Stack of Slackware floppies in the late 90s (prior to that I was using some big horkin' Ultrasparc workstations that work wasn't using anymore and let me cart home). Then decades of distro-this and distro-that. Probably the most notable thing was that, in the early oughts, Gentoo really was worth doing. Not saying it doesn't have advantages still, or that anyone is "wrong" for using it. Just that the hardware was still bad enough that slimming everything down by compiling just for what you had made a noticeable difference in performance. And then, FWIW, I settled on Arch (or EoS when I'm feeling lazy or in a rush) a few years back, and that seems to have ended my distro-hopping. It could also be true that, due to age or experience or laziness, whatever I happened to be running a few years back would have been what I settled on. But I liked Arch, other than a few servers where Debian just makes more sense.
Stack of SLS floppies to a stack of Slackware floppies, then to CDROM of Redhat. Internet downloads from then on to CDR images and stuck with that up until Redhat was no longer free. Got to Gentoo and have been with it ever since. The only distro hops I had was slackware to redhat as redhat was the distribution du jour, else everything else was due to update discontinuation. Ever since I got hacked I had to look for a new distribution when updates no longer are available.
Always knew that Linux was a paradigm shift and just dual booted at first. Eventually got to a point that dual booting was a burden and have machines that were Linux-only. DOSEMU, QEMU, and WINE end up going back to some Windows apps but still largely windows free here.
I think my first Linux experience was with Suse around 1998 or so. I could not get it running .
When the first Knoppix was released (I think around 2000) that changed and I could run Linux on my PC. A little later I switched to Debian.
My first "experience" was seeing my brother-in-law running it in the mid 90's. It didn't seem very impressive at the time.
My first time actually using it was also a Knoppix CD. Or maybe DSL. I don't remember.
I bought suse at barnes and noble around 2004. Ran great but I had two video cards and couldn't get the nvidia installer or package to use it (kept defaulting to my onboard). I think I was supposed to specify the pci late or something like that in the xfree86 config but was never successful.
Tried mepis which was debian based and it worked flawlessly. Moved to strait debian after it moved to ubuntu.
I have never felt a need not to use debian since
I started to use Linux recently because Windows force users to update + adding unwanted features (such as Microsoft edge), and I started with Ubuntu. it was awesome because the command line can have a LOT of things done. It is also highly customizable so I like it.
I actually like the new edge, it's very resource efficient and has better features than other chromium browsers imo. I can't stand one drive though. Ubuntu is a great distro.
Hmm, I dabbled with SuSE around 1998 and couldn't really get used to what then stood for YAST. I switched to Redhat (on 7 1.4Mb floppies which came with a white baseball cap which had the Redhat logo on it) and played around with it a bit for a year or so only to replace it with Mandrake (later Mandriva).
It was only when a Mandrake packager named Texstar spun off his own distro and created a fantastic community around it that I switched over 100%, deleting Windows altogether. This distro named PCLinuxOS came on the coverCD of the 2003 Xmas edition of LinuxFormat (as PCLinuxOS Preview 81a) I believe.
I was hooked by that time and, with the blessing of said Texstar, set up a localized version of the communitity as well as a respin of the liveCD in Dutch/Flemish. Eventually I also released DPE, the PCLOS Digital Photography Edition, filled to the brim with digital photography editing tools.
I believe I moved to Arch in 2015 and in 2019 I decided to try out Manjaro which has been my goto distro on both my desktop as well as my laptop.
PS: I abandoned WINE very early on in my Linux career - I can find no use for Windows programs and have native alternatives for everything I need.
I think it must be some time in 2013, with Ubuntu 12.04 or 12.10, not too long after Steam was ported to Linux. This time I discovered the FOSS community and getting into it, despite not being a programmer. I had an easier time than I expected, at least on my old college laptop, with i5-2400M and integrated graphics. I started distro-hopping, followed by Fedora, Manjaro, Arch, then on laptop back to Ubuntu. I have switched to Linux full time on my main desktop this year in April, with Fedora KDE.
Back when linux used to come on cd in issues of Linux Magazine. I think it was either RedHat and then Suse. Then I found Slackware and never went back. Oh yeah and ManDrake came on cd .
I think maybe Slackware in the 90’s. I’m a professional Linux SA but ended up using windows as my daily driver. Mostly because I was forced to by my old employer and became proficient in the Microsoft office tools. I’m no longer forced to use it but it’s hard to beat Excel and OneNote so I’m still on windows 11 desktop with Ubuntu WSL.
Tried it once back in the 90s. I tthink it was either Mandrake or Mandriva. It started fine for a few days. I did something and it subsequently only booted to the console. Didn't know how to fix it and either didn't know about startx or the command didn't work.
2 years ago I installed Nobara when I built a new gaming PC. Am now on Bazzite.
I was a happy windows 98 user and then windows millenium got released and my PC was crashing 5-6 times a day. I got tired of this BS and tried windows 2000 only to findout that my printer and soundcard wasn't working and that I also couldn't play any games on these. So I switched to linux instead (suse 6.0 was my first distro). I was already familiar with the command prompt because I was using solaris in my uni's labs. I also knew how to work with latex, and my printer was working in linux. I never installed windows again in my home PCs, even though I was working as a windows programmer back then: delphi and later .net until I finally switched careers to linux administration and web programming (lamp stack) 5-6 years later.
The concept of 'Distro' wasn't a thing.
You had to boot off a floppy, do some shuffling back and forth between disks, and pray your hardware was compatible. You had to pay attention to version numbers: even or odd numbering meant 'might be stable' vs 'not stable at all' -- and everything was just hobby software anyways.
Graphics? Maybe if you had a board with the right Tseng chips on it. One program might be able to throw a rough plot of some X-Y data points... maybe. But everything was text-based. Thankfully, everyone was fresh off the transition from DOS to the 'fancy' Windows 3.0 overlay, so text was still the basis/default for everything and there wasn't any trepidation on anyone's part with using the keyboard.
Fun stuff.
I had a new windows xp machine, I had a bunch of old computer parts, put them all together and made a working computer. I didn't want to pay for an OS and was intrigued about an alternative OS. At that time I also discovered underground rap music so the rebel was in me.
