First time I ever used Linux was probably back when my laptop's hard drive died. This poor thing had a 1.4Ghz single-core CPU and 512MB of RAM, although one of the slots had recently become faulty and it was limited to 256MB. This was my only computer, and I'm pretty sure it was 2009. Very poor time.

I had heard of a lightweight distro called Puppy Linux, which was supposed to work really well for low-end hardware (and it had persistent booting by default, which was a great plus for someone who had to live off a flash drive). Pretty neat stuff.

Got on another PC, threw it on with unetbootin and off I went. Went quite a long time on that setup before a friend gave me another hard drive. I then installed Crunchbang on the HDD and went from there.