Mid 90's. Company switched from 3.1 to 95 for the networking. Slackware claimed to run in 8 megs (which is what I had.) After much frustration trying to install, Patrick admitted that it took a bit more memory to install. Somehow ran across VectorLinux 5.9 (a SW derivative), dl'd and installed - wonderful! shortly 6.0 came out and it worked as well. Unfortunately my complicated spreadsheets weren't compatible and I had to keep 95 and 98 until I retired. Unfortunately, the lead for VL is stepping down and they are hoping someone will spearhead the project. I would install 7.2 except that nothing has happened or the past year. I want to quit W10 that resets half my preferences every time it "upgrades".

As best I recall, Linux came on a set of 3.5in floppy disks for the Amiga computer. The Motorola 6800 user base was a fairly small community and support consisted of a unix-news thread. I wanted a home version of a unix system because I was supporting BSD unix based hardware in the field for 'Floating Point'. The company was an early producer of massively multi-processor systems and math co-processors. When the company failed due to stock manipulation and lawsuits Texas Instruments bought the math co-processor designs and converted them from metal cabinets to microchips.

Switching to PCs and Win95 I couldn't help but eventually install dual boot. Slowly, over time I became disenchanted with Microsoft and Linux continually got better. From Fedora-4 on, it was Linux only. Somewhere around Fedora-14 their new versions seemed to take a turn for the worse. By the time Fedora-21 came out, I had 'had it'. I tried Debian but it seemed as if they were not keeping current with changes to major applications. I currently am using Mint with an xfce desktop. When my wife's Win 7 disk drive died, I introduced her to Linux by booting a live Mint dvd while we waited a week for her new drive to arrive. When it got here she wanted Linux Mint installed and she has never looked back. She will be 80 years old in January.

Technically, my first experience was with Corel Linux which came on a magazine cover CD. It booted right off the CD and I was marveled at that new concept. I was fascinated, confused and disappointed, all at the same time. The desktop area and the few applications in it were somewhat off-putting and the terminal reeked of witchcraft. But some gut feeling kept telling me I should keep interested in it. Hard to explain.

But that is irrelevant except for sticking with the theme of the thread. That first experience only lasted two days.

One year later, I really invested in Peanut Linux, a loosely Slackware-based distro maintained by an extremely helpful guy named Jay Klepacs who also played the guitar. He was incredibly selfless and Peanut was a great school for me. It was an odd distro with a very small community and that had the effect of being somewhat limiting, a little bit like a walled garden, but that distro was FUN. Easy to use and with many nice touches. It played a big part in my falling in love with Linux. It certainly had the best souped-up version of Midnight Commander one could possibly want. Those were the days. I even used Enlightenment with reiserfs. Gosh, I had no idea what I was doing.

SuSe 5.something.
Intruiged me. But after spending hours to get the sound card running, but only in simplex mode, and having even less luck with my printer and the legendary 3dfx-Vodoo VGA; I decided Linux was not fit for Desktop use (though I eventually did use Suse for re-purposing my old PC as router - real routers were shit-expensive back then).
I returned to Desktop Linux with Ubuntu 4.10, using it as my primary Desktop OS ever since.

What do you remember about your first Linux install?
 

First I'm amazed my sign-in from years ago still worked. I'd had hands on experience with Unix (Remember upgrading to SystemV). A friend at work had a single double-dense double-sided 3 1/2 disk (one) with a complete Unix like OS that would work and run on a PC. I was amazed at his story describing this OS and took off early to go home and try it. No sleep that night. Pissed-off wife. But I made it work. No GUI but got my e-mail from company bulletin board. Took some effort but it worked. Had an external AT&T modem and got it to dial out and connect. 300 baud. Internet and Red Hat came later after 3-disk set came out. Fun times.

I had a lot of Unix experience from college and work. Installing Slackware 10.0 in 2004 was the first time that I had a Unix-like system at home.

I already knew how to use it. It was all very familiar.

