Linux

Accidentally fried the windows install on my first laptop in 2005 or 2006. My friend told me to try Ubuntu and I loved it. A few years later I had an art school GF and she introduced me to Macs. I wanted to be cool so I upgraded to a 2008 unibody MacBook. I used Mac OS for a while until apple started to really wall off the garden and the laptop was no longer supported. Got a new Dell XPS around 2016 and got back on the Linux train. Not hopping off again except maybe for a BSD.

Tried installing debian in 2002 but had no idea what I was doing editing xorg configs so didn't succeed. Succeeded in running knoppix soon after, but didn't really know what to do with it because I mainly used a computer for gaming in those days.

Ran ubuntu in 2007 for a while but I needed to do too many things in a VM so I skulked back to windows.

Used linux for random bits and pieces over the years but was always too tied to art software and games. Proton fixed the games side of things in 2018 so I decided to go all in reworking my art workflow to be linux focused because I wanted not to worry about needing a windows license for all my machines, buying expensive software, etc. etc. (And I wanted to get into creative programming more.)

Running linux has made automation and programming a much more seamless part of the way I use computers and I am endlessly grateful for this. General computing is fun again and I now have a heap of skills I always wanted.

Red Hat 5.2. 13 years old. Came from WFW 3.11. Used Red Hat for about six months, then switched to FreeBSD for the next decade.

Never went back to Windows. Windows has always been a thing that school and work computers use. My kids have never used it.

That would have been Slackware, which in those days came on a stack of 3.5" floppy disks. So early 90's (and hence I was in my mid-30s) but I was still mainly using Windows 3.1 and Trumpet Winsock to connect to the Internet.

I think the first time I really took it seriously was in the mid 90's with Debian, a copy of which was posted to me, on CD-ROM I think, by Ian Murdock himself (back in the days when he was still with Debra 😏).

SuSE @ 1999, then Slackware in the same year.

Tried SuSE (bought as a box) as an alternative to the annoying, unstable and insecure Windows 9x, it was also the time when Linux as an alternative desktop OS was starting to get hyped in the media. Especially in regards to stability and security. Well, it wasn't hard to beat Win9x in those areas. Tried it a bit, didn't like it that much (I think it was KDE 1.x) and also didn't understand much of it. I was still intrigued though and wanted to really learn it starting from the commandline, but I felt I couldn't with all the SuSE stuff like YaST being preinstalled.

So I bought a big book (by Michael Kofler), it was the de facto standard book for really learning Linux from the ground up back then. And I chose a distribution which would be much more minimalistic (because I felt that makes it easier to learn). So I installed Slackware. I used it for like 3 years and learned a lot (all the basics), it was a hard journey though and other distros started appearing and they promised to be more modern or better than Slackware.

So I tried Debian next, then Crux, then Arch. This was all around 2002-2006. I can't remember exactly how long I used each, but I do know I've used Slack for quite a lot, then Debian rather shortly, then Crux also not very long (basically I just wanted to test a source based distro but compile times were annoyingly long back in the day), and then it was Arch all the way. Arch was fast, rather simple, always up to date, and it had the great AUR. I didn't ever look back.

I did take a break from Linux as my primary OS from approximately 2009 to 2017, mostly due to playing a ton of video games (Windows only, not runnable at all on Linux back then) and also due to my career path making me work with lots of Windows Servers, Powershell and other Microsoft stuff.

Since about 2017/2018 I'm back to Linux as primary OS (Arch, again) and haven't looked back since. Even managed to fully delete all physical Windows partitions now (I only keep it in a VM in case I need to test something).

I'm testing NixOS on my notebook currently, it seems to be "the future", but my main desktop will probably stay Arch for a bit longer still.

Looking back at using Slackware early on, I don't regret it, since I learned a ton, but it was tough using Slackware around the 2000s. I still remember a lot of fighting with programs which wouldn't compile due to dependency errors or other compilation errors. And a lot of Google searches for various compilation errors leading to rare and hard to understand solutions found in random forum posts. Compared to that, any Linux distro feels like mainstream these days. But it was an efficient way to learn.

