Linux

i probably first got started with linux back when i was around 12 or 13. would make a bunch of usb flash drives and install a new distro every week or two

longest i'd go with one distro was like a month and then i'd make some stupid move and break my system and re-install again.

after a while i went back to windows and then in my early 20s i went back to linux. used arch linux for a bit but then tried fedora and have been using fedora for years

right now my main OS is macos because I have apple silicon but as soon as asahi is more mature i'm gonna switch over back to linux. i do have windows & fedora installation through parallels

Kernel panic after installing Redhat 6, not RHEL, in the late 90s or early 2000s. Later tried 7 and has been using Linux since.

Around '08 or '09 I found Hak5 and was live booting backtrack on my macbook to play with the tools. Was really out of my depth, but hey, it's easy to get stuff done when you run everything as root ;)

I got a Karmic Koala (ubuntu 09.10) CD from my friend kn my high school days, I install it on my Pentium 4 PC then freaked out because there are no codec and I can't install it because I have no Internet at all, lol. Going back to windows until I have Laptop on my second year of uni. I still needs to use my uni's wifi to install any apps, but it is workable and I use Linux almost exclusively since then. (sometimes dual boot-ing if there are Lecture that needs me to use windows.)

Slackware 1998. I spent 6 months in a text only freebsd install in 1999. Because of a dram issue I wasn't able to run windows without blue screens. Text based internet wasn't that bad in 1999. I could load up xwindows if I wanted to see a picture but rarely did. Talking on irc somebody mentioned memtest and my memory had a very long warranty so I took it back to the store. Then I spent the next several years addicted to quake/quake2

When I was 16 I was working at a grocery store and another worker around my age talked me into trying it out. I had heard of it from a high school class I had taken, so I figured I'd give it a try. I called him on the phone and he talked me through installing Ubuntu Dapper Drake on my laptop. The biggest issue back then was getting the WiFi to work, which required ndiswrapper to used the Windows drivers. We eventually got it working and then played Tremulous together.

I dual booted for a while, occasionally got angry at Windows and nuked the partition to go fully Linux. Occasionally got angry at Linux and nuked the partition to go fully Windows. Eventually settled fully on Linux. I did have a separate drive with Windows installed in my desktop at one point to play around with VR, but I'm not much of a gamer so the only time I use Windows now is in a VM if I need to interface with some device that only provides Windows drivers. Pretty rare at this point.

Ubantu in 2007 ish. Games didn't work.

Started dabbling in Linux some 15+ years ago, dualbooting with windows XP. Tried bunch of different distros - suse, Slackware, RedHat (pre-enterprise) etc. Didn't really understand it and kept going back to windows. A classmate had told me Gentoo was good for learning Linux. So once I was trying to shrink my windows partition to make space for another dualboot experiment, and in the process borked my partitions. They were probably recoverable, but I got furious, ragequit windows and installed gentoo on the whole disk and used it as my daily. That helped me learn.

Knoppix in 2nd year at Uni. It made me more productive because there were few distractions from programming. So zen.

Can't remember why I looked into it but my very first experience was using Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04.4) on VirtualBox. At some point I also used Wubi to install either that one or one or two versions later on a desktop PC. Honestly I didn't really "get it", it was difficult to do anything (tar.gz files utterly defeated me), I really didn't understand the concept of the apt package manager. I was curious but ultimately didn't really know why anyone would bother using it.

A few years later I installed one of the versions of Ubuntu when they moved to the Unity DE (again on Virtualbox). I remember really liking it (only later found out how controversial it was) but yet again didn't really understand why I would want to use it instead of Windows.

It wasn't until around maybe 2018 or 2019 that I installed Linux Mint on a spare SSD in my computer and actually began using it. However yet again I still didn't have a reason to use it - that was until I got involved with an open source project and trying to set up a dev environment on Windows completely melted my melon. The instructions to get the dev environment going on Linux looked so much easier, and it was. I've barely looked back since.

