I’m quite sure this post interests nobody, but…
My first contact with Linux was Red Hat 7.0. I didn’t understand it at all, but still was hooked, so when 7.2 was released, I upgraded and gradually started to understand and use Linux. 7.3 gave me some trouble (for example font anti-aliasing never did work), so I switched to Mandrake 8.2. 9.0 was released soon, and I used it for some time. Mandrake 9.2 was a disaster (buggiest Linux release I’ve ever encountered), so I re-installed 9.0 and started looking for alternatives (and I wanted to get rid of the so-called ‘dependency-hell’), finally deciding on Slackware. That venerable distribution was a real ‘Linux-high-school’ for me… I used Slackware from version 8.1 to 10.2, and even became a maintainer of some Slackware packages. Then a friend of mine introduced me to Gentoo, which I have been using since 2005 on all of my computers, be it a desktop, a laptop or a server.
Reason for sticking with Gentoo Linux? In one word: configurability :)