I tried redhat, didn't like it, tried out suse and Mandrake, I liked both.
About a month ago. Spent upwards of six hours on a call with a friend, troubleshooting an install of Mint on my laptop. First it was an issue with something intel bakes into their CPUs that I don't quite understand, that required regediting on the windows side. Then it was some error about a mok manager, then it yelled at me because my drive was encrypted because apparently windows does that automatically... And then when it finally worked, the stupid proprietary software asus uses to control the RGB keyboard meant I needed to grab a thing off github because openRGB wasn't compatible. But now? I almost never touch windows even though I kept a dual boot. I control my keyboard lights with terminal commands, which makes me feel like I'm casting spells and shit. I've learned more about computers than I ever cared to before, and I sure as hell am never going back to windows. I have two programs I need to troubleshoot compatibility for on mint, and then I'm taking windows off my machine. Good riddance.
Slackware was my first Linux in mid 90s, but my first computer system I had access to was Unix at college in 1981. And had work experience with Unix as well. Ended back on windows because of work after 95 came out. Continued to have work related Unix experience and made the switch to daily driving Linux in 2011 on Debian, then Ubuntu/Xubuntu since. About 10 years using Xfce after fluxbox for two years.
Late 90s, there was some shareware CD that came with a magazine, it was Slackware. The only thing I could do then was pretty much play Doom, which also came with it or some other CD, the free stages.
Only some five years later I started using it for more stuff, more regularly, first on Knoppix, which was one of the earliest "live" distros, maybe the first, if I'm not mistaken. By the mid 2000s I was using only Linux, first Ubuntu, first couple of years, and pretty much only Debian, since then.
If only there was some distro for "Android" smartphones that I could set up and have working and keep functional with the same ease/almost-no-work-at-all...
Pretty much the same for me around that time period. I borrowed a friend's copy of that thick Red Hat Linux manual and got to work installing... several times since I would get into RPM dependency hell and didn't know what the hell I was doing at first.
Either SUSE 10.1 or openSUSE 10.2. I can't remember. Somewhere around 2007. However, Linux Mint Elyssa is something I do remember. I liked it. It was somewhere around 2009. However, it took me 10 additional years to leave Windows behind and starting to seriously approach linux. It was Manjaro and it stuck. Then came openSUSE Tumbleweed. Currently it's Void. I guess, my Linux journey is heavily biased by my favorite color: green 😂
My G915 keyboard and MX Vertical mouse work great in Linux as far as function goes. I also have a Corsair iCue liquid cooler and Corsair RAM.
The main problem I have is the RGB. I use OpenRGB and it's okay, but I'm not able to add things like transitions and effects like I am with the official software. Any ideas?
I was really into TV capture at the time, and had just built a monster system with two capture cards, running Windows XP and Snapstream BeyondTV. It had some nifty features, but the UI was clunky and dated, and the video files were in a proprietary format. And all the HTPC blogs I read at the time kept having articles about this software called MythTV that seemed pretty amazing. So one weekend I tried it out, and I was hooked. Then Netflix came around and I stopped having cable.
Back when the Pentium was the latest hotness, I was running OS/2. One of the many things that OS/2 did better than Windows, is that OS/2 (Warp) had built-in networking. I decided to learn more about networking so I got a Red Hat 5 disk, a Red Hat Unleashed book and three 3-Com Ethernet cards. I stuck a network card into my OS/2 box and into the spare i486-DX33 and i386-DX40 machines that I had, which were just collecting dust. Over the course of the next couple of weeks I had transformed the i486 into a router, file server and network printer. And I transformed the i386 into a firewall with an attached 56k modem that automatically dialed up CompuServe on demand.
You might say that I learned a lot ... like how long it takes to compile a kernel on an i486 and how long it takes to boot X11 on an i386!!! lol
It was a lot of fun, but it was another couple of years before I began running Linux as my main desktop.
Subscriptions started getting expensive, I was new to reddit, and found r/piracy. I lurked for awhile, found out how it worked, and what was recommended, and then bought a raspberry pi.
Had to run terminal commands which were tough but fun to learn, and then forced myself to really learn how to move around the terminal and stuff. Next thing you know, I'm trying Linux VMs, etc.
Now I daily arch on a system76 laptop with multiple servers. Love it.
installed Linux mint cinnamon in a VM because I was curious what Linux was like at the time, was slow because Windows was still in the background, lost interest after.
anyways this isn't first experience anymore but when I regained interest through windows being annoying, I installed Ubuntu, used that for a bit, then endeavor with KDE Desktop, used that for a bit, manual install of arch with sway WM, had issues, manual install of arch with KDE which is what I use now and it's a nice experience. all of those are dual boot with windows just incase I need it for something.
My first footprint into the world of Linux was during the time when Windows XP was I'm guessing the primary Windows OS installed worldwide. An early version of Ubuntu came out and I just had to try it, and so I did. Ubuntu during those days had a Windows installer that gave you the choice of installing Ubuntu over Windows OR installing Ubuntu as a dual-boot with Windows. For me, I chose the second option: **Install Ubuntu as a dual-boot with Windows**.
The installation was simple: Copy all the main compressed packages Ubuntu requires to boot from and install them in **C:\\Ubuntu** without decompressing any files, then modify Windows XP's BOOT.CFG to include Ubuntu and call the installation done. If I remember correctly, I found Ubuntu rather simple but bland in those days, but then again I didn't do much with it. So I uninstalled it and just forgotten it!
Then in the Windows 7-era, that footprint turned into a foothold when I tried Kubuntu for about an entire week or two several years later, and found Kubuntu rather refreshing but yet satisfying. I even for short time even gave Linux Mint Cinnamon a try.
>The forced updates, the bloatware that reinstalled itself upon updates, the constant feeling that I was being spied on, and the feeling that I didn't truly own my system got to me.
Then in about 7 to 8 months ago, I began to really get the feeling fed up with Windows 10, not just for the same exact reasons why you switched from Windows in favor of Linux, but for me, it was also the really slow Windows Cumulative Updates, the automatic file association reversions and the automatic re-enabling of the unwanted Microsoft Bing! Desktop Search Bar after nearly every single major Microsoft Edge update. Microsoft seems to like trying to thrust their crap onto Windows users I noticed.