1993 or so with some Slackware CDs, i bought, because I had no internet back then. Took ages to compile, and never got past the black x on the checkered background when I tried to startx. Console worked nicely though and I loved the bash (?) experience with command history and all that. However, no games, very little software, and I didn't program back than. It took quite some time to be able to use those things productively as a user.

MKLinux on my PowerPC Macintosh when I was ~14. Read about it online. Got my mom to take me to the book store to look for a book on Linux. They had none. Booted to a command prompt and had zero idea what to do. Didn't run it again until (many) years later.

It was redhat around 2001. I burned 3 discs for the install. I was installing on an old computer that was struggling to run windows. I think the DM was Gnome. I remember being in awe that it got up and running after having to re-burn some of the install discs to finish the installation.

Windows Vista completely died on my laptop back in 2009. I'd vaguely heard about this other OS called "Ubuntu" shortly before that seemed neat and was especially cool because it was free, but was too nervous about breaking my machine to try it before, but because it was already broken at that point, I had a friend burn me an ISO and installed it. I learned Ubuntu was actually Linux when I was configuring and learning how to use it, and that's when I learned about concepts like FOSS, Linux just being a kernel and not the whole OS, and the idea of Linux distros. The only time I looked back was dual booting a gaming PC with Windows 10 for a while just before Proton came on the scene. Even then, booting into Windows was rare, only for games that did not work on Linux at the time, which with Proton releasing and constantly improving, became even rarer as time went on. A failed distro upgrade last year (likely due to me messing around with Mesa driver versions) finally had me wipe the Windows side from that PC altogether and go back to only running Linux when I clean installed over both Windows and the other broken Linux install. Truly haven't looked back since.

In 1999 / 2000 I started using Mandrake because I missed the days of using a terminal instead of a GUI. That got me into setting a web and mail server up and running things from home once I had stable internet. I have always had an on and off relationship with Linux and the other *nix. Currently I have a few servers running around the house for various things all running Ubuntu but besides upkeep and making changes I don't touch them much until my ADHD kicks in and I want to learn something new then I burn out for awhile and repeat the cycle. I am probably the outlier here that uses windows daily and Linux secondary these days.

Ubuntu was my first. I got a copy of 7.04 from the IT instructor at a local tech school during a field trip back in high school. I had no idea what linux was before then. I would boot the live cd on the family computer and mess around with it since I didn't have one of my own. I was finally able to get a hand-me-down windows 98 PC from my aunt and installed my copy of 7.04 on that right away. Got my dad to run some ethernet up to my room and I was living like royalty after that.

I've tried about every distro under the sun since those days, but Ubuntu always feels like home

I read The Jargon File before I touched much of anything aside from DOS, and I was hooked. My first starry-eyed actual experience with Unix was at my first programming job: On a Unix system writing C (neither of which I had ever used). They gave me and my coworker a single copy of Kernighan and Ritchie's book and told us to get up to speed. The people assigned to us as mentors were more or less useless as far as figuring out how to do anything, so we struggled a lot. In the end we did okay.

We also an excellent computer science teacher who gave us an old SGI system to play with, which she said "fell off a truck." It couldn't really do much of anything interesting because we didn't have any internet to connect it to and we already had compilers on our own more-capable computers by that point, but it was a super cool little artifact to have.

My first actual Linux experience was when downloading Mandrake when it came out, and starting to use it for my everyday personal computing. Multiple people saw that I had this super-weird science fiction computer and heard how I talked about it, tried to install Linux for themselves even when I told them they probably didn't want to, and then suffered as a result because it wasn't super capable (for normal computer tasks) or easy to use at that time in history.

For a while I lived in a big rented house with other young layabouts with my computer (Debian by that point) being totally inscrutable. E.g. it would bring up just a grub command line when booted, which you had to type the right super-cryptic commands into in order to boot the actual system. It was effectively alien technology to everyone else. It was also permanently hooked to an always-on boom box's headphone jack and had a cron job to record Howard Stern every morning to a low-bitrate MP3, which was shared via Samba to the rest of the network, by request of my housemate so he could listen to Stern any time he wanted to.

