It must have been 2.0.x for me since I got a late start. We had Debian Hamm on the desktops at work at a new job, moving them upwards through new releases but not quickly. The first names I recall were Bo, on an older server, and Potato mostly because the latter was the first Debian system I maintained myself a few years later. I remember recompiling the 2.2.x into a custom package for local use for one project on quite ancient hardware.

Now I'm far enough away from all that I have no clue but checking uname shows 4.9.x on the nearest machine.

Bought it for 60 deutsche Marks, it came with 2.2.13 (I think). I'm still using suse but tumbleweed these days.

Kernel 1.2.1 with Kheops linux around 1995.
Kheops was a french version of slackware 2.2.
I also played with Altos 586 and Xenix.

First used SuSE 4.2 when it came out, a bundle of floppies at the time

Got this in the back of a book. Remember being pissed off coz when I upgraded to Red Hat 6.1, my printer stopped working coz the parallel printer port was no longer in the kernel but a separate module. It took me SIX HOURS to fix that printer.


I've hated printers ever since.



Good times. Learning to compile kernels. Yeah, haven't done that in a while. Slackware seems to come with it all.

Mine was SuSE 6.3 (kernel 2.2.13), IIRC. I loved YaST.

Earliest kernel that I can remember using was 2.0.32

Around the year 2000 is when I and a friend started installing RH to manage our Unix servers.
My company made us remove them and install Unix Work Station because they did not like Linux.

Mandrake for several years and then Lindows.

My first Linux had a 2.0.x kernel, either some Red Hat or already S.u.S.E. 6.0 (which I, at least, bought in a box which I probably still have somewhere).

I started with Mandrake 7.1 later 7.2, kernel 2.2 all the way to 2.6.
I did Mandriva and Mageia, Fedora, and some that dont exist anymore, like Caldera.
Now I am stuck on FreeBSD 11.

Yggdrasil linux for me, kernel 0.99. I then moved to Slackware 2.2.0.1 and I'm still running Slackware today. Also Linux Mint, Raspbian, and occasionally some other flavor in a VM. But my "main machine" runs Slackware 14.2.

I came across and began using Linux when I bought the book Red Hat 5 which contained a CD (or 2?). The exact kernel was 2.0.29.
I have used Linux in various flavours on various computers ever since.

My first install and build was in 1994 using a Slackware distro and kernel .76 or thereabouts. I moved up quickly to the full slack disc set with kernel 1.0.x, though.

Who can remember back that far! I tossed all the media long ago.
But I remember a Red Hat cd set, all CL.
And I believe my first was a 14(?) cd Slackware install downloaded over dial-up (never forget that), wondering if I would lose the connection and tying up the phone line over night for hours.