My first was Slackware. I don't remember much other than following instructions really well and coming away with a working, albeit slow, OS. There was a joke video making the rounds back then of someone opening their laptop in a library or something and the Windows startup chime playing so slooooooooow. That was unfortunately my embarrassing experience, in a community college class, with the KDE startup chime. I didn't know anything about TWMs, the terminal, or anything else really and foolishly thought my secondhand, 90s Compaq Presario (?) laptop would run a full DE in the mid 00s.

Anyway I got Ubuntu running a while later, when the Beryl (Compiz) cube desktop videos were showing up everywhere, and it was much easier. Same time Live CDs got popular and you could test run the OS. Then did Debían for a while because I hated Unity and the end of Gnome 2. Riced out Arch with Xmonad after that, learning Emacs, Vim, TeX, Bash and so on along with the various coreutils. Arch(wiki) and some solid YouTubers got me finally learning to be a proper power user.

Now, servers aside, I've just got a Steam Deck and WSL. My next build, when/if prices get less stupid, will probably be Arch again unless I do the lazy thing and run with Bazzite or similar. I love Arch but I hate the occasional troubleshooting after I don't update for a while, even if I have gotten better at it.