I remember being very interested in programming in middle/high school, but all the environments in our school computer lab had windows (this was in India), and I think at that time (maybe 2001-2003) I didn't even know there were other operating systems.

Our school was participating in something called International Cyber Olympiad, and of course I gave the eligibility exam.

They sent all students who passed a Knoppix Live CD to prepare for the actual competition. We did not have a PC at home until a couple of years later, but I used that CD in any PC I could find anywhere - the school computer lab, the school library computers, and my dad's office computers. It was my first experience with a Linux system (and I found it awesome). Also my first experience with gcc instead of borland c++.

Since then, a lot of Live Linux distros emerged, with various features offered; Debian got a much better installer; and then Knoppix dropped KDE Plasma as their desktop environment. All of that made me to move over to better "Live Linux" distros.

I remember there being a sliding puzzle game in the theme of assembling molecules. I remember this because I remember a very classic argument between two teenagers over "propene" being a typo of "propane" vs. being an actual chemical. If only they were sitting in front of a device that could help them find the answer.

Enter Knoppix and persisting any state I cared about on a thumb drive.

Of course, since RAM was so limited on devices, just installing packages and leaving the modifications taking up valuable RAM was inconvenient to do, so I went down a rabbit hole of customizing the image builds with various nonsense.

Useful dozens of other times before Ubuntu popularized live images just being a thing you supplied as table stakes, but that window of going down a customization rabbit hole and running a diskless laptop is what I remember.

I remember using this when it first came out. It was a game changer for doing forensics back before full disk encryption was a common thing.

Thank you Knoppix.

Either way I used it a good few times to rescue data and generally fiddle with all sort of pcs from this era. (late 90's to early 2000')

I'm pretty sure that if I manage to find that HDD, it will boot today.

Haven't used it in many years however, since most distro installers now boot a "live" linux so I just use that.

My first Knoppix CD may have actually come by way of the front cover of Linux Magazine.

I first thought there was something new about it

At the time it didn't have the overlayfs feature which often felt limiting since most directories were read only. Slax felt like a serious upgrade since you could install more packages after booting the CD.

I think Knoppix was the original live CD distro though?

It was certainly my Linux start. I'd been embarrassingly defying friends for years and sticking to Windows because I'm a creature of habit - thank god I jumped ship before Vista, when all my habits would have changed by force.

I think the 1-2 punch of Knoppix and Vista might be responsible for a significant portion of current Linux usage, at least in a Butterfly Effect way. People who were trying out Linux when Vista came had an easy escape hatch, and wouldn't have felt any urge to turn back until Windows had reverted to usable again.

Knoppix saved my bacon a couple of times, I remember using their live CD.

Knoppix was my first experience with Linux over 20 years ago; my brother-in-law introduced me to it and it was really neat. "My computer isn't just Windows!"

Now with major distros offering live sessions in their installer, you can just hop into Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch.

Lateron I think this was renamed to sidux, based on debian sid.

Been quite a while since I last used either though. Nowadays most linux distribution .iso files work - they may not be as adjusted as knoppix or kanotix but my use cases have changed. I mostly use manjaro these days, it works quite well as base system (I modify it anyway, so what I am using has only little parts of manjaro left, mostly just the linux kernel and glibc, rest I already compiled anew from source).