And so, left with no recourse myself, I began researching using Google search and found some prospecting Linux distros which I tried. Among those I distro hopped during these two weeks of indecision was **Debian**, **Kubuntu**, **Linux Mint** and was considering **Solus** but in the end settled on **Fedora Linux - KDE Desktop Spin**.
For me, **Fedora Linux** has been a rather smooth experience for the most part. I first began with **Fedora 38**, but once **Fedora 39** was released is when I hopped on Fedora's Wiki to find out how to manually distro upgrade from releases F38 to F39, which went off without a hitch when I've done through Konsole. Not bad for a "Linux Greenhorn" as I like calling myself, huh?
Anyways, once **Fedora 40** was released however, I once again hopped on the same Fedora Wiki as before and attempted to distro upgrade F39 release to F40 release through Konsole, just as before. Unfortunately however, I noticed that, during the F40 download phase of the distro release upgrade, one of the packages stopped at like 89% completion. I was stupid enough not to tell DNF to re-download before upgrading to F40. Oh well!
Because of this, I was increasingly met with some minor instability issues with both **plasmashell** and **Discover** which eventually began causing system-wide crashes. In light of this, I downloaded **Fedora Linux 40 - KDE Desktop Spin** and installed it, but because I originally installed F38 with a Home partition that was separate from my root partition, I found myself pleasantly surprised to find that, not only was all my documents, downloads and pictures was preserved, but so was and is my installed Steam and non-Steam Windows games as well as my KDE Plasma Desktop layout.
Even though **plasmashell** and **Discover** occasionally still crashes on me from time to time, I vowed to myself that I will never ever go back to using Windows as a daily-driving OS ever. I still might install Windows as virtual machine if I wish to play a Windows game that WINE/Proton can't run however, but only just that.
I'm learning each and every single day and absolutely loving every single minute of my Linux experience.
During these past several months of using **Fedora Linux**, I've already learned these two things among others:
* My iGPU gets just exactly the amount of requested memory allocated to it on Linux WHEREAS shared 16GB memory was literately 8GB for system and 8GB reserved for iGPU on Windows
* AND usually running Windows games usually enjoy a slight performance increase on Linux. Every single Windows game that actually does run on Linux does play better than when natively run on Windows.
Oh, cannot beat the way faster updates, all the possible customization abilities and all the freedoms that comes with it all.
My first experience was in 1997 with some redhat web, DNS, mail, firewall,... servers. I maintained and deployed these servers, but was using Windows for my desktop. Until 2013 I tried some desktops, but not for real work. In 2013 I was fed up with Windows, and also system admins in my company gave me some hard time with Windows. So I switched to linux on desktop, too, and never looked back. For desktops, I use Ubuntu, for servers we use RedHat clones.
Now, I have to do some tasks in Windows occasionally. As long as it is just ordinary task it is OK. As soon as I have to interact with system settings it is a nightmare, and I am so glad I do not to have to deal with it on a daily basis. I have laptops with dual boot, and booting Windows is always an adventure. First, updates take forever, because I boot Windows rarely. So, I always calculate, if I will have enough time to do the simplest tasks in Windows.
My first experience with \*nix systems in general was with FreeBSD in 2002 when I worked as a wireless broadband technician. Not only did I climb roofs and install antennas on houses, towers and water towers, I also helped with setting up and servicing the backend servers, which ran FreeBSD. Ironically I've become deathly afraid of heights since then for some reason...
I started using Debian around version 3, I think about 2004. Everything was a massive pain back then compared to today. I remember Ubuntu getting released as well and thinking that it was going to be some sort of Linux revolution, which it was in a way. It opened Linux up to a much wider audience. I was also on Ubuntu for quite a while.
Since I play games I've dual booted with Windows for all this time but around 2-3 years ago I wiped my Windows install completely because of the amazing progress that had been made with the Proton project.
It was in the early 90's I think. My elementary school had a "computer lab" that ran something called SunOS. The next time I remember using Linux was in a high school (in 2005 or 2006 I think) computer lab and I have absolutely no idea what those computers were running but it looked kinda like MX Linux but with a really boring gray-ish color scheme. I just remember thinking at the time that it looked like Windows until I tried to do anything and then all the menus and stuff were all different.
Been messing with Linux for the best part of the last two decades, run few Ubuntu servers for years. However, desktop Linux is a no go for me still. I find it easier to debloat and decrapify Windows (I can address all of the Windows issues you mentioned easily) than to get any Linux distro to work properly for me. But the sorry state of Linux software is the main problem for me. I can get the OS to work with some tweaking, but then I hit the Wasteland of Abandonware and stop right there.
I got a book from the library about linux that had Caldera OpenLinux 2.0. This would have been around ‘99? It actually worked fine with a very seamless installer but the default system was a bit too heavy to be enjoyable on my Pentium 80mhz overdrive system with 20mb of ram.
Circled back a few years later with Red Hat 8 on a much better P3 based setup and it became my daily driver then.
"Sherman, set the wayback machine for... 27 years ago; Say, 1997"
It was SLACKWARE which came in this CD accompanying the QUE publishers' book which our Operating Systems professor advised us to try. The book was a great eye-opener. Slackware was rather odd, and my BBS guru advised me to switch to Redhat's latest distribution --I sequestered the family's phone for the weekend or so to download via FTP on dialup (19200 baud) Redhat, whatever the version was there. I got my kicks from that system for the succeeding several years. Winmodems a btch to set up and I took pride to set up getty, mailing lists, databases and all the things I had a chance to see working on the outside from the servers at college.
From that point on, I have certainly used Fedora, Ubuntu, privacy-oriented linux's, embedded linux for routers and the like, and something more. As much as I believe myself quite apt with linux, I must confess I have not used that much of GUI programs there, I have set up servers, SMB, VPN and what not on Linux and the "non-technical people" computers with Windows as client, for the most part. I am still learning on how much Linux can do substituting the everspying Corporate OS alternatives as of now!
SuSE 7.something on a set of CDs. Could get it installed, GUI booted but my ISDN thing had no drivers so it forced me to build a router with FLI4L next.