I remember a co-worker trying Linux in the mid-1990s and pronouncing it "not ready". By 2004, Linux was ready.
Ed

I was glad that basic necessities like water air space and OS still remain free for humanity.

It was 1994 and I installed an early version of Slackware which came on 63 floppy disks. It took me all night... but was worth it ! Never could take Windows seriously after that.

That was "back when the earth was new and dinosaurs roamed the earth"! (Oh, what, 1994-ish?)

I doubt this was my FIRST install, but sometime along the way I had a laptop that I wanted to dual boot Windows and Linux. I was having real problems getting the install to finish, so at one point I went to / and typed 'rm -rf *'. A few seconds in I realized I'd left the dos partition mounted!

ARGH! Yes, it was partially gone when I hit control C.

I sat there thinking. Hmm, why was I trying to dual boot anyway? Ah, yes, so I could play freecell. Hmm. Wonder if Freecell.exe works in Linux? YES! SCORE! No more need for booting Windows!

I've pretty much never bothered with Windows on any of my personal machines since. If forced to use Windows for work, that's their problem...

(Don't remember if it was Slackware or what. Yeah, back in the old days you had to know your hsync and so forth or you could literally fry your monitor!)

First installation was Linux Mint. Don’t remember the version though I want to say 4.0 It installed easily and everything worked automatically. But I didn’t feel I got my hands dirty enough so I wiped it out and installed Slackware 12.0 which was 32bit. It took a week to get network video and audio to work. Lot of ndis wrapper stuff but once running, it Cadillac’ed. KDE and over all OS worked out of box but the rest required some effort. I even got it to dual boot with lilo. Also not the most intuitive thing to do lol. Well not for me anyways. I eventually wanted a 64 bit so I went to Slam D 64. Worked completely right out of the box and had the 32 bit libraries with it. It still was a little bit of a pain for dual booting. But as Slackware went 64 and SlamD dropped out I went back to Slackware and been with ever since. i love Slackware but still miss SlamD.

The first version I ever used was an early version of Ubuntu, back in '06 I beleive it was.

I installed it to a virtual machine, and I had a somewhat intruseive ant that would borrow my computer. So prior to her showed up, I started the virtual machine and I prevented my ant to snook around in my files - as she wasn't able to figure it in fact was a virtual machine.

Then in 2015, my first installed distro on an actual physical machine was Linux Mint Debian x86.

Never got the desktop working...
 

My first Linux install was Red Hat 7.1, and I loved it - later that is when I bought a newer machine, but I never quite got it running on that P200MMX with 32MB RAM and Hercules Stingray 128 3D (a Voodoo Rush card - the first 3D accelerated card for home computers that could do both, regular 2D and 3D accelerated graphics in a window).

I mean, yes, I got it running just fine, but I never got it to boot into desktop properly. Even though it had this easy to use automatic configuration tool for X windows and it actually let me choose exactly the card I had, but I can only guess there was some issues with the drivers. I never used Linux properly with that machine, but it wasn't long before I bought a much better and newer PC (the P200MMX was bought in 97, almost five years earlier).
I was very excited about it though - for like a week I only had it running in 80x25 text mode, but still running screen and irssi, and sshd, so I could connect to it remotely. But since I couldn't do much with it (heck, I didn't even know how the system worked yet - I loved the shell, but couldn't do much with it) I quickly went back to, uh, Windows 95 and suffered with it until I got the new PC. After that I went completely Linux and never went back.

At least with a Voodoo-card you still had a separate 2D card to fall back to. I had a Voodoo Rush card, which had both, 2D and 3D acceleration at the same time on one card, and I never got Red Hat 7.1 to work with it, never got it to launch X and Gnome desktop on that PC. Was an interesting first experience though :D

I remember that I accidentally unplugged the usb drive in the wrong time, and watching with great horror the ubuntu 14.04 installer crashing, taking my computer with it.

I broke my first Ubuntu install twice on the first day.