad could it be?"


Well, we found out quickly! We had three printers - two of them a year old and one only a few months old. NONE of them would work with Windows Vista (at least at that time).


So I told my wife that I would order Windows XP discs from Amazon and I asked her if she would like for me to install the Ubuntu system so she would have something with which she could work.


She said yes, install Ubuntu. I did so and the same day I ordered the Windows XP discs.


Those discs arrived five days later and I asked her if she would like me to install it to her computer.


She replied (and these are her exact words), "Not on your life! This Linux is TERRIFIC!"


I returned (unopened) the Windows XP discs to Amazon (and ordered two Ubuntu books at the same time) and we've never looked back.


We are currently both using EndeavourOS which is the very best GNU/Linux distribution we have EVER used (and we have tried quite a few).


We are both very grateful for the existence of GNU/Linux computer operating systems.

It was Red Hat 5, around 1998.
Who remembers when the search was by "Archie" and "Veronica", and UseNet was where you found your interest group? Then there was the Mosaic browser!

I went the whole gamut - though forced to run a separate PC with various Windows. That one saw Windows versions from 3.1 through W7, constantly reinforcing my preference for the Linux box. The Windows PC was always the "hand-me-down" from Linux box upgrades.

I became a Linux load-up junkie! I became expert at multi-partition grub boot-ups in the days before scripts calling more scripts left us with modern grub.conf which must not be messed with. At any one time, I was perusing SuSe, Debian, Slackware, and several more, each in a partition. I even once built a blazing fast Gentoo, which took too large a fraction of my time and ability being a Gentoo builder instead of a user.

The main resource was the CDs that came with Linux magazines. Then came the king of Live CDs - Knoppix! around 2001.

So now we end up with Linux Mint (Mate desktop) on a regular modern PC and a Raspberry Pi (Raspian) on the side, with no regrets about leaving alone a system which thrived on "versions", none of which would remain compatible with the stuff produced by it's previous incarnations.

I acquired a learn linux book that had RedHat 5.1 on CD, this was late 90s. I remember what a pain in the butt it was to have to give yourself permission to do things like, use the printer. But it gave an old computer the power to use the internet. Might have been a text based experience, but that was ok. It is so much easier now.

My first Linux install was sometime in the Spring (northern hemisphere) of 1999, and it was Debian 2.1 "Slink" on a spare DEC server PC that a former employer had given me. The biggest thing that I can remember is that I couldn't get the blasted GUI desktop going. Command line worked, but I was definitely having video challenges. So, that was a very limited success, though technically my first install nonetheless.

My first real install success, was later that year, where on Christmas Day 1999, my father gifted to me a retail boxed copy of Red Hat Linux 6.1 "Cartman", complete with actual books that proved quite educational. Sometime in the week between Christmas and New Year's, I was able to get RHL 6.1 up & running on that DEC box, and yes, complete with the GNOME 1.0 desktop. [cue angelic singing] Alas, this was a dial-up modem era for me, and I couldn't get the software-based modem to work. But all else worked. Huzzah!

Joe

I'd been using a port of Red Hat on a Motorola 68060 computer, which had been installed for me. The xorg was slow, so I decided to build my own AMD desktop. The public library had a book on building your own computer and also Linux for Dummies, complete with a CD of Fedora Core 1. So I followed the instructions and everything worked. Then I went to the bookshop and bought my own copy of the book, complete with Fedora 3, updated, and that worked too.

I remember installing Slackware from oh so many floppies in 1993 or was it 1994?

I have been retired for about 20 years and my first installation occurred (at work) well before that, so it was quite a while ago. My son was then a teen-age computer whiz and he put me onto Slackware, which he said was the best distribution going. I didn't know what a distribution was but I took his advice. I think the software was available on disk at the time, but I'm not sure. I know that I bought a second hard disk for my pc in order to install it. If I remember right I found someone who was selling the disks for a dollar and that is where I started. Around that time people were encouraged to make their unused disks available to newbies and I did that a few times in the following years. I have been using Slackware exclusively since then, although I did try Red Hat (when it was free) and Debian just for fun. I remember poring over Matt Welsh's Running Linux, which was a great help in getting started. I wish Pat would release version 15.
Cheers, jwc

Slackware, CD tha came whith a magazine here in Italy I think '95 year. You had to compile the kernel and many aplications. I read a lot, learn a lot and got a lot of help of two friends, one ingenier and programmer, the other one junior system admin. It was fun.


It was A long time ago in galaxy far, far away

It was before Fedora Core started. I installed Red Hat 7.2 as a friend of mine told me to check it out.
I did and fiddled around with it for a couple of hours and didn't understand s**t.
I removed it but some months later, can't recall how many I returned to it and have since been checking Linux out, loving it more and more.
If was putting way more time into it I would be so much better at it and possibly having a job doing nothing but this.

I tried Ubuntu 14.04 for the first time in 2014. It worked well - eventually. Almost nothing worked right out of the box. It took LOTS and LOTS of work. And I had to reinstall a number of times.

I also tried Mint and soon gave up on it. Nothing works the way it does in Ubuntu and the Mint forums standard answer was "reinstall". I don't think so. If I wanted an unstable system I can't count on and I lose my files, I'd install Windows 8 or 10! Maybe they've gotten over it in the intervening five years, but people like that have a permanent personality disorder.

After all of that, my experiences installing Ubuntu 18.04 have been a pleasant surprise. There are a couple of bugs, mostly with video drivers, and those are serious. Do you really want to make people replace perfectly functional monitors and cables and video cards that had no trouble in Windows? Really? I think there are some people at Canonical sadly in need of getting over themselves... But everything else worked right out of the box. At work, Ubuntu even found, set up the driver and connected itself to the network printer!

My first Linux install didn't go well.

Must have been in the fall of 2000. I was learning to help my cousin with his web hosting company, which was using Red Hat.
My day job was doing development and data migration from a mainframe system to a multi-tiered environment that had Solaris as the back end, with Windows servers in the middle tier and serving Windows clients. The development tools I was using were Windows-based. I was telecommuting from Arizona to Northern California using my own laptop.

We decided to install Linux as dual-boot on my Dell Laptop. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts, we selected the option that reformatted the entire hard drive, wiping out the entire Windows installation. After a couple of days of panic, we managed to re-install Windows, and I had my client in California ship me copies of the software I needed to continue my work.

I didn't get back to trying a Linux desktop until about a year ago, after I retired, although I've been running the web hosting company, now running CentOS, since ~2002.

Putting Red Hat 5 on a generic thin client without an X-Windows manager and having it act as a remote terminal for a Sun SparcStation in a manufacturing facility. The glory days.