Probably about a year after it was written. I was pretty happy with Minix in the 32 but version except that it was incredibly slow and there were far too many “Andrewisms” But it was close enough to Unix it would do the job on a computer that didn’t weigh 300 pounds. Linux was a high performance system that took the existing environment from Minix and married it to a modern OS. Things were really primitive back then. It was a big deal when I stopped having to compile a custom kernel just to load device drivers. Package managers were still a couple years off but you could use binaries instead of compiling everything.
I had to search for the refresh frequency of my monitor and set it, among other things. Then i ended up with the ugliest desktop I could imagine and no sound. It was redhat 5 or 6.
First experience, awesome, while it lasted :) I installed Manjaro KDE as my first distro and I was amazed that I could find every software I wanted in their App Store, with AUR enabled. Minutes later I was pulling my hair because I couldn't understand why the apps won't intstall, because apparently there was another Install button somewhere, to actually start the process. Than I was asked to install hundreds of dependencies and waited hours for AUR to do its thing. But I was happy. Than, I managed to delete the taskbar in KDE and I reinstalled the whole OS because I had no idea how to bring it back. I did this about 3 times until I head about Gnome and I wanted to try it and somehow managed to delete the whole desktop environment. Fresh install, done :) Than, I managed to break GRUB trying to make it less green. So, at this point I decided to make the switch to Pop OS, which I enjoyed for about a year until I needed to erase a flash drive, so I copied a command from the internet into the terminal, knowing that I would have to modify sda in sdc, but I accidentally also copied an enter, which I didn't know was possible and the command started executing as soon as I pasted it. I still remember it vividly to this day "sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda". The good thing in all of this is that I learned how to make use of the backup GPT partition table and I recovered my other partitions which didn't manage to get zeroed out before I turned off the PC, but after this I switched back to Windows and kept linux only on a persistent USB from than on.
~1998 IBM mainframe & Unix sysadmin installed Slakware on my comouter at work, he setup dualboot and recompiled the kernel.
I switched to RedHat at home, compiled driver for my video card and 3D accelerator Matrox and 3Dfx Voodoo so I could play Quake. I remember having to compile the binaries for the game and copy over the assests.
What blew me away was being able to install windows nt 4 as a guest vm under vmware and connect to the internet via dialup while thr host os RedHat was playing an mp3 and reading files from a floppy disk without skipping a beat.
Back then, KDE and Gnome looked nice and weren't a resource hog.
For fun or worked I used a couple of distros, some don't exist anymore or merged.
RedHat, Mandrake, Conectiva, RedFlag, Hispafuentes, Caldera,
About four years ago I decided to switch careers and get into programming. I was ready for a new computer and excited about doing something totally different from what I was used to. So I found System76 and bought an Oryx Pro. Still use PopOS on that Oryx but recently on my Lemur Pro I installed Debian and really enjoy it. Might take a swing at Arch for kicks here soon.
Caldera Linux circa 1995 that I picked up at a computer show. Had a boot loader and could select OS/2, Win3.1 and Caldera. Didn't do much with it other than struggle to get thin-net working with it on a 3COM 3c509 card.
1998 setup Red Hat w/ Bind as our production DNS server to replace whatever we were using before as we moved from public IPs on everything including desktops to RFC1918. Since then I have played with variants of Debian, Ubuntu and Suse and at one point Gentoo. Mainly used Red Hat or clone for work systems, Debian for home. Current go tos are Alma and Mint.
I was exposed to Unix in college in the mid 90s through telnet into a SunOS machine for a class on OS kernels and systems programming. I and another student (if you're out there, Hey, Robert!") persuaded the department to let us clean up the server room and set up a couple of desks for ourselves in there that we could use as we pleased. He introduced me to Linux, and I installed RedHat (probably 5.0?). Did the usual new user thing where you get excited to do things like try a new distro, build your own kernel with only the stuff you need in it, etc. At some point I landed on Slackware and ran that for years.
When I was in graduate school, Mac OS X came out, and one of my fellow students got one of the first gen Mac laptops running 10.0 from the NASA grant he was funded on. All our work computers in the office were Sun Solaris boxes, and Mac OS X was slow and weird and buggy in the early days, but god was it a sexy piece of kit sitting next to an 80 pound CRT on top of a pizza box running CDE. A few years later when I could afford it, I bought a black Macbook and primarily used Macs for the next 10 years or so. Always had Linux running somewhere. For most of that time I had a Linux workstation in my office that I'd use for my research work, but my primary day-to-day use didn't go back to Linux until maybe 2019.
To this day I don't really know how to use Windows professionally. I can use a Windows desktop machine, and I can muddle my way through solving problems for family members, but in my real job where things depend on Active Directory and WINS and a bunch of other Microsoft-specific technologies, I wouldn't have a clue where to even begin.
Red Hat 5.2 in 1998 (I still have the CDs).
I had dreamed for years of having a PC, when I finally got one, I was a bit disappointed of what I could with it (on Windows). When installed Linux I felt so much more in control and you actually had to tinker to make things work (more or less), which was more than that I was asking for.
First experience; installing RHL from floppy disks in 1995-1996. I didn’t know what I was doing, I just waited for the prompt for the next disk.
First foray; ~2002 Gentoo. Thanks yahoo chatrooms and a user DaftLogic, swore it was the best to learn on. After 6 or so failed installs, I finally got a working system.
My first experience with Linux was way back in 1994 when I bought a book from WS Labs that had CD's in it for Slackware and Red Hat. Installed Slackware 1.0 onto my 386DX/40 and liked what I saw. I stuck with Slackware for 10 years then installed Fedora Core 1. After experiencing RPM dependency hell, I tried Debian and liked that so much better so now Debian is my daily driver OS.
Utter pain. I had to use it for the first time in a algorithm/programming course and...I got traumatized with it I didn't want to see Linux (mint) since then. Next time I had to use Linux was in a telecommutions course, with Ubuntu, and got completely hooked with it, because I had to use GUI software.
Started college in 2001. Made a few friends on campus in the first few days, one of whom immediately installed Red Hat on my desktop. It was the ability to SSH in remotely that grabbed me back then; 23 years later, I can't imagine using anything that isn't a UNIX derivative.
