Slackware back in '05 to '09 stopped for a whIle and i just got back Into it. Currently distro hopping the BSDs and fiddling with gentoo, and Guix, trying to set up A reproducible system that doesnt use systemd and offers good wine and vm support with an Openbsd firewall/router and nas setup.
Whoa, I used Slackware for basically that same time frame (IBM --- not Lenovo --- ThinkPad 600e, which was pretty ancient even at the time). Good stuff!
I'm far from OG, unless you count my dad's SUSE that I "used" as a child for a while. I fondly remember SuperTux. But I didn't really interact with the system much beyond starting games or a browser.
Later (about six years ago, I think) I started dual-booting Ubuntu as a side piece for productive stuff while gaming on Windows. Gradually tried gaming on Linux too, then made the jump to Linux (Ubuntu) exclusive late 2021.
Since a recent PC upgrade, I've used an additional disk to try Nobara and am happy with it so far. I've now got a spare disk and more time to try new distros, so I plan to explore the distroverse some more, but all in all I'd consider myself more of a newcomer or at best a resident than an OG.
Time to shoot the newbie. First used Ubuntu 20.04 in 2022. It was a necessity at the time on that shitty laptop and I had never used Linux before. Wouldn't go back to using that distro or laptop ever again since I have upgraded.
Debian 2.2 "Potato" on a stack of floppies. If one was corrupted, you had to reimage it, and hope the download was good or you'd be sitting and waiting for a while.