Very succinct.
But there is an IQ factor. (@SgtAwesomesauce ) Like general mathematics, people fall off the higher later rung.
@zlynx nows. Though, when i had him on the line i was a few highballs deep. So my attention to detail might have been off a bit.
As a “Linux Veteran” of 16 yrs I beg to differ 
My first experience in Linux wasn’t actually all that good: it was Caldera Linux (back in 2000!) and I couldn’t get it to run on my AMD K6-2 with just 64MB of RAM. Even after adding another 128MB stick, it just wouldn’t boot the CDR. I may still have it though. The Caldera disk, not that K6-2 system Then in 2005 I had one too many BSOD from the Win98SE I ran, so I changed to Linux. Never looked back 
Started with RedHat8, then 9, then Suse then got frustrated by the ever present dependency hell that is rpm, so switched to Debian. Woody, IIRC. Ran Debian until 2015, when the old-old-old Stable distro I still had just couldn’t anymore. It was the last pre-systemd (note: all lower case!), which I studied and concluded it’s not Linux. So I switched to Funtoo, ran that for a while then found Devuan, essentially Debian Stable but all things systemd removed/ripped out. OpenRC, which I got to know in Funtoo, is a very usable init system and if it had gotten even a quarter of the development systemd received, it’d be far superior. But it wasn’t “invented” at RedHat 
Anyway, running Devuan for stability and Funtoo for “bleeding edge” stuff. I’d love to switch to Funtoo in full, but compile times are forever on my old hardware (pre-Zen AMD APU’s, mostly) so I’m hoping to obtain some Epyc-based system that’ll function as a build-server for all those massive packages like Mesa, LLVM, etc. May take a while, unfortunately 
Are you using Linux for work throughout any of this narrative? There’s such a big difference between people who are using Linux as a hobby or casually vs people who are using it to make a living. The latter will always get preferential treatment.
That’s OK. There’s enough Linux for everyone.
I started using Linux with RedHat 5 back in 1997 or 1998. Bought the CD at CompUSA.
Oh yeah check out this link! Index of /pub/redhat/linux/5.2/en/os/i386
My roommates and I used it on a Tyan dual CPU Pentium 166 (well it started as a single Pentium 166 and got upgraded), as a way to share the single modem we had. Remember diald? I remember diald. Heh. It was also the best way to burn CD-R discs that actually worked.
I’ve also used SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX and AIX. And Mac OS X. I never had a chance to use any SGI or NeXT hardware, sadly.
But there are a LOT of different ways to Unix and systemd takes the best of all of those and standardizes is. It is well worth learning the new way of doing things. And y’all know that the people who designed and adopted systemd are all long-term Unix and Linux experts. It isn’t some new untried idea out of nowhere. But anyway, there’s plenty of room for everyone to do their own thing.
Yeah, I first ran Gentoo when I got a Compaq laptop with an AMD64 CPU and 2 GiB RAM. It was a pretty nice machine I thought! It took me three days to get Gentoo with a KDE desktop running on it.
That laptop burned itself up sometime in 2008 I think. Seriously. It didn’t catch fire but I came back from a break and it was almost too hot to touch, and dead.
I’d been using it for work and then had no laptop. Work gave me an Apple Macbook Pro to use. It was pretty good. I left OS X on it and used a lot of virtual machines.
That was the end of Gentoo for me. Ever since I’ve been running RH 9, RH AS, then Fedora Core, then Fedora. I ran Debian on my Itanium systems for a while.
Now I’ve got a Ubuntu 20.04 LTS installed on my Ryzen 5950X system. That’s because when it was a 3900X there was an AMD BIOS bug with random number generation and I had to use Ubuntu 18.04 instead of Fedora, and it just kind of stuck. The server / NAS and the Dell XPS laptop are running Fedora.
Ah yes I too liked orange linux
It’s the only linux u krow
No you know orange linux deer edition
Linux kernel 5.10 was very solid lol… 5.11 is incremental so men. 5.12 doesn’t have ZFS yet so can’t use
Ohhh distributions
Arch Linux. Manjaro the only legit spin off I see of it. I don’t want to hear about gentoo or baby arch’s. Not one of its other spin offs was good. Lol inb4 distro wars arch edition ™
The last time I liked anything before that was Fedora 29. I’m so over point release with Linux. I got pretty fed up
Well that’s an easy question to answer.
Answer: The one I’m currently using.
A brief history of my Linux usage. I was Linux-curious in elementary school and when we got 512Kbit ADSL in 2002 (maybe it was 2001) I spent a whole day+some of the night downloading Redhat 7 on to a Compaq Presario AMD K6-2 machine with 8GB harddrive.
I immediately installed it and realised that I hadn’t any clues on how to use it or how to even play music or browse the internet. Plus this was the family computer so I had to promptly reinstall Windows 98. Reinstalling windows was something one had to to pretty often so it was no big deal.