I can't remember how old I was, but it was during my youth when I bought a computer magazine that came with a "rescue CD" with Knoppix on it. I thought it was really cool, but never did more than looking around in the OS and playing around with it. It had KDE 3.5, which I really liked though. It felt comfy, and that would manifest in the back of my mind. Months or years later, I bought a magazine with a SUSE Linux... I believe 9.2 and supposedly modified for Linux gaming. That got me curious. Same thing, I took a closer look at it, found it really cool and comfy, played around with it, but ultimately it could never replace Windows for me at the time. But the seed was planted, and curiosity remained. Years later, I learned more about Linux during some training for an IT job, and I got the LPIC-1 certification. My journey with magazine DVDs continued, this time with Ubuntu. I got more and more comfortable with the applications and desktop environments, but still, it would not replace Windows for me. I tested Ubuntu and Linux Mint on a cheap notebook for a while, and later, as Linux got better and better on the desktop, I gave Linux Mint a shot on my PC in dual boot. Years of distro hopping, testing, coming back to Windows for gaming and music production software, Windows frustration and the urge to switch to Linux... Then, in 2018, I had enough. I really wanted to get rid of Windows. I bought a 27" iMac as a studio machine for my music production. Of course I evaluated it for a while as a Windows replacement, but where it shines for creative applications, it is useless for a gamer. The durations I spent with Linux on my main PC increased. Still often would come back to Windows. I was changing my OS like pants basically, just because of fucking gaming. FINALLY, as Valve pushed Proton and Steam on Linux, I was able to make the final jump to Linux in 2022. It was now supporting so many great games that I could live with the few that won't run. Since 2022, I am exclusively on Linux on my PC and notebook(s) and I won't look back. It keeps getting better, where Windows falls apart in quality, privacy invasion and user experience. I'm still distro hopping, but I actually enjoy that. It has become almost a hobby. And I'm about to discover the BSD world, I think. Cute little detail: That SUSE Linux from the magazine DVD in my youth had some nice wallpapers that I liked and that I associate with that "comfy" feeling I had while exploring it. I still keep those wallpapers in my wallpaper folder like a treasure, even if I don't actually use them. Except for one, that I still use from time to time: https://wallhere.com/id/wallpaper/163038 That in combination with KDE 3.5 was really lovely, and I still enjoy this one from time to time on my desktop.

1998 - Mandrake Linux

I bought a random Linux magazine that came with a Mandrake CD, I installed it, struggled with everything, but fell in love with the idea of Linux. So, I kept trying distros until last year, when I finally settled on an Arch based distro called Crystal Linux.

When I was about 11 roughly two decades ago, on the first PC I got to actively use. I think it was OpenSuSe. My father had unix at work back then and saw no reason to use anything but a -ix system.

I liked it a lot, back then so was mainly reading things on the internet, no gaming needed.

Haven’t cycled back yet, since I play a few games that don’t run well on linux at all and use some proprietary software. I do find myself trying to use linux commands on windows from time to time, getting annoyed with it not working before remembering.

Linux was kinda sketchy on the hardware I had available so my first experience was installing NetBSD on an '040 Mac with a stack of floppy disks. I was able to get WindowMaker running at 16bits, 640x480. I was pretty slick, with my 'transparent' eterm.

My dad got me a Raspberry Pi for my 10th birthday. I used Ubuntu Mate 16.04 and was amazed by the customizability. Switched my laptop in 2019, never looked back.

Oh gosh, it must have been 1999? 2000ish? I have no idea what distro it was or if distros were even a thing. It took me 3-4 days to get all of my driver's working. I clunked along with it for a week or two until an update borked the system and I didn't know how to fix it, so I went back to Windows. I tried many more times over the following decades, usually with similar results. About 6 years ago I really learned a lot more about Unix servers and therefore about Linux itself. So I installed it again and I've had it on at least one computer in the house ever since then.

After reading this question, I got strangely excited the thinking I had a relatively older and/or unique experience. Nope, most all you guys are as old as me. Late 90's, early 2000...got a red hat CD in some literature...installed it. Now only use Windows if I need to for work which I haven't needed to for over a decade.

I got into linux at ~20 in ~2010. It's great but got anoyed with installing windows support for games/work, and have been stuck with window since. The game engines I work on and the tools I use (visual studio, visual assist, vsvim, etc..) simply refuse to cooperate on Linux and I can't spend valuable work time fighting my distro.

Windows is soon forcing me to switch, and changing my entire workflow, but I'll keep it going as long as I can

I'd used Linux in VMs since the early 2010s, though only really for curiosity purposes and never did much worthwhile. Got a job that uses Linux pretty extensively back in 2016 and by 2019 once I'd noticed proton was a thing I was using Arch Linux on my own laptop. Distro hopped several times in the following years and now on a new PC I've decided to just stay on Debian bookworm and just keep applications up to date using flatpak.

Heh, this inspires a neat little bio.

I had access to then-usual computer-related stuff growing up as a teenager in the late 80's/early 90's (C16, C64, Amiga, DOS/Windows on 286/386). One of the nicer things in that environment was a PostScript capable laser (well, LED) printer. At that time struggling with PageMaker and the likes, the possibilities of a page description language fascinated me.

Later, but still in teenage years, I came across NeXT(STEP) - first through a friend who had one, and its manuals and TeX documents out that PostScript printer like nothing I'd ever seen (done in-house) before. I was hooked. ;-)

A NeXT computer then became my daily driver through "college" and university, where at the time there also were Unix workstations by HP, Sun and SGI. DOS/Windows was all happening at that time, and it always felt to me like the VHS of operating systems - the technically worst implementation taking the market share.

