Linux

In 1993, a guy I knew had a Linux server running in his dorm room. I think it was a 0.9x kernel. He dialed into the University network and I was able to telnet in through my own dial up connection to the University. He was running Slackware.

Within a couple months, I downloaded all 30+ 1.44 diskette images and built my own Slackware server. In that time I used Slackware and Red Hat (which then became Fedora before RHEL became a thing). Now I've pretty much settled on Debian for servers and Arch for desktop/laptop systems.

I dabbled in Linux for a while (since 2009, college). I did some distro hopping for a while ( Ubuntu, opensuse, mint, Debian). I finally mained Linux after windows 8 came out, ugh.

I mained Manjaro and then switched over to Endeavour. I couldn't be happier. My opinion of Linux keeps getting better and better, but that's probably because I have to fix my parents computers once in a while. They run windows 10 now. I hate it. Ads in the start menu?! Kill me now.

Back in 1996 I was studying computer science, and one of my courses required me to write programs in Prolog. Rather than go to the school to work on the computers there, I bought an enormous book (I think it was a printout of all the man pages) that had Yggdrasil Linux CD-ROM, and ran it on my home desktop.

I started working for a video game company in 2000. It was dominated by Linux nerds (including the CEO) and they indoctrinated me into their cult. My first distro was SuSe, then Redhat for a while, then Gentoo for about a decade, then Arch, which is where I am now.

My last Windows "daily driver" was Windows 98se.

Slackware in 93 or 94, on a 386DX40 with 4MiB ram and a 40MiB HDD. A friend and I split downloading the disk sets 1/2 disks a day on our limited ISP time.

When Netscape came out, I ran it on that machine. It took literally 30 minutes to start (with much swapping), but was actually usable thereafter.

During the pandemic in early 2021, I was bored and browsed Reddit too much. Some people talked about Linux as a way to avoid the problems of Windows (which I was planning to switch to from MacOS). I got curious and wanted to learn more, and discovered Linux was lightweight and could run on old hardware.

After much research, I settled on putting Linux Lite onto my family's old laptop from around 2010. I used it for a while and it worked great, although it was still somewhat unresponsive, so I switched to Lubuntu. That worked even better and brought that laptop to speeds resembling my gaming laptop with Windows 11 on various categories of apps (file manager, basic text editor, moving around the desktop, etc.)

I was satisfied for a while, but recently I installed Linux on two other computers:

1. KDE Neon on the desktop purchased from my friend because I knew I didn't need Windows for what I was doing, and I dislike Windows 11 enough for me to use Linux full time. I also wanted to try out KDE and avoid Snaps while being in the Ubuntu ecosystem.
2. Dual booting Ubuntu on my gaming laptop (on 2nd SSD), because one of my classes requires me to run Linux software. They had directions to run a VM or use WSL. I tried the latter but ran into a weird error and figured it was easier to just dual boot. Let's see how this goes, as I installed Ubuntu yesterday.

Well I'd been on and off for years, but never made the switch due to games. Then windows 8 came out with a terrible privacy policy.

I'm an open book and wouldn't mind sharing most of my data but I just think it's improper behavior to make assumptions and to forgo consent. Privacy must be the default. I wouldn't mind donating most of my data to progress say AI research, but it should be clear to everyone that it is my data and I decide what happens to it. And when it comes to security I believe that proper investigations and warrants are still a thing.

So ya I made the switch and sacrificed the ability to play certain games. Plenty of stuff to play any way. And this issue has been mostly rectified by now as there's maybe only 5% of games that don't run properly. Recently I had to refund baldur's gate 3 due to some visual glitches. At this point I also feel that the developers are responsible for fixing these minor issues.

As a programmer I think it's a more fitting OS all around for me regardless.

Mid 90s at work as a project support technician in Sony Broadcast R&D in the UK. Slackware, then red hat mostly. Installed Linux boxes in various digital TV stations in London in 1999/2000, used to insert interactive games into the broadcast stream.

I was a sysadmin from 99 to about 2018, from then onwards I'm more DevOps. Done a bunch of stuff with CentOS too, including migrating 500k email accounts to our hosted solution. Other cool stuff included a VMware based development environment using Foreman + FreeIPA to auto provision dev VMs with all sorts of puppet code.

Now at home I run Fedora and work on macOS, writing Terraform and Python. And some nodejs too.

Been at it a long ass time now lol

January 2023, started effectively with Fedora and I'm still on Fedora, before that I used Ubuntu in 2013/2015 but was not on my machine.

2001, I was 19 in USAF tech school in Biloxi, Mississippi, just bought a second hand computer from someone else in the dorm and needed a budget OS, and the local BX/PX had a copy of Corel Linux for $30. I had no idea WTF it was at the time, I thought it was just some kinda cheap bootleg Windows or something, something with half-ass compatibility like OS/2. I had no clue how to use it and I couldn't get any familiar programs to work, so I just paid another dude like $20 to burn me his copy of Windows 2000 for me.