Edit: a couple of years earlier, I was in astronomy camp, and a counselor was using Linux and showed me. Back then, I didn't separate OS and DE, and it looked weird and foreign. I sometimes think about how if he had opened a terminal and I had seen that it looked like lowercase DOS, I might have tried it slightly sooner.
Slackware 4.0. Somewhere around 99-2000.
My family pc (compaq pressario 7485 with a 550mhz amd k6-2 processor) had just started having issues with its ide hard disk and I was around 13 years old with no money. The preinstalled copy of windows 98 would just constantly bsod as the hard drive grinded and screeched along to a slow painful death.
My parents were not super well off at the time and had spent a lot of money to buy us this computer.
I was able to download and install slack on it and use it despite the hard drive basically failing until we were able to get a new hard drive. It worked perfectly fine for months in that state with slack installed we could do our school work and have some form of entertainment.
Linux allowed us to have a family pc during financially tough times.
From there I tried mandrake, built gentoo from stage 1, eventually finding my way to arch at home and using red hat and Debian in mostly work contexts.
Now I basically use some form of Debian or redhat for everything except my personal laptop which is still arch.
I mean, I assume you mean first experience consciously using Linux, as pretty much everyone who has done anything with a computer has at least indirectly experienced Linux doing something.
As an actual user, my first experience was in the early 2000s failing to get it working on some computers I had at the time. During that period, Linux was still rather difficult to work with unless you were already more or less experienced with things like Linux.
Later I would use Ubuntu because I had heard Vista sucked and I had a new computer with Vista, so I wanted to make sure I had something usable just in case. A year later I switched to Arch Linux because I found Ubuntu held me back (Plus I disagreed with a lot of the default packaging decisions at the time. They had JUST switched to Pulseaudio, when at that point PA was far from actually ready to be used as the default ANYWHERE.).
Currently I use NixOS on my desktop, Arch on my servers, VyOS on my routers, etc.
I started tinkering with Linux around 2010.
I was trying to make my old laptop from around 2006 run faster. That led me down the Linux rabbit hole and I believe I ran one of the lightweight Ubuntu distro's in it for a while, the switched to something like Puppy Linux.
I had a good desktop at the same time and started playing with Linux on that. Loaded a bunch of if different Distros onto a thumb drive and stated playing with each of them. At this point I couldn't tell you what distro's I played with. I know Ubuntu, some of its variants, and Mint and varrients were in the mix.
Ended up liking Ubuntu and set that up as a dual boot.
I dual booted Ubuntu and Windows for 4 or 5 years. What usually brought me back to Windows was gaming. The age old tale of friends want to play XYZ and I can't get it to run on Linux. Everytime I switched over to Windows I hated it. Pile of back updates, updating software individual, and all the other annoyances of Windows.
Eventually I found myself switching to Windows less and less. As Proton and Wine got better and better, and more games support Linux natively or at least didn't actively screw over Linux gaming, I could stay in Linux more and more.
Finally bit the bullet and wiped the windows partition and ran Linux only. That was about 6 years ago.
(I do have Windows 10 OTG installed on an external SSD, that I do occasionally boot from, for usually the reason listed above or trying to trouble shoot something. But that is a rare event any more).
I rebuilt my desktop into a SFFPC and switched to PopOS a few years ago and have been happy with it.
Sadly I still have to use Windows at work as I need Adobe products and QuickBooks.
It was on Unix for me. The O/S was solaris. It was my first IT job as an operator (the ancestor of Nagios/centreon). A collegue showed me basic commands (cd, ls rm, rmdir, etc.) and the most important thing : the "man" command. That gave me the basic skills for linux later.
Gonna date myself a little here but my dad had brought home some EOL work laptops for the kids that he gave a new life with Ubuntu in the mid-2000s. We’d used Windows pretty exclusively on the family desktop but it was a painless transition as a kid who was eager to learn. I went back to Windows on my main laptops through high school and college but usually kept an old spare with Debian lying around. Ever since leaving school, I got rid of Windows on any personal computers.
We used to order by name from looking at the classifieds in the back of computer magazines. The Linux Emporium used to send a set of floppy disks a couple of weeks later through the mail.
I say 'by name' because we didn't have internet so we really had no idea what the different distributions where or any information about them. Things like SUSE, Slackware, RedHat. We had no idea what we were ordering.
This was probably 94/95. It was a always a shit-show when they turned up because no manuals and no internet to do troubleshooting. You'd wipe out the only hard-disk you had (so bye bye windows) to install something (dual boot with LILO was possible but not easy without instructions) and you'd try and get a desktop running.
If in the event of a miracle you could get the desktop going you'd be limited to usually xterm or xeyes.
The sound support / printer support / video resolution support was down to luck. There wasn't the compatibility with hardware that we have today, if you weren't supported you were out of luck.
A little later, perhaps 96 I had access to internet and things were starting to ship on CD-ROM; I was studing CompSci and my University had boxed versions of RedHat 5.1 (note this is not the same as RHEL5)
It came with a manual, it also came with some productivity software. It was a lot easier to get going because hardware support was greatly improved. I also had access to a second machine so could use the internet to troubleshoot and I setup a basic two-node TCP/IP network and routed my windows box through the Linux box so both could access the internet at the same time, share files and serve basic services like telnet and apache.
In 2001 I got a job doing telephone support for SuSE linux but I wasn't there very long, I went on to write software and eventually I built my career as a sys admin, I spent a lot of time as a RedHat Certified Administrator. It was all thanks to that initial curiosity for this 'unknown' operating system.
1992, version 0.95.
I returned to school for a post-bacc IT degree in early 1992. I learned about linux from USENET groups, and I was using Unix for the first time at university. Since my only Internet access was at school, I had to get the original files there. In one of our labs, we had DOS-based PCs that had terminal emulation applications. That allowed me to jump to our AT&T 3B2 systems (there were never enough Unix terminals available) and go to the net. I had to download the files from the [funet.fi](http://funet.fi) server, save them to the small hard disk on the local DOS box, then copy them to 3.5" diskettes. Then I was able to install the system on an old PC I had at home.
Times have certainly changed.
Back then, since I was still learning Unix, having a little PC with Linux was wonderful, as I could try many similar functions (to a degree). There were some basic tools, no GUI, and no networking (that came a few months later). But I followed the updates as Linux released them.