When Linux appeared on the scene, I was obviously interested. The first distro I remember was SLS, followed by SlackWare and Red Hat. Mostly for communication/networking (UUCP, PPP, eMail, Usenet, IP connectivity, ...) I started to use Red Hat in 1996, with the NeXT keeping its place for its graphical desktop on my personal desk. At the time I started working for a software startup where we used a mix of Linux (Red Hat) and Windows (NT) desktops, and Linux (Red Hat) mostly for servers (some Sun and BSD as well, IIRC). Around 2002(?) maybe I had mostly migrated to Linux also for my home desktop, but I kept the NeXT around for a long time, most specifically because of Diagram!, a predecessor (in spirit) to OmniGraffle.

Moving to Apple/OS X never sat right with me due to its proprietary, closed-source nature. "It works great when it works. When it doesn't, you're even more SOL than on Windows."

When Red Hat went EOL in 2004 I looked around for alternatives and most seriously tried out gentoo Linux. I love the flexibility of being able to use one distro with consistent paradigms all the way from (almost) embedded through various server configurations to a fully multimedia capable desktop. I haven't looked back since, typing this into LibreWolf on a KDE Plasma desktop running on gentoo.

All the while, I've also been using, supporting, and developing for Windows professionally to some degree (in addition to working for/on Linux and other more Unix-y stuff). It's such a quality of life hit compared to open source - I remember phone calls with prominent Microsoft employees over weird support cases involving DCOM permissions (or rather, bugs therein) - Microsoft's reply certainly felt quite like de Maizière's infamous "some of those answers could unsettle too many people" quote, hinting at security through obscurity.

Whereas in the Linux ecosystem, I can analyze to their root and facilitate taking care of even decidedly weird corner cases.

One thing I still miss a lot from the NeXTSTEP desktop is its concept of "services": Global utilities that could/would operate on anything (of suitable data type, e.g. text, image) that is currently selected (and show up in what today would amount to the context menu of the selection, regardless of which program it's in). In the simplest case, this could be a Wikipedia lookup of the currently selected word. But, services also had the ability to replace the selection, allowing for all manner of things like unit conversions, 'intelligent' expansion (what this could do together with ChatGPT!), at-the-fingertips OCR and so on and so forth.

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.

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.

When I was about 12 I had a computer nerd friend who used linux almost exclusively. I used various linux distros at his house. I don't know what they were.

He gave me a knopix CD so I could use linux too and that was the easiest way.

I thought I'd try linux myself so I burned Ubuntu to a cd and tried to install it on a family computer as a dual boot. I did it wrong and deleted everything. My dad is a computer network specialist so he understood what happened and wasn't mad. He made a backup of the family computer a while ago and restored it. We still lost some things, but not everything.

My friend got me a desktop computer for free and put SUSE on it. My parents wouldn't allow me to have internet in my bedroom so I just played games and made stuff on blender with it.

My friend also got me a free laptop at this computer nerd conference we went to. We listened to a bunch of people talk about computer stuff. They also had free stuff we could grab. I got myself a laptop. It didn't have an operating system so my friend installed Ubuntu on it for me.

Eventually that laptop and my desktop stopped working and I never used linux again. After reading about linux here I started to miss my Ubuntu laptop and I'd like to try it again, but I don't want ruin my current laptop like I did with the family computer.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I think it was around 2014 and I tried Ubuntu 10 or 11. After using VM for a bit I tried it on my main PC with dual boot.

The problem I had was that steam wasn't ready at the time, let alone other games. Steam kept giving driver errors that required an obscure command to be run every time before booting and for some reason I couldn't get it to fix permanently.

Wine was wine. Sometimes it worked sometimes it didn't

In the end I recall the DE crashing and then I gave up for a few years on it.

Still turned out to be a huge benefit at the time with the advent of USB boots. I remember saving my PC at one point when the Vista endless reboots occurred, because I was able to boot into Linux and reach my drive from there to remove the update.

edit: jeez it had to be way further back than that. I clearly remember the vista incident and using linux, but vista was in 2007.

@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.

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 ;)

2016 for me. I wanted a music production suite, and was given a new laptop for starting college (uk college, I was 15 at the time). I decided to try out Ububtu Studio, a media/art-centered branch of Ubuntu. I found that the incredibly slow laptop that I used to have just.... worked? It was somehow faster at doing day to day tasks than my much newer laptop. I also found the visual aesthetics (Ubuntu Studio was pre-Unity Ubuntu) really appealing.

As I kept using it, I found that more and more my time was being spent on my older laptop rather than the newer one. I started disteo hopping nefore setttling on Manjaro in early 2017. Then I went for i3 and dwm, which led to me using gentoo for a few years. In my last year of uni I found that my time maintaining my set-up was getting impractical on top of all the work so I went back to Windows briefly. Very quickly realised I couldn't use it anymore and so set myself back up with Manjaro.

Currently giving Ubuntu a go because my current laptop has dual amd/nvidia graphics and out of the box it just works much better on Ubuntu. There's been some frustrations but I can't see myself going back to Windows. I use it for work on my work laptop and the little things frustrate me to no end

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

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

Ubantu in 2007 ish. Games didn't work.

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

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 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.