Linux

Back in college my CS 201 class was on C programing and needed to use the Linux machines in the lab for the class. They were running CentOS. That was my first time using Linux. After that I starting playing around with different distros (Ubuntu and Debian mostly). Then I took a "system administration" class that was really "Linux 101" that was taught by the departments sys-admin who is a Linux Evangelist and they showed me the light. Havent owned a windows or Mac machine since (about 20 years ago now)

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.

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.

It was Ubuntu 8.04 in around 2013. I only did it to get a promotional item for Team Fortress 2 called Tux, a cosmetic item that looks like... Tux. I remember hating the UI/UX and promptly uninstalled it afterwards.

Eventually circled back around to Xubuntu for my low-end hardware and various other distros. Currently daily driving Fedora.

Ubuntu in the early 2010s. Installing flash player to get YouTube working.
It took me more than 10 years, but I am finally windows free. Linux came a long way in such a short time man.

I mostly installed Ubuntu on old machines after nuking them with dban right before selling them. Stuck with Windows until 7 stopped getting security updates. I'd still be fully on 7 if I could, tbh. Though living in Linux is helpful for selfhosting.

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.

I think my first experience was around 1993 or 1994. I downloaded the 3.5" disks at the university and then uploaded onto my 386. No GUI, all command prompt. :).

Right around that time, too, I found some network cards and co-axial cables and 3-4 of us in the house put the cards in our computers and could see each other's computer. Couldn't do much else though. Hahahaha.

I was about 16 and made a Slax CD to get around my schools locked down WinNT/XP installs. After school I ran Ubuntu on an '06 Acer laptop for a while but later switched to W7 for gaming. When W10 launched with ads in the start menu I moved to Debian and have been totally happy since then.

I tried linux and went back to windows to many times to count, mostly in the halcyon days of late dialup/early "Broadband" (back when broadband was a whopping single meg down), always for the same reason.. Had a problem I couldnt find a solution for, and the few times I reached out to linux focused IRCs and stuff, well, so say that my head was bit off would be putting it lightly, which always ultimately lead to me reinstalling windows95/98/xp

Thankfully, there was a perfect storm of Valve dumping dumptrucks of money into linux, creating proton, and Windows 7 reaching EoL that I finally said fuck it and switched for good around.. late 2018ish I think? I still kept Windows 7 for dualbooting for games that didnt work via proton, but eventually I was booting into windows less and less as more games just worked on linux with proton until.. about 6 months ago, I realized I hadnt logged into my Windows 7 drive in over a year, and finally wiped it.

Hands-on work began in the 1990s with a Red Hat derivative for PPC called Yellow Dog Linux. Once finally getting X11 to run correctly, I recall settling on Window Maker as a window manager. At the time, apps associated with the KDE project seemed to have the most cohesive and organized design sensibility.

Leading, of course, to endless distro hopping in search of the one perfect solution.

A friend of mine suggested muLinux for an old 486DX I had lying at home, muLinux was a very basic distro that run off a floppy disk (1.44MB). Obviously not the most comfortable of the experiences. I toyed a little bit with that and switched to Slackware at some point but the package manager for Slackware is minimal so I just didn't do much work on that computer. I ended up installing DOS 6 and windows 3.11 back. It was around 2003. I had another newer computer with XP, the 486 was a remnant from olden times.

Fast forward a couple of years and in Uni I tried dual booting Suse. didn't really liked it and went back to windows. our Operating system course lab was no Linux, though. I finally switched a couple of years later when I went to work and the whole IT department was Linux enthusiasts and all the PCs were running on Linux. Debian did it for me, now I am begrudgingly on Ubuntu, but will soon hop on Void.

Once I got Warcraft 3 working on Wine on Ubuntu 4.10, I quit Windows cold turkey.

Erase disk and install Ubuntu

I was ~18. The first "OS" I've used was a BASIC interpreter. Then DOS. Then Windows till Ubuntu 4.10. I've also used Debian concurrently here and there since then. I've tried various other Linux OSes for fun. I've used both Ubuntu and RHEL for work. Currently I run most of my machines on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and done Debian. My work machine is on officially supported Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Used ophcrack back when I was a teen so i could learn my parent's windows password and fuck around when they were asleep. Then I figured just using live cds was cleaner (no browsing history to delete). Then once they upgraded, I was given the old pc to nuke and pave as I saw fit. It was a lot of fun outsmarting my parents in the wee hours of the night, not that they were terribly tech savvy.

so linus made his first linux post when i was in highschool. (freshman). i didnt know of it but thats what wikipedia says. windows 95 came out when i was in college and by my junior year i knew about linux. in our networking class most everything was unix, one sun machine and the instructor got linux on one or two. students would rush to get the linux machines. it was seen as a better unix. at that point it wasnt seen as a desktop alternative just a better server experience. right before windows xp came out, i built a new computer for xp and used a disc from a magazine with redhat. installed it on their ma hi e and it didnt work because the hardware was to new. i soon got XP and learned about boot loaders.had to call microsoft since xp wouldnt install. tbe guy just recently i stalled linux on a few machines and helped me out.

didnt try linux again till broadband and the web was more of a thing.

Linux FT. From a magazine cover disk in around 1996. I was a teenage oik working at a company where I suggested setting up the Internet for email and support use. The manager at the time subscribed to bill Gates' belief that the Internet was a fad. I was granted an old 486 desktop pc, and modem and a basic modem account.

I setup a squid proxy and email server with dial on demand. It was slow but it worked.

I moved onto redhat 5 after (before it became the enterprise thing), we went to isdn and leased line and I even had a stack of usr courier modems under my desk by the end with dial in for both Internet and collecting mail (for sales mostly).