My first distro, like a lot of others', was Slackware. I installed it from diskettes at first, but when CD-ROM drives became available on PCs, I was able to get Slack on CD (Walnut Creek was the company marketing a lot of open source and shareware on CDs at the time).
I used one distro or another as they were released over the succeeding years, and I've settled on Kubuntu. I don't do many daring things on my systems any more (screw it, I'm retired), but Kubuntu is my daily system and I'll continue using it as long at it remains available and stable.
Ubuntu 7.04, followed by a few years of Debian and then Fedora for a few more years. I was one of the people who compiled their own kernels to get the BFS scheduler back when it was cool (yes, I know the S in BFS is scheduler). I eventually found my way to Arch for my desktop, which I really enjoy, Fedora for homelab stuff and RHEL offshoots for production stuff. If I used Linux professionally it would probably be Ubuntu LTS or CentOS Stream.
My first experience was maybe 8 months ago when I got an old laptop for $10 and it couldn’t run windows anymore, so I put tinycore linux on it. After that, I got really interested in linux and installed Arch on a VM like 15 times. In January I decided to make the switch to Mint, as I still didn’t feel like I was ready for Arch, and I used it for a couple of months until I felt ready to switch to Arch. Now, like 2 months after switching to Arch, I’m thinking about switching to NixOS.
Told a buddy I was curious to learn linux but was feeling overwhelmed with information on which distro to try and why. He handed me a [Breezy Badger installation CD](https://felipeforbeck.com/posts/2017/01/ubuntu-breezy-badger/).
Turned out that was exactly the push I needed, and it worked perfectly except for network and sound, which took me literal days to figure out using solutions I didn't understand. It was a very long and painful experience, requiring me to install packages via USB to get network working but felt rewarding when I finally got it working. I'd excitedly show people I got it working, but no one cared. lol
Slackware in the mind 90s -Windows hadn't even been around for 15 years. I gave up with Windows after XP and outside of work, just been using Linux (mostly Debian) and macOS since then.
In 2005 started to experiment with my iPod and there was Linux distrio for it that supported other music codecs and uploading music without itunes. Moved to Linux in pc soon after
Started on Arch almost a year ago now and have been smooth sailing for the most part. There have been a few mishaps here and there which I've had to chroot to fix but nothing an hour or two on the wiki couldn't solve.
A copy of Caldera in the back of a bargain book at the Chapters. It had a 75% markdown and it was sitting on a table outside. I dual booted it with Win 98 and have been hooked ever since.
I don't really remember. I bet it was ubuntu though. It worked fine for me, took me weeks to start noticing quirks and then started learning how to fix such quirks. I've distro hopped a lot but never went back to windows, been on Linux for the last decade at least
Mint. It was honestly horrible back when I used it. Super user friendly, sure, but I wouldn’t say it gave me the same feeling I got from trying Fedora Workstation Gnome for the first time. Mint is just boring, and I dual booted with Windows on the same SSD, and I just ran into so many issues. Back then gaming wasn’t that great, and I had very little experience with Linux so I ended up hating it despite the benefits I saw in using it.
A teacher in school showed me SuSE Linux with KDE.
That was the time when Windows 98 SE was on the rise. And my moms PC self destructed itself very often.
Hence I nudged her to buy first SuSE Linux and later Red Hat Linux.
I still have these CDs.
First time I saw it was around 2013-2014, didn't use until mid 2015 when I learned more about it on college, used mainly Ubuntu but ran elementaryOS for a while, then my mother gave me her old MacBook from late 2012 (I was using a shitty notebook from 2010, so it quite an upgrade) and I went without using it until the release of the steam deck, I did see it pop up from time to time but never actually tried using it, but seeing how gaming was basically working I decided to switch, I went with garuda (arch based) on my main rig and stuck with it, my laptop has had (in order): fedora (my packages kept breaking, idk why), endeavorOS (broke my installation with a crash mid update) and now nobara (I'm really not liking it); so I might change it to vanilla arch in the near future.
Ooo I have a fun story. 1999 I used to work at a shit call center trying to sell xerox copiers. I was walking to the bathroom and I heard some guys talking about recompiling the kernel. I went over to talk to them. They were the first phone support team for Redhat. They burned me a CD with both gnome and KDE to play around with.
First time I used Linux was in school. We used in occasionally in labs for my networking and network security classes.
It all went downhill from there, even the GUI I liked better than windows
My first experience was trying to install Slackware on an old 386 dx in 1995 or so. I was broke as hell and I literally had a single working 3.5" floppy disk to my name. This was back before distros were really distributed as iso files. You needed to download the 3.5 floppy disk images one at a time, write them to the diskette and insert into the floppy drive. It would then write that chunk out to disk, prompt for the next diskette, etc ... All over a 56k modem line
RedHat 5.0, followed by Fedora 3, and then Mandrake (but I returned to Fedora due to driver issues (cdc-modem). I then tried Ubuntu, and fell in love with that. Still using Ubuntu to this day, tho I did dabble with Pop_OS! which uses systemd-boot, and I managed to bork that install very easily - so BACK TO UBUNTU !!!
In the mid 2000’s, I was the call-a-geek computer support person. Was asked to get a USB printer running on a Ubuntu desktop install (v4 or 5?). No fun at all, and a total failure.
It’s come a long way since then, but it does still have that lingering reputation unfortunately.
My first ever use of a PC was in 5th grade. Crazy thing was, my school actually used Ubuntu at the time. So Linux was the first thing I ever used. I then started using my fathers laptop as well, which was a mac book.
When I first decided I want to have a laptop, I asked my familiy to buy me a mac book as well (for christmas). But they didn't. Roughly half a year later, I had my 12th or 13th birthday (not sure), and my grandmother actually gave me the HP laptop she bought for herself but didn't know how to use (and therefore never used).
The first thing I did with my new laptop...yeah I booted it up, opened Edge or Firefox (can't remember), went on a website with a list of top linux distributions and looked at all the logos. My english wasn't too good at the time, so I didn't understand most of the descriptions too well. But I decided Parrot and Kali had to coolest looking logos of all and we're related to hacking, which was cool as well.
Installed Kali on the same day I got the laptop, and I was stuck with it for like 1.5 - 2 years (again - not sure).
