I think this was my first (or among my first) Linux distributions, around 2000 or so. I did not had Internet access back then. I had some coding experience (mostly Basic; I was just learning C++). I made a dual installation with Windows. I don't really remember the details anymore, but I struggled with really using it, and after I played around with it (maybe it lead to some system freeze and then I did a cold restart), at some point it would not boot anymore. But also, I was not really learning anything about how it works, and did not really understand too much. I think I also tried Red Hat later but had similar experience.

Then some time later, I got Internet access, and I read about Gentoo, and the tutorial to install it from scratch was really well written and easy to follow, and that helped me really a lot in understanding how Linux really works, what components are involved in the whole system. I continued using that for many years. Whenever there was some problem, I was able to understand it and fix it.

Nowadays, I just want to use sth which is so widespread that it is very well supported, and I can expect that any problem can be found on the Internet with some solution, and sth where I just need to spend only a minimal amount of effort to keep it running and up-to-date, so I chose Ubuntu (already couple of years ago; not sure if my choice today would be the same, but for now I stick to it). So this is sth which basically just works. But I wonder, for a newcomer who really wants to understand how Linux works, I think I would rather recommend Gentoo or Arch Linux or so. I think I also prefer the rolling release concept (Arch, Gentoo) over the point release development model (Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, Slackware, etc).