The first Linux distribution I used with any level of success was Red Hat 5.2, which was before Red Hat became RHEL, and Fedora was a hat worn by Marc Ewing in his college computer lab. By the time Red Hat had become Fedora , I had already departed the land of RPM and found myself happily using the APT based Ubuntu. I found Ubuntu exponentially easier, more user friendly. On top of that, Ubuntu had more apps to choose from. Since then, I've primarily used only Ubuntu based distributions