Didn't even realize its potential until later, 2004 when I got a civilian IT job. Now Debian has been my daily driver for ten years.

Edit: oh yeah, the box came with an inflatable penguin, which I gave to the dorm guard on duty when I got back because he recognized it and I didn't think anything of it. If you ever see this post I want my penguin back now, dude.

I am also fairly new to the game. I had an iMac from around 2010 that was starting to show its age. Newer macOS versions were glacial on it. I eventually realized they were meant to boot off SSDs, but my options in that regard weren't great. I would either have to take the whole thing apart to replace the internal drive or live with USB2 speeds on an external SSD. Then it dawned on me I could just put Ubuntu on there and call it a day. This worked great and bought me a few more years out of that machine.

More recently, we started buying threadripper workstations at the office for scientific modelling. These have since migrated into a server room where they are currently acting as a small compute cluster.

And most recently, I've been tinkering around a bit on my Steam Deck. It's a little walled-garden-ish but it let me put VSCode and a few tools on there so I'm playing around.

I started around 2018, using crouton to run Ubuntu on a Chromebook so I could have better functionality. I went back to Windows for a while, then I started using Pop!OS as my daily driver last year. I still don’t know if I love it, but I’m sticking with Linux of some flavor going forward.

My first Linux distro was Mandrake. I'm not exactly sure when it was, but FiveStar sounds about right, so 2003 or so. I've since used Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and possibly some others. I did use Windows 8.1 for a good few years, but came back to Linux when I saw where Windows was headed. Right now I'm on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, which is pretty darn good, and thinking of maybe hopping on to OpenMandriva, though not out of any real necessity. I have a PinePhone and have used Mobian and PosmarketOS on it. There's also my first generation Raspberry Pi running Raspbian.

The way modern commercial OSs are developing, I'm extremely glad something like Linux exists. Libre software is the future.

Sometime in the late 2000s. Bought a used netbook and didn't know it was running on Ubuntu. Over the years I went through PeppermintOS, Crunchbang, BunsenLabs, Antergos, Arch, and many others. Now I'm on Mint because I don't have the time to maintain my OS and just need something that works. The graph meme where long time users end up with a "basic" distro in the end is somewhat true.

Started in college with Mandrake Linux. Used it off and on over the years, though I kept switching back. I recently settled on Pop_OS. Part of what kept me switching back was not having the time to tinker with it. Now that it mostly works, it's become my daily driver.

Slackware on floppy disks back in 19-dickity-three. A friend at university introduced me to it and I installed it on my 386sx. Was a hell of a chore, but once I got it all all working it felt amazing. Been using it off and on both personally and professionally ever since. Sadly most of my professional work in recent times is MS based but c'est la vie.

Around 1998, bought 2 old servers from my university with dual 486dx50 cpu, eisa bus and scsi. They had flashable bios which was a security risk at the time if you used Windows so i was told i could try something called suse Linux on it - and i got hooked. I fanatically read thru all the man pages and soaked in all the knowledge, i don't think i enjoyed learning anything else this much in my life, like finding a new galaxy. Then this new thing called Debian Potato came out and i've been a debian fan ever since.

Started: ~2008 because I saw compiz had the virtual desktop cube & wobbly windows animations. Now I'm on Debian.

Half a year ago I tried it but I have destroyed the system so bad, that even live usb wouldn't boot. Few months ago I have tried again, seems in time what was broken before got fixed by itself also I stuck with it this time and love using it.

This time last year I decided I wanted to selfhost services in an effort to take control of my data. Now I run Pop!_OS as my primary OS, host 13 services across 4 different servers, and am having a blast learning.

Prior to selfhostint in earnest I had a Pi-hole instance running on a Pi 3, but those are pretty hands off once it's setup.

I started with RedHat 6.1, codenamed Cartman, on an i386. My god, the pain, the failed boots, the fail testing and source building by way of multi CD's provided through magazines. It was great

Now, many years later, after many, many different distros, after several immutable distros, I've ended up with NixOS, because I still like getting punished by my software.

Suck it, nix users. You know it to be true.

Back around 2001ish my das brought an old laptop home and we put Knoppix on it. I think that was when I fell in love with Linux lol

Now I am using Arch btw.

About 3 years. I wasn't good with computers because I mostly just didn't want to mess with them, due to Microsoft being who they are. I started with Ubuntu, went to Arch, Nixos, and now Gentoo is my standard. I got into it because my brother who's a security programmer recommended it to me. I use much, much more linux than my brother does now. I don't have any proprietary systems in my home now. All is FOSS.