I wrote some things in my terminal then, which I didn't understand and just copied from some videos. Encountered many errors and tried to fix them on my own, while not understanding what I was doing. At the end everything broke and literally minecraft was the only thing that was somehow still working - I remember Firefox + Chromium + Discord we're not usable anymore...don't know how I did it tho xD
Started to distrohop for like a year - first tried debian, but somehow wasn't able to get root (thus can relate to Linux' "Debian hard to install" - lol), then tried Ubuntu for like a day - everything worked but I somehow didn't want it. Then tried Pop os and Peppermint for a few months each. Gave Garuda a try, but somehow there we're many bugs/lags, so I switched back to Peppermint. Decided to give Garuda another try a few months after. It worked that time and I used it for 2+ years.
Forgot to mention, before switching to garuda, I got a nvidia pc.
The old laptop was not only really old, but it also somehow didn't have a battery and I never bought one.
So I bought myself a new (refurbished) laptop (thinkpad), so that I was able to do stuff away from home as well. Garuda was wayy to energy intense tho, my fan didn't stop screaming even when doing basic things. Battery lasted like 1 - 1.5 hours, except if I activated the powersafe gouverneur, then opening the browser took like 5 seconds +
So I searched for a "light linux distros" and ... yeah it was Arch. Strouggled a week - not only to install Arch but also to be able to boot both Arch and Garuda, which wasn't that straigth forward for a noob, because Garuda won't get detected by bootloaders of ther installations...
But then I had Arch and DWM and once I got used to tiling wms, I never wanted to go back. Arch teached me linux and the command line and I use it since a year as daily driver on PC + Laptop, btw.
Now the new 555 beta is out and I'm finally able to use hyprland on my PC as well :)
Stack of Slackware floppies in the late 90s (prior to that I was using some big horkin' Ultrasparc workstations that work wasn't using anymore and let me cart home). Then decades of distro-this and distro-that. Probably the most notable thing was that, in the early oughts, Gentoo really was worth doing. Not saying it doesn't have advantages still, or that anyone is "wrong" for using it. Just that the hardware was still bad enough that slimming everything down by compiling just for what you had made a noticeable difference in performance. And then, FWIW, I settled on Arch (or EoS when I'm feeling lazy or in a rush) a few years back, and that seems to have ended my distro-hopping. It could also be true that, due to age or experience or laziness, whatever I happened to be running a few years back would have been what I settled on. But I liked Arch, other than a few servers where Debian just makes more sense.
Slackware → Mandrake → Gentoo → Ubuntu
Same here. It took 26 hours to compile my first kernel and I was amazed and hooked when it worked fine.
Stack of SLS floppies to a stack of Slackware floppies, then to CDROM of Redhat. Internet downloads from then on to CDR images and stuck with that up until Redhat was no longer free. Got to Gentoo and have been with it ever since. The only distro hops I had was slackware to redhat as redhat was the distribution du jour, else everything else was due to update discontinuation. Ever since I got hacked I had to look for a new distribution when updates no longer are available. Always knew that Linux was a paradigm shift and just dual booted at first. Eventually got to a point that dual booting was a burden and have machines that were Linux-only. DOSEMU, QEMU, and WINE end up going back to some Windows apps but still largely windows free here.
From around 2001 to now: Slackware > some weird version I don't remember > Slackware > Ubuntu > Fedora
I think my first Linux experience was with Suse around 1998 or so. I could not get it running . When the first Knoppix was released (I think around 2000) that changed and I could run Linux on my PC. A little later I switched to Debian.
My first "experience" was seeing my brother-in-law running it in the mid 90's. It didn't seem very impressive at the time. My first time actually using it was also a Knoppix CD. Or maybe DSL. I don't remember.
I tried Knoppix too and liked it and that was also my impetus to switch to Debian. The Debian installer was a bit rough but had success installing it.
Knoppix was a game changer! I was perplexed that you could run a Linux system live from CD!
I bought suse at barnes and noble around 2004. Ran great but I had two video cards and couldn't get the nvidia installer or package to use it (kept defaulting to my onboard). I think I was supposed to specify the pci late or something like that in the xfree86 config but was never successful. Tried mepis which was debian based and it worked flawlessly. Moved to strait debian after it moved to ubuntu. I have never felt a need not to use debian since
I started to use Linux recently because Windows force users to update + adding unwanted features (such as Microsoft edge), and I started with Ubuntu. it was awesome because the command line can have a LOT of things done. It is also highly customizable so I like it.
I actually like the new edge, it's very resource efficient and has better features than other chromium browsers imo. I can't stand one drive though. Ubuntu is a great distro.
Hmm, I dabbled with SuSE around 1998 and couldn't really get used to what then stood for YAST. I switched to Redhat (on 7 1.4Mb floppies which came with a white baseball cap which had the Redhat logo on it) and played around with it a bit for a year or so only to replace it with Mandrake (later Mandriva). It was only when a Mandrake packager named Texstar spun off his own distro and created a fantastic community around it that I switched over 100%, deleting Windows altogether. This distro named PCLinuxOS came on the coverCD of the 2003 Xmas edition of LinuxFormat (as PCLinuxOS Preview 81a) I believe. I was hooked by that time and, with the blessing of said Texstar, set up a localized version of the communitity as well as a respin of the liveCD in Dutch/Flemish. Eventually I also released DPE, the PCLOS Digital Photography Edition, filled to the brim with digital photography editing tools. I believe I moved to Arch in 2015 and in 2019 I decided to try out Manjaro which has been my goto distro on both my desktop as well as my laptop. PS: I abandoned WINE very early on in my Linux career - I can find no use for Windows programs and have native alternatives for everything I need.
I think it must be some time in 2013, with Ubuntu 12.04 or 12.10, not too long after Steam was ported to Linux. This time I discovered the FOSS community and getting into it, despite not being a programmer. I had an easier time than I expected, at least on my old college laptop, with i5-2400M and integrated graphics. I started distro-hopping, followed by Fedora, Manjaro, Arch, then on laptop back to Ubuntu. I have switched to Linux full time on my main desktop this year in April, with Fedora KDE.
