Wouldn't subject anybody else to this order (Score 1)

Really dating myself:

1. Slackware - 75 or so floppy disks borrowed from the sysadmin at school and couldn't get X to work because of my Diamond SpeedStar Pro graphics card
2. RedHat Linux (no, that is not missing an "Enterprise") on recommendation from a friend after I upgraded to a machine with an ATi Rage card
3. Debian - moved to Japan and the version of PPP on my laptop wouldn't connect to my ISP, so bought a Japanese Linux Magazine I couldn't read for the Debian JP CD in the back. Connected fine, and no more dependency hell! Yay!
4. Gentoo - Enoch Linux had a version especially compiled for the AMD K6-2, but it morphed into Gentoo before I got back to Canada and broadband, so jumped into that. Brief forays into OpenBSD, Ark, Mepis and LibraNet during this time, but none of them stuck.
5. Fedora - Fedora was well supported at my new job and a new baby ended my time with Gentoo. Unfortunately, it was dog-slow on my laptop.
6. Arch - All the advantages of Gentoo, with none of the hassle. All of the advantages of Fedora, but booted in less than 10 minutes. Works great. Fast. Until...
7. Fedora - I switched jobs and had to give back my company-supplied ThinkPad. And made the big mistake of buying myself an HP. Nothing worked. Spent a month fighting with Arch, finally got it set up, and the HD ate itself. Didn't have the patience to do it again, so back to Fedora. It runs much faster than it did on the Lenovo laptop, but there are some definite issues with power management. Gave Mint Debian a try, too, but it worked about as well as Arch.

Next upgrade, I'll by a ThinkPad and probably go back to Arch.

Recently, if anybody asks (nobody does anymore), I push newbies towards Ubuntu. My wife uses it, and I actually really like Unity (ducks), but use tend to use KDE4 unless I'm on her machine. To be honest, I use Win7 most of the time now because then the fan doesn't deafen me and it'll wake back up after putting the thing to sleep. I'm getting use to it, but the UI is still a PITA compared to ones on Linux.
Mint might be a good starter, too, for the slightly more technically inclined. After that, depends on what they want: bleeding edge - Fedora, learn Linux - Gentoo until they get tired of compiling, then Arch.