I think Puppy or Damn Small Linux, maybe knoppix, i was on dial up at the time. Then I found that I could request a free Ubuntu install disk and the speed and cleanliness and compiz effects blew my mind. 04 or 06, can’t remember which. From there I think it was xubuntu, mint, arch, arch nvme died and I needed an os immediately so manjaro, got sick of manjaro and garuda sounded neat so i tried it and that’s where I am now on my main. Made a mess toying with wayland and am ready to reinstall, probably back to arch or try out nixos

edit: reading through all these comments is bringing back so many memories of other distros I played with back then.