My first distro was Knoppix
The Red Hat account on LinkedIn asked what everyone's first Linux distro was and here's the longer version of my answer:
Mine was Knoppix.
The Novell years
Our school computers ran Windows, and everything about them was managed through a Novell network. You logged in through the Novell client, you got whatever policies the IT department pushed down, and the content filter decided what you were allowed to look at. Somewhere in that filter list, right next to the stuff you'd expect a school to block, was runescape.com (that he referred to as runnerscape).
The school had a real solid internet connection. My parents' house did not. If you wanted to actually get through a trip to Varrock without disconnecting halfway there, the school computer lab was the place to be. And much to my disappointment they eventually blocked it.
Knoppix was the answer according to a friend of mine on Yahoo Chat (we are still friends to this day). For anyone who missed that era, Knoppix was a live distro. You booted it from a CD or, in my case, a flash drive, and it ran a full desktop straight out of RAM without ever touching the hard drive. The Windows install never loaded. The Novell client never loaded. None of the policies ever ran, because the thing they were attached to wasn't running. All Knoppix needed was a network cable and DHCP, and the school had plenty of both.
So that was the attempt: plug in the flash drive, reboot, hit the key to pick a boot device, and wait for that KDE desktop to come up. Whether I ever got a clean run to Varrock out of it isn't really the point of this story, the point is what the attempt turned into. In trying to get around a blocklist, I'd stumbled onto a full Linux desktop, and I couldn't stop using it.
Sorry, Mr. Wile. I was determined to find my way around that content filter to get my Runescape fix. 😆
I wasn't thinking about it as "learning Linux" at the time. I was thinking about it as desperately trying to get around a blocklist. But it meant I spent a lot of hours in a terminal, in a file manager that wasn't Explorer, on a desktop that wasn't Windows, and it stopped feeling like The Matrix pretty quickly.
Trying various distros over the years
Once Knoppix got me over the hump, I started downloading other distros just to see what they were like. This was back when distros still shipped you a CD in the mail if you asked. I went through Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, a few of the "lightweight" ones that were popular at the time, and some I'd have to think hard to remember the names of.
What I figured out over that stretch was which distros I actually cared about versus which ones were just a different wallpaper. I liked the ones that got out of the way. I liked being able to see what was going on under the hood.
Where open source actually clicked
Around the same time, RuneScape led me to SCAR (tips fedora to Kaitnieks). If you weren't around for it, SCAR was a color-based automation tool, and the scripts were written in Pascal (I believe SCAR was written in Delphi). People wrote scripts for it and just posted them. Full source, on a forum, for anyone to download, read, and modify. I learned more about programming from reading other people's SCAR scripts than from any class I took in school. If something broke, you opened it up and fixed it yourself, tested it, and then posted the fix back.
This early automation helped me later in my career with tools like Selenium, Chef, Puppet, Port Scanners, and eventually running loads of bots and AI agents.
The other thing from that era was Yahoo booters. Jason Clauss wrote a great piece on those a few years back (Booted!) if you want the full history. The short version is that Yahoo Messenger had so many holes in it that people wrote little programs to knock other users offline, and just like with SCAR, the source for those got passed around freely. Reading through some of that code was a real education.
Both of those things were "open source" before I had the vocabulary for it. Then I skimmed through The Cathedral and the Bazaar at the library, and it put a name on what I'd been living. The idea that a loose crowd of people sharing code in the open could out-build a locked-down team wasn't a theory to me. I'd watched it happen on forums.
The years I didn't think about it
Then I went a long time without caring. I had a laptop and operating system that just worked, and I used it for day-to-day tasks and eventually my first software job. Linux was something I touched on servers and in containers, but not something I ran on a desktop. I didn't miss it on a laptop as my daily driver, or I didn't think I did.
What brought it back was Texas Linux Fest. I went kind of on a whim, and walking around a room full of people who were excited about running Linux on their actual laptops did something to me. Not the enterprise stuff. The hobbyist stuff. Window managers and dotfiles and weird little ARM boards. I came home and started wiping machines again to install various distros.
What I'm running now
Three favorites at the moment:
EndeavourOS with Hyprland. This is my daily driver desktop. EndeavourOS gives you Arch without the ceremony of installing Arch by hand, and Hyprland is the tiling compositor I've been happiest with. Once you get used to keyboard-driven window management it's hard to go back to dragging things around with a mouse.
Kali on a Pinebook Pro. Nothing fancy. Just the ARM build of Kali on a cheap little laptop. It's slow, it's plasticky, and I love it. It's the machine I grab when I want to poke at something without risking anything that matters.
Proxmox. Technically a distro, since it's Debian underneath, and it runs my whole home lab. Every VM and container I have lives on a Proxmox box. It's the closest thing I have to the feeling of booting Knoppix at school: a whole environment I control, that I can tear down and rebuild whenever I want.
That's it
I don't have a big point here. I just like Linux. It got me curious about a school blocklist, it taught me to read other people's code, it gave me a career, and twenty-some years later it still gives me something to tinker with on a Saturday.
Happy 35th Birthday, Linux!