Debian. I've been running it on my "daily driver" personal desktop/laptop since -97 (Debian 1.3).
Changing now would be major undertaking with no apparent upside, so I won't.
Vanilla GNOME without extensions is very challenging to use IMHO. It lacks serious Quality of Life features (well, it doesn't lack them, they've been purposefully removed).
It's so frustratingly close to being excellent, clean desktop - but then it takes some really strange decisions with basic usability (like panel, taskbar, windows without controls etc).
Luckily those are easy to fix with couple of extensions.
Downloaded Slackware at univ lab and split it on endless amount of floppy disks.
This was probably in ..-93 or 94? .. or thereabouts. I was in my early 20s.
Went home and had to come back 3 times, because one floppy was always corrupted.
Then I tried to compile kernel for 24 hours and it just kept failing. . struggled with it for a week or so and got it running - then formatted the disc and started over. Ah good times.
Started using Linux "for real" after Debian 1.3 was released in -97 (I think?). Haven't really stopped using it.
I guess the best analogy is a "virtual desktop" but for the terminal.
It's is a program which runs in a terminal and allows multiple other terminal programs to be run inside it.
Each program inside tmux gets its own "page" or "screen" and you can jump between them (next-screen, previous-screen etc).
So instead of having multiple terminal windows, you only have one and switch the screen/page inside it.
You can detech from the program and leave it running - so next time you log on to the server, you can re-attach to it and all your screens/sessions are still there.
Not super useful on your local machine - but when you have to connect to a remote server (or several) is really shines. Especially if you have to go through a jumphost. You can just connect to your jumphost, start tmux, then create a "screen" for each server you need to connect to - do your stuff and deattach. Next time, just re-attach and all your stuff is there.
Once, many moons ago, a group of devs at my old work got deny on internal zone-to-zone Firewall open request that they needed for integration between two internal systems, so they ended up making a script that e-mailed the info to a hotmail.com (SMTP was open) account and then wrote a script to login and screenscrape the mail info from hotmail back to the other server (https was open through surf proxy).
Debian. I've been running it on my "daily driver" personal desktop/laptop since -97 (Debian 1.3).
Changing now would be major undertaking with no apparent upside, so I won't.