At the time, I bought a boxed copy of 7.0 at Wal-Mart of all places. That was my first introduction to Linux. Mandrake was easy enough that I could fumble through and learned a ton in the process. Grateful for its existence and the fact that they had a retail version for someone without reliable Internet access at the time
@amoroso My first linux! Around 2001 it was the only thing that would run on my laptop with no issues.
I found out about linux in 2001 while using mIRC on Windows 98 and telling someone about all the crashes and BSOD I was getting. They recommended I try linux. Someone offered to burn Mandrake 8.0 cd’s and mail them to me. I used it for about 2 years before I first started distro hopping.
Definitely my first distro. My S3 graphic card was partially supported so I spent a lot of time tweaking X86Config in tty which for sure contributed to build my comfort in the terminal.
While I for sure tried many distros, my 20+ years path of daily drivers was quite straightforward
Mandrake SuSE Debian Arch (probably Server only?) Ubuntu NixOS
