I started in the middle and have ultimately landed on the right. Most distros weren’t around when I started. Slackware on floppies in '92, Gentoo and many others along the (gasp!) decades) including all the major players - roll your own or otherwise.
About 8 years ago I tried out Mint as a Daily driver. After years and years of countless tinkering and compiling and swapping distros, I just wanted something to get rid of Windows. It did well and it stuck. About a year later, I didn’t even have a Windows partition. I tried a few other distros like it, but Linux Mint “got me” and their stance on things is refreshing (looking at you Snaps & Canonical). I still mess around with other distros now and then, but the fact that my machine(s) have like 5 9’s of uptime (reboots for new kernels not withstanding) for nearly a decade feels so good. I also use it as a base for all of my servers. It’s rock solid, has everything I want, and really minor overhead to have everything convenient in the gui. Yes, I’ve been a sysadmin, etc. Don’t care. :)
I started in the middle and have ultimately landed on the right. Most distros weren’t around when I started. Slackware on floppies in '92, Gentoo and many others along the (gasp!) decades) including all the major players - roll your own or otherwise.
About 8 years ago I tried out Mint as a Daily driver. After years and years of countless tinkering and compiling and swapping distros, I just wanted something to get rid of Windows. It did well and it stuck. About a year later, I didn’t even have a Windows partition. I tried a few other distros like it, but Linux Mint “got me” and their stance on things is refreshing (looking at you Snaps & Canonical). I still mess around with other distros now and then, but the fact that my machine(s) have like 5 9’s of uptime (reboots for new kernels not withstanding) for nearly a decade feels so good. I also use it as a base for all of my servers. It’s rock solid, has everything I want, and really minor overhead to have everything convenient in the gui. Yes, I’ve been a sysadmin, etc. Don’t care. :)