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I started with Android, of all things (first android phone in the froyo/gingerbread era, iirc). Got really interest in modding so I signed up for XDA. It was pretty cool while it lasted, and it introduced me to the world of GPL and open source stuff. Still didn't install Linux.

After a few years, my now ex-company started using Ubuntu and it worked pretty well for such shitty PCs, so I got more interested in Linux. At home, I got interested in building kernels, so I started reading up more about it. Finally installed Virtualbox and installed Mint and built my first Android kernel from source. Stuck with Mint for a few years.

Got interested in Arch but was intimidated, so I went and installed EOS on my laptop. Learned more about Linux (Still using EOS there now) Kept using VMs for hobbies and tried a lot of distros.

Saw iusearchlinux.fyi in lemmy and it called out my name. As an asshole whose whole life revolves around bragging about using arch, i signed up for this instance. 😎

It was a low-spec laptop I was gifted as a teen. To give you an idea:

• 32 GB soldered-in SSD
• 4 GB RAM
• dual-core celeron

It came with Windows 10, and on day 1 it said I had low storage 💀. The huge bottle-neck for me was the un-upgradeable storage for sure, because a lot of programs I wanted to install (i.e. for art/music/programming) wanted to live on the C: drive rather than on my usb. And in general it was atrocious to use.

I got introduced to Linux from the Godot Engine discord meme channel of all places. Lots of Linux users seemed to live there, so I thought maybe I ought to learn Linux to understand the memes 🤣 (and escape my insanity)

I still was very unsure about wiping Windows in case something broke or still had info on there (i think i still do in my browser). So if not wipe the OS, I could have ran Linux off my USB, but it stuck out a couple inches so I didn't wanna risk it unplugging 🤣. But my buddy suggested an idea to use the small MicroSD slot on the side. I was able to get one (128GB) for my birthday and decided to go with Mint. Things mostly just worked but there was some strangeness cause it was a persistent live usb install. But still so much better than Windows

This was about 2.5 years ago now. And don't worry, I saved up to build a desktop PC, running Arch, of course ;)

My first installation was in around 2006 when I bought my own computer, but I heard abou Linux from my middle school IT teacher. First distro was mandriva, but I jumped from one to another on weekly basis. I think that first Ubuntu I tried was feisty fawn. I remember as well the ubuntu netbook remix as well. Why? Dont remember. Probably curiosity , being tired of bimbows.

Loaded up 40something diskettes of Slackware, on a ship anchor of a PC in an effort to learn a Geographic Information Systems back in 1897, er I mean 1997. Pulled out chunks of hair trying to pick swap file sizes. Was dazed by /, /boot, /usr, /var,. Never got the GIS working. Sang magical incantations to bosses about how Linux would smite their god MSFT. And they laughed. You know the rest.

My first computer was a Samsung N150 Netbook (Intel Atom N450 1,6GHz, 1GB RAM, Intel 3150 with Win 7 Starter which i bought instead of a smartphone in primary school. I refunded the smartphone i bought since it was very bad. Windows 7 Starter sucked on this netbook and you couldn't even change the background image without changing some registry entries. Not sure where I got the idea to install Linux but I decided to install Ubuntu on it (i think it was ubuntu first and later lubuntu like lubuntu 8.10) and i had a much better experience than with windows. I also hosted a mincraft server on this laptop and played at the same time with almost zero fps and my friends complaint about the server lagging

It was a gradual process. It somehow started with Raspberry Pis because there were some laying around and I wanted to use them as a server for something. Later privacy and my increasing repulsion for windows played a role. It also helped that I stopped ~~having friends~~ playing online games with friends, very convinient, so I had not to use windows for that either. Now I just love using it. I can do whatever I want and the system does only what I want. And foss is great.

@MouseWithBeer you didn't tell us your story

i tried installing windows XP on my computer, and it wanted me to activate it? wtf? so i said F that. it was like 2003 or so and it was redhat 7.3 that i bought at circuit city or somewhere

~~I guess I will start.~~ People beat me to it.

The year is 2015 and the GPU drivers for my laptop decided to stop working out of nowhere. No matter how much I screwed with it I couldn't get them working. So even if my only experience with Linux at that point was a little bit of screwing around in VMs I decided to install Mint. Guess what? Drivers worked! (AMD ones then actually stopped working as well somewhere around 2018? Third party ones still work to this day). Man gaming back then on Linux was rough, but hey, my laptop worked so I didn't care and my desktop was still running Windows 7 anyways.

Then in 2019 I build my fancy new PC, get everything set up, installed Windows 7 .... USB ports don't work, no drivers exist for them for Windows 7 at all...shit... There was no chance I was going to install Windows 10 on it so since Linux served me well for 4 years on my laptop I decided to just screw it and install Mint there too. Mint turned into Manjaro (and recently Arch on laptop), Proton became a thing and all is good in life and I wouldn't want to have it any other way.

I did eventually install a LTSC version of Windows 10 on a separate SSD that I keep around for emergencies that gets booted into on average every 3-6 months.

I had a coworker mention his RetroPie setup. I followed suit and built one, but quickly realized that the system under the hood was pretty cool!

A few months later, I built a PC on a budget. In avoidance of purchasing a Windows key, I threw Pop!_OS on it instead based on the RetroPie experience. Greatest decision I could have made!