I started with Gentoo in college back in 2004. I recently got rid of my windows partition and am rocking tumbleweed

Some time before Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04), so somewhere around 2006-2007. Had a spare laptop I had installed (unsuccessfully) Gentoo on, then played around with stuff like Mandriva and Debian, and early versions of Fedora and OpenSuse. I’m a developer now, using Pop right now. Honestly I don’t really care which one as long as my tools and hardware work, and it works well enough on Pop.

I start with Ubuntu 3 years ago and now I am Emacs. That's all I want and all you can get. For me it's better to have an easy linux. But I think Ubuntu, now I have Kubuntu, is too slow on my laptop. So next time I am planing to do mint linux xfce. I only need a fast booting linux to start Emacs. And few programs more. Arch Linux is too elite for me. 🤓

Canada, 2005, fresh off the boat immigrant, just graduated high school in Europe. I had already bought the open source idea years prior and used mostly open source software on Windows. Having recently switched to NVIDIA from ATi, I tested DotA 5.x (Warcraft 3 TFT) on Ubuntu via Wine. It worked great and that was the final hurdle to a full migration. Wiped Windows and installed Ubuntu. I've been using Ubuntu as the primary OS on all my computers ever since. I went through university with a Dell laptop, intentionally purchased to be compatible with Ubuntu. No NDISwrapper shit. The knowledge acquired over this period naturally flowed into my professional career where I've primarily used Ubuntu and RHEL for various use cases. From software development to software deployment and cloud operation in production. These skills keep helping my day to day work in automotive these days.

Went full Linux in the early 2000s. Never went back. Started with Debian and Ubuntu. Tried many distros for varying amounts of time. I always come back to Debian.

I'm just a regular desktop Linux user. It's great.

Dabbled in Linux Mint in 2013-14. Recently started using Linux more frequently. Started out on Pop OS this past June/July but moved to Opensuse Tumbleweed as my main OS. I do still have my Windows drive but havent ran into any issues where I needed to boot it up.

overall - only a few years constantly - just a few months on mint now. I find I get frustrated at some things that I believe should be easy, but seem super convoluted. I'm sure its the years of windows BS beat into me thats making me show my bias, but im learning. I want it on my main PC but figured I would learn on a junker hp dual core pc first. I'm shocked at the amount of things I can now do on it where as with windows, it was useless. Only thing stopping me from putting it on my main pc is gaming. Once I learn more and figure out a good destro for gaming, i plan to switch everything over.

I don't even remember. It was around 2000, I was 15 or something like that. I think I heard about it from my brother and a guy running local computer store hooked me up with my first distro, Mandrake I believe. I remember searching for things like 'printing how-to' on HotBot using links (I didn't learn English in school so reading all the man pages really helped me with the language), setting up IRC bots using screen and irssi/BitchX, burning cds using mkisofs | cdrecord and generally having a lot of fun. After some time I would switch to Windows mostly to play games but when Country-Strike started working in wine I pretty much stopped using Windows. There was a small Linux/open source conference in my country and I gave there a talk when at a university. Couple years later when I was looking for my first job I ended up in a interview with some guys that went to this conference a lot. I got the job and since the company was very Linux oriented and never had to use Windows there. Now I'm still working in IT and use Linux exclusively at work and at home.

I tried a long time ago on Mandrake or Mandriva, cannot remember. Didn't stick and eventually after trying to use Windows 10 on a HDD, Linux Mint welcomed me with open arms. Now duel booting on OpenSuse but haven't started Windows in 6 months. I just don't need it anymore. Thanks to the Wine and proton teams!

4 months now, Debian Gnome. Its on a laptop from work. Knowing what I want and how to secure things they gave me local admin rigths on Win11 to convert the device to dual boot. Slowly getting to know my way around.

1. College. Kernel 1.2.10 I think.

2. Ran out of money before a degree. Haven't stopped working since.

I started using linux as my mac got unusable with macOS First touch with Linux I had in Work, i test our products which run on an embedded Linux yocto build.

Now, my phone and my buisness windows are now the only proprietary OSs I use (have a pinePhone, bit it is not daily drivable for me)

Now I have the old macbookpro5,2 running Arch and my iMac running openSuse TW. For my smart home, I have a pi Zero 2W running hombridge via hoobs. Ah yea and a router on a board that I got from a friend running on OpnSense. With him I have a proxmox server running.

Started out with Mandrake in 1998 and got into Debian shortly after. I moved to Gentoo in 2002. In the later 2000s I only used my desktop for gaming and stopped dual booting for many years. My home server runs BSD and I was using a 2010 MacBook as my laptop. The only Linux box in my home was my HTPC, running Ubuntu.

When I heard of Proton I started dual booting again. In 2020 I got rid of Windows and the aging MacBook. Since then my desktop, laptop and HTPC run on Arch. The server is still FreeBSD.