It only got replaced when the company actually paid for a full time IT manager (I was primarily a software developer, doing IT on the side) and they switched everything to windows.

Beginning of the year when I got my Steam Deck and found it about the desktop mode. Now I have garuda on my living room tv-pc up and running to game and watch stuff. Best decision since a long time, thanks GabeN for giving me the final nudge to go linux.

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

My first experience with Linux was in the mid 80s when I was in the service working with AT&T 3B20 and Sperry UNIX servers as an admin. I enjoyed just about every aspect of the OS, but most government, contractor, and civilian jobs required desktop software that Linux either couldn't install or the open source equivalent just wasn't good enough.

Over the many, MANY, years I have kept experimenting with the various desktop environments, but with my current job a large percentage of our servers are Ubuntu or RedHat Linux (although we're being forced to migrate to Windows Servers for many of the same reasons yet again).

That being said, with the ability for many Microsoft Office365 products working well enough as web-apps, my home laptop runs 100% KDE Neon, and with the exception of needing a couple Windows-only programs (which no longer runs on Linux) I'd probably be running KDE Neon on my work laptop as well. If I can ever get Cisco ASDM to work with Wine and/or Bottles, I will be switching over soon after.

The DEs in the last few years are light years ahead, and I am personally very impressed with just how smooth everything works. My hope is to get back to a semi-40 hour work week in a few years and help contribute - not as a programmer, but perhaps as a QA tester or the like.

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.

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.

My very first experience with Linux was in probably 1993 or so. I ran a dial-up BBS with a Usenet feed and a friend UUCP'd me the first few floppies of slackware to try. I don't remember getting very far but I had used OS/9 earlier on my Coco 3, so the shell was pretty familiar.

For actual work, about a year later I started working for a dial-up ISP and my workstation was a Linux box connected via Serial PPP to a Sun pizzabox.

I've used Linux on and off as a Desktop over the years but always maintained at least one server. In my current jobs there is a mix of Linux and FreeBSD servers I run on a Linux based virtualization platform.

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.)

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.

Slax and puppy on a 128mb usb that i would take with me to school to test

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.

Sounds like I might be the youngest here lol. I started with Ubuntu 11.04 which I would live boot off CD in my school laptop. After I got my own laptop with Windows 8, I used Windows for a good long while until the thing got super slow after having windows 10 for a while. That's when I got back in to linux.

2000. Computer science professor handed everybody in my data structures class a stack of Red Had 3.5" floppies.

It took me almost a week to realize that I was actually installing it correctly and that there was no GUI out of the box.

Didn't make Linux my daily driver until 2007ish when Sabayon was in its heyday. The Compiz eye candy was too hard to resist.

It was around the year 2000 and I installed red hat on a laptop but I never got xorg working so I gave up and didn't try again for a couple of years.

@eric5949 Red Hat 5.1 1998/99, I was aged 40. I attempted dual booting with Win98, but Disk Druid wiped my Win98 partition:-) I was a little upset but stayed with RH. I had actually purchased the RH CD's and manual from the US (I am in the UK), and incurred import duty, so it was not free as in beer but around £50. I looked at Windows again when 2000 was released. Now I use Linux Mint, Chrome OS and Windows 11.

I started community college in 2007 with no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I don’t remember how, but I came across Linux and spent that year brining ISOs to cds, testing different distros, customizing my DE, etc… By my second year I decided that computers was what I wanted to do and specifically something involving Linux. Fast forward 16 years and I’m still working in tech with 7+ Linux machine between my homelab and my cloud providers and dozens of FOSS services. Funny enough, I just recently moved and found a stack of like 30 bootable ISO cds as old as Ubuntu 7.10.

Mine was a Raspberry Pi in the early 2010s - I‘d had relatively little experience with computers before and had no idea what a terminal was (or even Linux for that matter, tbh), so it took me a good couple of weeks to even figure out how to reach the desktop… Used Windows most of the time after that, but got back into Linux via Ubuntu a couple of years ago. I‘ve now switched to Fedora as my daily driver and wouldn‘t go back either :)

My dad installed Linux on the family computer at some point in the 90s, but it was a bit overwhelming for me and I gave up on it for quite some time. I took an ethical hacking class in college that had us using Kali Linux and that wasn't too bad, so I finally gave dual booting another try around 2017 with Manjaro which didn't play well with my computer and Mint which did work better, but I couldn't get wine working right for my non-Linux games. Right now I have KDE Neon and mostly use that, but I still have Windows for some non-Linux games. I hear Steam has improved the cross platform compatibility, but I don't play games much any more and haven't felt like bracing myself for more frustration and disappointment fighting to get things to work on the wrong OS. I don't like to tinker at this point, I just want things to work.

I am considering switching fully to Linux on my laptop soon because Windows 11 is getting too invasive with the ads. I can live without the games and I do have several that have Linux versions which is good enough.

it was the early 2010s, i had just got my life back together after the great recession, but my laptop was in bad shape, and i needed it to work. I had heard about this linux stuff and dove in. I tried ubuntu and have been spending most of my time on various debian-based distros ever since. i confess i still keep a windows installation around for those one or two games that just don't play nice. But that list gets shorter every year.

Seriously considering never upgrading beyond windows 10. I'm on Pop Os but norbara looks better and better every time i look into it...

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.

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. Brieflu used Ubuntu on an old tower. When that laptop broke, I went with an old Mac (Linux broke it so High Sierra) and an oldish 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.

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.

All I remember about my first time is being tricked into using Slackware. They told me it was the easiest distro. And this was in like 94 or 95; just a year or two after the damn thing came out.