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 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.

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.

In university in 2000. Now I am a Linux DevOps Engineer.

Currently writing some python so we can get a report out of our shiny new harbor docker registry.

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.

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.

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.

It was at home on my first PC. The year was 1993, and it was a Slackware distro with a kernel 0.99.12.

Next to it I had an old Atari ST with MiNT, and it had the bigger harddisk and the nicer GUI, but the PC had more RAM and horsepower.

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.

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.

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.

First experience was trying to dual boot Slackware and Windows ME on the family computer in 2003 after getting a magazine with the install disc on. Nuked the Windows install and got banned from the family PC for a while.

Then I got my own laptop with Windows 98 on it at 18. I'd just found dyne:bolic which was one of the first Linux live CDs if I recall correctly and was designed to work on older hardware (this was mid 00s). That machine served me well for 2 or 3 years.

A few years of bouncing between various distros and Windows followed. Eventually I made the full switch in about 2012 first to Ubuntu then Debian which I've been using for the last 5 years or so.

I started in the mid to late 90s when my dad brought home old redhat CDs. I don't really use Linux consistently unless you count my Android phone or my Steam Deck, but the last OS I used was Linux Mint on a Thinkpad W520 maybe

Around 25 years ago I had read about this Linux thingy in a computer magazine somewhere in the middle east. We had a Windows 95/98 PC. I got my hands on some Red Hat CDs (or floppies) and managed to install it on the PC. It booted into a prompt, but I had zero knowledge of Linux or any Unix-like OSes and had absolutely no idea of man pages. Didn't manage to start the graphical environment. I took my case and rode my motorcycle to some computer engineering student (the most knowledgeable person I had access too, we had no Internet) and asked him for help. He told me it's my graphics card (some old ISA VGA card), but couldn't help more. In the computer market no one knew about Linux either. So my first try to switch to Linux failed.

Fast forward 25 years... I'm surrounded with Linux and computers in general. Desktops, laptops, single board computers, virtual machines, local or remote. I started with Ubuntu (free CDs posted to my poor country...) with Gnome and later gnome shell, tried Debian, Mint, Parsix, and finally Arch Linux. Moved from graphical to command line and started absorbing the Unix philosophy of simplicity and robustness. Nowadays I use sway and KDE on Arch Linux for work and pleasure, and follow very old Unix mailing lists looking for hidden internet gems.

P.S.: forgot to mention Libreelec (kodi) as my media server and OpenSUSE Leap on laptop which I chose to enjoy some automated install with encryption and btrfs which worked surprisingly well. If I live long enough, I might start thinkering with BSDs (openbsd probably, because of the picture at the bottom of their homepage). I already use pfsense which is based on FreeBSD.

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

I used Unix for the first time 1989 in university. Windows was hardly even a thing then and Linux certainly wasn't. Then I used both Windows and various Unix flavors throughout my working life. In the late nineties we first started using SUSE Linux in a project so that was my first direct hand-on experience with it. I wasn't terribly impressed. In my last job before my current one we had AIX so I had to use that. Then I exclusively used Windows for a couple of years after changing jobs. But I've been growing increasingly frustrated with the enshittification so about two years ago I finally made the jump and all my private systems are on Linux Mint now. I'm never going back, unless they open source the whole thing or something.

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.

2009 computer class in school. Buddy of mine was showing off these computers you could put together yourself, then showing me this cool operating system that has desktops with a 3d cube to change the workspace.

2024 laptop has Linux on it for the last 2 years, and I am waiting for the right excuse to migrate my desktop too.

Freshman year of college, about 11 years ago.

Been using Manjaro exclusively for about 3 years.

I had a friend in elementary school around early 2000s who was a huge computer nerd and with him I discovered the world of programming and computers in general - he was also the one who introduced me to Linux, Slax/Slackware, Blackpanther OS, UHU and later Ubuntu.

Then I installed my first Linux system for myself, which was Ubuntu then later changed to openSUSE. I loved it, up until the point KDE 4 came out and after 3.5, I hated it with passion so I dropped Linux for a while.