It was great days. There were kings on the land, there was magic in the world. Aside from work environments, I used Linux pretty much exclusively from that point forward, up until the modern day when Chromebook+crostini and MacOS have become civilized environments to operate in.

@eric5949 Late nineties. Joined a computer club at uni and got to play with aix, hp-ux, vms, linux, netbsd, freebsd, nextstep, amiga... Installed FreeBSD on my own box and experienced the, eh, joy of "make world", though making X Windows took longer. I kept Windows around for games but stopped even that around.. Nintendo 3DS. Used windowmaker for at least a decade, now on KDE Neon.

I'm basically a "native" Linux user. When my parents finally decided to get a computer in 2008 or so (I was in elementary school back then), it got Ubuntu installed on it, so my first contact points with modern technology were 100% on Linux as anything invented after the 1950s wasn't used at all in elementary back then.

When I got my first own computer a few years later, the guy who guided my dad and me through building it suggested installing both Linux Mint and Windows on it. The Linux installation died on me after a few months for unknown reasons, I had no idea how to fix it and our helper disappeared into severe personal problems, so I used Windows only for quite a while until I finally started to really get into Linux inside VMs and was finally able to reinstall it on the bare metal.
As I had always prefered Linux, it quickly became my daily driver again.

Fast forward to today, Linux is the only OS on my laptop and the main OS of my gaming PC. I use Manjaro KDE on both.

I have installed Ubuntu in I think at the beginning of 2020 at the end of my first semester as dual boot, because I wanted to learn it a bit while studying engineering informatics. Later I have installed it as my only distro on my Laptop to have more reasons to learn it since I use my PC mostly for gaming. After some time I was so confident with it that I wanted to try something new and installed Garuda on my PC and learned about proton. Then I learned about how many games I can actually play with it and used it as my daily driver for about half a year. Then I was distro hopping frequently, trying pure Arch, Gentoo and Void, wiped Windows completely at the beginning of 2022 because I didn't use it anyways if I remember correctly and sticked with Void since about mid 2022 until today for my Laptop, PC and Server.

I've been a Mac guy since 1985 but I've always had additional machines running other OSes (including Windows). My first Linux experience was with Yggdrasil, which my small company was trying out. We never got it to boot. After that, it was early Red Hat, which I ran for years until the hardware I was using died. After that, it was various versions of Ubuntu on machines at work. Now I've got a couple of Raspberry Pis running Raspian.

Installed Linux Mint in 2017 when I got real tired of having to reinstall windows (+ big programs) on my laptop which got blue-screened every other month. My laptop was not compatible for Linux and had to switch back to W10. When that laptop broke, I went with an old Mac (Linux broke it so High Sierra) and an old Dell Tower with LM. Gave up the Dell and now have the Mac until I can get a steam deck which I will use as a light linux pc w/monitor. Never going back to Windows.

My experience was Slackware in 1993. Some kid in another dorm was running it on his computer and he gave me an account on it. I'd dial into the University network and telnet to his server to mess around. I believe the kernel was 0.9x something.

Over the years I'd used Linux in various forms: built a router using Linux at a job, installed Slackware on my desktop at home using floppy disks, ran Redhat on most of our infrastructure (web, samba, ftp, sendmail, openvpn, ...) at another job, run Arch Linux on my desktop at home along with Debian in my home lab.

When I was a kid, we used to visit relatives a lot. I was 12 as well and listening to adults talk about boring stuff wasn't cutting it anymore. Most of my relatives had PCs, but none with any games I'd be interested in. So I took my mom's 8gb USB stick and turned it into a Linux Mint bootable usb.

Now, keep in mind that I didn't know that much English at the time and honestly I'm amazed I managed to do that, but... I wasn't aware stuff on the stick would be overwritten, and let's just say my mom wasn't too pleased!