I started dualbooting W10 and openSUSE Tumbleweed in October of 2022, I got tired of Windows 10 and having to enter regedit to change basic things (they solved some things with winget tbh), using inconsistent UIs and submenus to change other ones. Also, I had constant performance issues, then driver issues that most people told me I'd have in Linux, but have been barely existent.

Since then I barely use Windows, I mostly start it for uni projects and to play Minecraft Bedrock because I get dizzy if I play in bigger screens. I also have less issues with my printer/scanner and the performance has been better. I also love customization and having the option to write small scripts to solve small issues nobody else cares about makes me so happy. There was some software I wanted to try too and couldn't because it was not available on Windows or it was unusable, like Docker (and WSL was uncomfortable to use; inconsistent file names if you don't use W10 in english don't help either).

It's been a great journey, I love troubleshooting and I've been able to solve all issues I found in Linux, while Microsoft Support only said to me: "Have you tried reinstalling Windows?". I'd say that using Linux daily has helped me to learn more about FOSS, containerization and operating systems, while also helping me develop more skills to solve problems by finding solutions or creating them :)

Around 1998 I'd guess. Some loadlin based setup on my friends Windows machine. Don't recall the name. I remember running Mandrake shortly after that.

I've hopped back and fourth between many distros, and gone back to Windows a few times over those years. But I've been using Linux as my daily driver for about a decade now. Currently using and enjoying NixOS.

2004 (Ubuntu) - 2024 (Arch)

Almost two decades ago, as a teenager, I decided to give Linux a try as a bit of fun and as a learning activity. I put Ubuntu 6.06 on an old Windows 95 desktop which was languishing in a cupboard having been long replaced. The install disc was, I'm fairly sure, a freebie that came with a magazine. I was amazed at how easy it was to install and how smoothly it ran, and had lots of fun playing around with it and learning the ropes.

Have had a Linux machine or two on the go ever since. At some point in the last decade I made the switch from using Windows as my main OS to using Linux as my main, and these days I only use Windows on my corporate-provisioned work laptops.

I'm still an Ubuntu user. I've distro hopped occasionally, and Debian has a place in my heart, but I always came back to Ubuntu. There's a lot of meming about Ubuntu being terrible, but the reality is that it remains an incredibly polished, high-quality, "just works" OS which largely keeps out of my way.

Over the last two decades I moved into software engineering as a career, although I've since moved out of the industry onto non-techy things. Linux continues to scratch my techy itch in my spare time.

Around late 2017 I think. I was a first year university student. I bought a new laptop with Windows 10 when I started uni, but Windows would break with just about every other update. Eventually I was fed up with it and I wanted to try an alternative OS, so I installed Linux Mint next to my Windows installation.

I quickly found myself using it more than Windows, especially since a lot of software I had to use for university was significantly easier to install on Linux (think LaTeX). Quickly, it got to the point where I only used Windows as a gaming OS.

About half a year into this "experiment", my Windows 10 decided to nuke itself, again. This time the network driver wasn't working, which is annoying af to fix, so I didn't for a long time. Also in 2018 gaming on Linux got a lot better, with Proton becoming a thing around that time. Even when I eventually got around to fixing my Windows installation, I found myself not really using it.

Eventually got into a distrohopping phase, used Fedora for quite a while, but right now I settled on Debian with Gnome as my DE. It's not the most "exciting" setup, but I found that to be a good thing actually, because it allows me to get the most work done.

When I was 14 and got my second PC. That must have been around 2005 or so?

Installed Red Hat, printed a book about C and gave up rather quickly.

Ubuntu 6.04 or so (Dapper Drake?) Was the first one that I actually used for real.

2009 i started studying computer science. Having windows on my Laptop wasnt helpful when compiling c, that was my first encounter with Linux (especially Ubuntu). Was running Xubuntu most of the time because i didnt like Unity.

Stopped using Linux after finishing my degree, since Linux wasnt useful for gaming or my work.

Skip forward to 2020. Hadnt really used Linux for anything for years, then windows 11 was announced. Didnt like where this was going and tested out Manjaro, since gaming on linux was supposed to be "okay".

Didnt like Manjaro and tried out EndeavourOS. All games that mattered at the time ran good. Switched to AMD graphics, deleted windows completly from my drive and use Linux exclusivly for private usage.

Also installed EndeavourOS on my work laptop and use a Windows VM if needed.

I dont want to go back to using windows for daily stuff ever

About in 2008-2009. I was about 15 years old. One of my teachers installed ubuntu on school computers. Remember playing around with wobbly windows and desktop cube and having a blast.

I didn't use much linux at home though until college about 2013 when I put it on my laptops. Took until like 2018 to fully switch. I ditched the last windows VM with GPU passthrough when its boot drive died.