First used: TWM / TVWM
Then: FVWM
Then: Windowmaker
Then: Enlightenment (briefly)
Then: Gnome (briefly)
Then KDE (to this day)

I played around with a number of others, but never really used them much.

I like the one with the nice bush.

How did you think product reviews happened?

I mentioned that one because it’s been at it since way before the Internet and is now well known even beyond France for the extremely eclectic and high quality selection it plays. FIP originally stands for France Inter Paris, it was meant as a music only station with only very short interruptions with soothing voices for news and traffic. The women with those particular tones of voice became known as the fipettes, and got some kind of faceless celebrity as a result. It used to be a standard setting on every car radio before there were a bazillion ststions (and CDs, and streaming).

If you’re going that way, there’s also FIP.

First: Slackware (there were 2 or 3 distributions at the time… also so many floppies)
Next: Mandrake.
Next: Debian
Next: Ubuntu (and variants, didn’t like it, was brittle and messy)
Next: Gentoo (didn’t like it much when I did an update after three or four months idle, might be on me)
Next: Manjaro (self immolated at some point just because)
Next: OpenSuSE (soon switched to TumbleWeed, was rock solid, but didn’t like one of my new machines for some reason)
Next: Fedora (current, no issues, I’d still prefer a European system, but meh.)

I probably forgot a few, but that’s more or less the last thirty years. Unless there’s an issue, I see no reason to change. They all pretty much install the same thing anyway, and I want to use the machine, not configure it. The system ought to be as un-noticeable as possible IMO.

If their IA was so great, they would use it to curate the mess that is their app store…