Edit: this was about 3 years ago

Oh wow, it was way back, around 2007. I was dating a guy who used Ubuntu and I decided that Windows was pissing me off and I wanted to try it. So I got it installed on an Asus, if I recall correctly. Dealt with driver issues, install issues, all that. But all the same, I loved it because it wasn't corporate - I could do what I wanted to do. So then I ended up in grad school, ended up doing modeling and simulation, all the while using Linux of course. I tried Suse but it ended up with weird bugs, so back to Ubuntu. Built my own desktop for research that wasn't on the HPC. Eventually Unity came out and I migrated to Kubuntu because I can't deal with the Unity interface.

Sadly I mostly use Apple right now for work because I make a lot of powerpoints, basically. But I still run Ubuntu at home, including of course my wee raspberry pi that is a Pi-hole for our home internet.

It was Ubuntu 10.10 which I got sent to me as a CD for free! I had no internet at home that time but I did have a very old computer and I thought it was fun to try something different. It was a huge pain installing things without an internet connection since you had to find all the needed DEB files from another computer (definitely running on Windows) just to install something like VLC on an offline computer, as opposed to Windows where you just get an EXE and that's it.

I guess it was the cool factor of being different at first (that's probably still one of the factors why I use Linux) but I just slowly fell in love with it and the tons of customization and freedome althat it gives.

I now hate Windows. And macOS to a degree.

lost my xp product code and i had built a new pc, was stoked to try out RAID0. So i bought vista at walmart only to find out i picked up the upgrade version and not the base install, so i couldn't activate it without an xp code. Got exposed to linux during my programming class, all assignments had to compile on the school's server. After learning that linux was free and getting tired of reinstalling vista every 30 days (it got pretty manageable after i learned how to slipstream the installer but i was so done) i made a Ubuntu usb and fell all the way down the rabbit hole. I can still hear the ubuntu startup music and then the sudden BADADONK notification sounds. Wine was good enough to run my DOTA launcher (WC3) and that was all i really cared about back then. Believe it or not ubuntu was awesome back in those days. They did some 100 papercuts program focused on fixing annoying things, suddenly usability went through the roof, things just started working with less hastle. Eventually i distrohopped a bunch, i kept failing to get graphics to work on arch, stuck with fedora for a while, i was rocking intel's clear linux for a couple years but kept running into stability issues. At some point Mesa decided to be awesome and i had an AMD card and Arch installed with zero problems (I use arch BTW). I moved /home to its own partition so i can distrohop easier but i havent reinstalled an OS since i did that several years ago. Anyway, i like my setup, i'm really set in my ways and have gotten fast and efficient. I think i'll try Nix.

Guess it kinda depends what you mean by 'using Linux'. I think the first time I tried it was in 2017, I'd just built my computer and dad's a Linux user so I'd obviously heard about it before and I was at least somewhat sympathetic to the idea of free software over proprietary software, so I decided to try something out. I went with what seemed to me to be the basic safe option at the time and tried Ubuntu. I didn't last very long, found things kinda confusing and difficult, and was soon back to Windows, because I really just wanted to game with my new computer.

I think it was maybe the next year that my school decided to require people to have laptops, so I got one and since I knew I was mostly going to be doing basic tasks, I figured I'd give Linux another shot, this time I went with Mint (with cinnamon), which I'd heard was fairly similar to Windows, and it worked quite well for me so I stuck with it. Probably another year after that (2019) I actually decided, honestly largely so I could make my sister stop stealing my PC to game on so much (I knew Fortnite wouldn't run, while the games I enjoyed would lol), to switch my main desktop to Linux, this time I went with Arch and from then on it's all been Linux.

I had been using Linux in virtual machines off and on for various reasons (often just exploring) for years. It wasn't until I bought a Chromebook that I really got to digging deeper into Linux. Before Linux and Android apps on Chromebooks there was Crouton to run a full desktop chroot. I had to learn and use Linux a lot more to get the most out of this. Eventually I would install Linux on any / all secondary machines that I had since it performs so well on low resources. Flash forward to today and my favorite desktop operating systems are ChromeOS and EndeavourOS. I still use Windows 11, MacOS and Manjaro as well. There are pros and cons to all of these OSes. I just prefer ChromeOS and EOS with KDE because they are the easiest for me to get up and running ASAP on.

Late 2020. I bought a new laptop with windows 8 installed. Needless to say it sucked and had a lot of problems, in the next day it refused to boot. Then by the power of our holy lord and savior Richard Stallman, I stumbled upon a video made by Linus Tech Tips. (Not the best place to learn about linux but we all gotta start somewhere?). And now after distro hopping twice, I settled on Manjaro.

Was having driver issues on Windows Vista which led me to go Ubuntu. I've been on and off with Linux until recently with Steam and Proton. The work Valve has done to make Windows games work on Linux has been great, and I think it's trickled down to WINE in general too.

And then I'm on and off again since getting my new PC. Turns out liquid cooling and RGB aren't the best on Linux right now, especially with the components I'm using, so I've kinda stuck on Windows a bit. Maybe I should rev up VMware and handle those there where I can.

I got a laptop with windows 11 pre-installed. Everything I wanted to change was either impossible or required a bullshit workaround. Installed Linux to save me the trouble.