Didn't even solve my problem, since the only game that would run was Terraria, and that with like 5 fps on most of the computers I tried it on!

Mine was back in 1999 courtesy of this:

https://ia800600.us.archive.org/35/items/TheLinuxPocketbook/TheLinuxPocketbookfrontCover.jpg

The Linux Pocketbook from APCMag, which included a full copy of Red Hat 5.2 (according to this image, I vaguely recall the copy I had had a slightly different cover so they might have updated it). Having it on CD was a big deal back when we still had dial up! I remember how daunting the command line was at that point - like I had grown up on DOS and then Win 3.11, but a full blown Unix system was not something I was used to at that point.

For some extra context, my PC at that stage was a Packard Bell desktop 😅

I picked up RedHat 6.0 (hedwig) on the front of a Linux magazine in 2000. Took a few days to get X working on my Pentium3 at the time. In the end the thing that sent me back to Windows was an inability to get my modem running and thus no internet.

When I was at university in 2004 doing a network administration course, our lecturer was very proud of the livecd he'd created with an environment for the course. It was based on Fedora core 2. It was fascinating. Tried to install fc on my laptop at the time but struggled with ndis wrapper to get WiFi running.

Would try again out my early career (2006), went out to Ubuntu and debian. Gamed in early dx7/8 days in wine and Cedega. Would run home servers and mythtv on Linux over the years.

When the steam client beta came out I tried again in earnest to move to Linux full time and was ultimately successful, coming back to Fedora KDE 19 and staying there until moving to Fedora Kinoite last year.

Don't use Windows really except when I have to with building the SOE and a few windows servers at work. I am involved with azure and azureAD at work, so to me Microsoft is mostly a website and a powershell prompt.

Mandrake... In the 90's... I will never ever forget the pain of tulip

Maybe around 2nd grade with the piper computer which was a small rpi based laptop that you built. I switched fully in 5th grade when my windows install broke. A few months before that I switched on my laptop when my math teacher reminded me about it. I Have rarely used windows since but for a few months I used a Mac laptop. My linux laptop (Dell xps 13 7390) I had was hidpi, kind of slow and died quickly and the m1 Mac hardware was just plain better (this was close to when the 2020 m1 Mac came out so no asahilinux). I have used pop, manjaro, arch and alpine Linux. I have been using it for a few years now and never plan on going back to windows though I do occasionally use macOS for nonfree/closed source apps. When I first switched the only game I played was Minecraft which worked just as well as windows. Now almost all the games I play are free software like Minetest and super tux kart.

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.

A friend loaned me a CD set of Mandrake which had an early version of KDE. I was floored away by something as simple as the level of customization you could do with the taskbar. And having this alien operating system running on an alien EXT3 partition format instead of FAT32 or NTFS that you didn't need to defragment. It seemed pretty fantastical.

I loved tweaking the desktop environment on Windows by replacing explorer.exe with LiteStep and Blackbox so likewise I did this on Linux. Over time I had fun discovering Gnome2, Fluxbox, XFCE, etc. you name it. Eventually I got a desktop I really liked and felt productive on and as Windows XP approached end of life I had no intention of using Vista so I transitioned to exclusively Linux at that point.

I did play with different distros and running servers at the time, hosted VMs back in the day you had to take whatever distro they offered. But for my desktop I basically went Mandrake, Arch (didn't know how to make everything work), Debian, Ubuntu, back to Arch.

My first encounter with Linux was in 2008-9 when my dad bought a secondhand PC that came with PCLinuxOS. We mostly used it to play SuperTuxKart at the time.

Then a friend showed me Ubuntu (must have been 10.04 or something like that) when we started a website project together

I tried using Mint in college and ended up using it full-time by the end of the year. Then had a brief period of using Ubuntu (drive issues with Mint) before heading back to Windows when I bought a new PC for university.

I've been using Windows for study and work, and Linux for personal development when possible. I'd like to go back to Linux full-time, but I'm not sure which distro to use