Fast forward a couple of years and I dabbled with different distros. Junior year in high school (2004) I got introduced to SUSE Linux 8 or 9 (It was right before openSUSE) which I stuck with a little longer. I was a little older, more experienced and this time I had my dads computer to look up stuff on.
Familiarity with SUSE soon spun into trying different distros. I had used Lindows in an attempt to be the Linux prophet among my friends. Then a little bit of Knoppix-STD to try to be edgy and hack some wifi (I never succeeded). Then I started always packing a couple of live CDs namely ntpasswd for bypassing the domain login at school and Knoppix for troubleshooting people’s computers.
Throughout high school I was on SUSE or Debian 3 and then 4. I eventually tried Ubuntu and Kubuntu and still have some of my original free CDs of Ubuntu 6.06.
Then 7, 8 and 9. I distinctly remember Ubuntu 9 and Debian 6 being quite solid.
Currently I am running Ubuntu 20.04, Pop_OS! 20.04 and 20.10 and a couple of Debian 10 VMs.
The last versions I liked? Probably Pop OS 20.10 because it fixed some issues I had with my stock Ubuntu laptop (I assume it was the newer kernel).
I concur! 
Fedora 33, only 'cause Gnome 40 is driving me NUTs!
Seriously in what way does this new design facilitate workflow?
Now I have to wait for dash-to-dock to work again.
I think I liked Manjaro 16.10 i3 edition the best, it logged you in the desktop using only total 230Mb ram (if you didn’t use compositor) and ran soo smoothly.
Now I have arch linux with heavy customization with sway and I am on 400Mbram after loggin.
It’s horrible because I decided I will configure every tool I use and it generated so much work for me (so many wrappers and scripts I had to write). Why can’t I be happy with the defaults!
I’m currently enjoying Artix as my main driver, pretty happy so far. Though I have my eyes set on Gentoo, looking forward to messing around with it
Im only new to linux, last 6 months
I have tried Linux Mint20, which is very nice to look at
But recently I tried Ubuntu Budgie 21.04, I like it alot
Kubuntu 8.04 / Mint 5 KDE
I “formally” started my Linux career with Red Hat 6.0 which I basically bought on release (actually held off on a purchase until it released) which was 1999. That box still sits on a shelf here.
After the disappointment that was Gnome 2, and overexposure to “RPM hell” I started looking around for other distro’s. Ever since I first started using it (2002, if my Gentoo forum registration date is anything to go by) I’ve mostly been running Gentoo. The flexibility of the USE flag system, and the fact that all development libraries are just there without me having to dig through way too long a list of similar sounding packages makes it just so convenient to use.
Gentoo also doesn’t tend to make your decisions for you, as long as someone is willing to do the work things are available, regardless of commercial (dis)interest.
Moreover, due to being a compiled distro it can support some pretty exotic hardware configurations. I don’t think there are distros with better hardware support anywhere within the Linux world.
Over the years I’ve tried various distros, usually to try and avoid Gentoo’s compile times, but eventually I always end up back at Gentoo on any system that isn’t supposed to be “fire and forget”.
It may further amuse some people that, given my not-so-secret dislike for systemd, Debian’s sysv init has always been one of the big reasons for me to stay away from Debian.
I may not like systemd, but I liked Debian’s init implementation even less.
So since Gentoo is rolling release, I guess it’s the first, and last, “version” of Linux I liked 
Gentoo’s default init system is still OpenRC, Slackware also doesn’t use systemd as far as I know. A few of the lightweight distros also avoid it because of its bloat, and I imagine some avoid it because of its CVE track record.
Then there’s still all of the BSD world, most of which made it rather clear they have no interest whatsoever in systemd.
The main thing is that before systemd there was no “single init system to rule them all”, multiple distributions had been using OpenRC for a while already by that time, there also was Upstart, and at least a few more init-systems, and variations of init systems.
Systemd certainly unified the commercial distros, as far as init goes, so even if one would want to it’s rather hard to avoid if one want to work anywhere near Linux.
I imagine we have vastly differing opinions on what constitutes “forever”…
Mesa takes just under 30min on an Opteron 148, that doesn’t seem too bad for how often that needs building.
The big bloaters (like llvm, and rust) I tend to just avoid (on old hardware), either using the binary packages, or just not using them at all.
Huh, I thought BSD’s Did use systemd. News to me. Today I learn, Thanks!
Whatever the most recent Manjaro ARM version is is the last version of Linux I liked.
I expect to also like the next update, and probably the one after that.
The only BSD that I’ve heard of trying to integrate systemd is Debian. It isn’t super popular, but there is a version of Debian that uses the BSD kernel.
A big problem with that is that BSD either doesn’t have Linux features or implements them differently. So a lot of systemd functions involving cgroups and filesystem namespaces had to be stubbed out. I haven’t followed their efforts and don’t know how it went.
As far as I know Debian kFreeBSD still works with the SysV init script setup.