I had and have lots of Raspberry Pis, so I haven't abandoned Linux completely, also in University, I needed Linux so I had a Kubuntu as well, but didn't use it too intensively.

Also I used to bork all my Linux installations sooner or later to the point I was unable to recover them.

Now I built a new PC and I deceided I will use Linux, because I have no intentions to use Windows 11 for a while at least, so now my daily driver is Debian with KDE Plasma.

Tho I had no idea the louder part of the community/fandom is so toxic, cringe and childish, and I was and am in a few fandoms before, I've seen some shit, but not this much of a shit some Linux extremists have.

Broke my dual boot iBook (Mac 9.1.2 and OSX) in about ‘06 and was too poor to replace it; and my still to this day used Psion 5mx was… limited to say the least. I bought a super cheap net book that didn’t have Windows installed. After a week I discovered I could remove the (acer?) oem os and replace it with something I could burn onto a thumb drive. It was called “Ubuntu”, and could apparently do more. Seemed interesting and worth a shot. Stuck with that until the desktop went all weird (unity?) and then migrated to Mint. I only use laptops as a tool, so as long as I had a word processor, browser and media player alongside a traditional file system I was quite happy.

1. College. Kernel 1.2.10 I think.

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

4-5 years ago. Started because my one machine won't get security updates from Microsoft and my main machine isn't eligible for the Windows 11 update.

Started on Ubuntu and then did some heavy distro hopping. I've ended up preferring only 2 distros; Debian and Arch. There's plenty of others that I like but those are my top 2.

I was about 13, parents were getting divorced, house was being shortsaled, mom had moved out already and took the main computer with her, dad got a really old Windows XP Dell laptop (had a red nubbin) from a friend to use, it ran so extremely slow on XP already (literally would take minutes to load a video and it was choppy doing just that) I knew Vista or 7 couldn't run on it so I looked online for other OSes that might work.

Landed on Linux mint, got that bad boy set up in my little sisters (now empty) room as it was in the corner where I could reach my neighbor friend's wifi. I watched so much Bleach/Naruto that summer lol

Luckily I had setup that neighbor friends wifi with DDWRT so I knew the pw :P

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.

Over the summer, and these days I’m somewhat comfortable typing in terminal. Got foundry and steam and my vpn all running using Garuda

Actually no wait I tried ubuntu in college but I couldn’t figure it out while doing my senior year of engineering school

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. 🤓

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.

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 more than 2 years ago with Ubuntu, now I'm on EndeavourOS.

1999. I liked fooling with computers and installed it just to see what it was. I went through several distros over the next few years, Mandrake, Suse, Red Hat, compiled Gentoo from scratch, and finally settled on Slackware. It was my only OS for 14-15 years until I started a business in 2016 and needed software that's only available in Windows. I only use Windows on my PC now because my computer does weird boot stuff that screws up dual boots and I don't really use the PC that much anyway. I still use Linux on small servers for media and home automation

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

I was in college. I was talking with a classmate how I tried to burn this OS called Linux that I heard of on TechTV, bit the stupid disc never worked. I leaned how to properly burn iso after that. Pretty sure he showed me some copy of Fedora or Mandrake, maybe SuSe. Didn't care for Fedora, bit found this other one that seemed real interesting everyone was talking about, Ubuntu.

2020

I got bored during the summer holiday and installed Ubuntu for the first time. Now I'm a CS major.

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.

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.

About 2 years ago but I can't believe it's been that long tbh. I started with Ubuntu but switched to arch after about a year mainly because I enjoyed the challenge and learning involved in installing it through a command line. I understand my computer a little more because of it.

I chose Linux mainly for privacy reasons; I didn't enjoy having a spyware as my OS but my friends call me crazy for going as far as I have to avoid being tracked. Idk it just bothers me.

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.

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

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.

Must have been 2001 or 2002, and I started with the Red Hat CD that came in the back of my friend’s Linux For Dummies book.