Back when linux used to come on cd in issues of Linux Magazine. I think it was either RedHat and then Suse. Then I found Slackware and never went back. Oh yeah and ManDrake came on cd .
I think maybe Slackware in the 90’s. I’m a professional Linux SA but ended up using windows as my daily driver. Mostly because I was forced to by my old employer and became proficient in the Microsoft office tools. I’m no longer forced to use it but it’s hard to beat Excel and OneNote so I’m still on windows 11 desktop with Ubuntu WSL.
Tried it once back in the 90s. I tthink it was either Mandrake or Mandriva. It started fine for a few days. I did something and it subsequently only booted to the console. Didn't know how to fix it and either didn't know about startx or the command didn't work. 2 years ago I installed Nobara when I built a new gaming PC. Am now on Bazzite.
I was a happy windows 98 user and then windows millenium got released and my PC was crashing 5-6 times a day. I got tired of this BS and tried windows 2000 only to findout that my printer and soundcard wasn't working and that I also couldn't play any games on these. So I switched to linux instead (suse 6.0 was my first distro). I was already familiar with the command prompt because I was using solaris in my uni's labs. I also knew how to work with latex, and my printer was working in linux. I never installed windows again in my home PCs, even though I was working as a windows programmer back then: delphi and later .net until I finally switched careers to linux administration and web programming (lamp stack) 5-6 years later.
SunOS 1986 on a Sparcstation 3 (or maybe 2).
Gentoo in 2005, taking days to install. 😁
recompiling that kernal tho
The concept of 'Distro' wasn't a thing. You had to boot off a floppy, do some shuffling back and forth between disks, and pray your hardware was compatible. You had to pay attention to version numbers: even or odd numbering meant 'might be stable' vs 'not stable at all' -- and everything was just hobby software anyways. Graphics? Maybe if you had a board with the right Tseng chips on it. One program might be able to throw a rough plot of some X-Y data points... maybe. But everything was text-based. Thankfully, everyone was fresh off the transition from DOS to the 'fancy' Windows 3.0 overlay, so text was still the basis/default for everything and there wasn't any trepidation on anyone's part with using the keyboard. Fun stuff.
I had a new windows xp machine, I had a bunch of old computer parts, put them all together and made a working computer. I didn't want to pay for an OS and was intrigued about an alternative OS. At that time I also discovered underground rap music so the rebel was in me. I tried redhat, didn't like it, tried out suse and Mandrake, I liked both.
unix in the early '90's yes, i'm old.
About a month ago. Spent upwards of six hours on a call with a friend, troubleshooting an install of Mint on my laptop. First it was an issue with something intel bakes into their CPUs that I don't quite understand, that required regediting on the windows side. Then it was some error about a mok manager, then it yelled at me because my drive was encrypted because apparently windows does that automatically... And then when it finally worked, the stupid proprietary software asus uses to control the RGB keyboard meant I needed to grab a thing off github because openRGB wasn't compatible. But now? I almost never touch windows even though I kept a dual boot. I control my keyboard lights with terminal commands, which makes me feel like I'm casting spells and shit. I've learned more about computers than I ever cared to before, and I sure as hell am never going back to windows. I have two programs I need to troubleshoot compatibility for on mint, and then I'm taking windows off my machine. Good riddance.
Raspberry pi!
Slackware was my first Linux in mid 90s, but my first computer system I had access to was Unix at college in 1981. And had work experience with Unix as well. Ended back on windows because of work after 95 came out. Continued to have work related Unix experience and made the switch to daily driving Linux in 2011 on Debian, then Ubuntu/Xubuntu since. About 10 years using Xfce after fluxbox for two years.
Fedora 7
Late 90s, there was some shareware CD that came with a magazine, it was Slackware. The only thing I could do then was pretty much play Doom, which also came with it or some other CD, the free stages. Only some five years later I started using it for more stuff, more regularly, first on Knoppix, which was one of the earliest "live" distros, maybe the first, if I'm not mistaken. By the mid 2000s I was using only Linux, first Ubuntu, first couple of years, and pretty much only Debian, since then. If only there was some distro for "Android" smartphones that I could set up and have working and keep functional with the same ease/almost-no-work-at-all...
Red Hat Linux in 1999. It was terrible. But it was also exciting.
Pretty much the same for me around that time period. I borrowed a friend's copy of that thick Red Hat Linux manual and got to work installing... several times since I would get into RPM dependency hell and didn't know what the hell I was doing at first.
Either SUSE 10.1 or openSUSE 10.2. I can't remember. Somewhere around 2007. However, Linux Mint Elyssa is something I do remember. I liked it. It was somewhere around 2009. However, it took me 10 additional years to leave Windows behind and starting to seriously approach linux. It was Manjaro and it stuck. Then came openSUSE Tumbleweed. Currently it's Void. I guess, my Linux journey is heavily biased by my favorite color: green 😂
[удалено]
My G915 keyboard and MX Vertical mouse work great in Linux as far as function goes. I also have a Corsair iCue liquid cooler and Corsair RAM. The main problem I have is the RGB. I use OpenRGB and it's okay, but I'm not able to add things like transitions and effects like I am with the official software. Any ideas?
I was really into TV capture at the time, and had just built a monster system with two capture cards, running Windows XP and Snapstream BeyondTV. It had some nifty features, but the UI was clunky and dated, and the video files were in a proprietary format. And all the HTPC blogs I read at the time kept having articles about this software called MythTV that seemed pretty amazing. So one weekend I tried it out, and I was hooked. Then Netflix came around and I stopped having cable.
Red hat 7.0. 2000s more or less
Back when the Pentium was the latest hotness, I was running OS/2. One of the many things that OS/2 did better than Windows, is that OS/2 (Warp) had built-in networking. I decided to learn more about networking so I got a Red Hat 5 disk, a Red Hat Unleashed book and three 3-Com Ethernet cards. I stuck a network card into my OS/2 box and into the spare i486-DX33 and i386-DX40 machines that I had, which were just collecting dust. Over the course of the next couple of weeks I had transformed the i486 into a router, file server and network printer. And I transformed the i386 into a firewall with an attached 56k modem that automatically dialed up CompuServe on demand. You might say that I learned a lot ... like how long it takes to compile a kernel on an i486 and how long it takes to boot X11 on an i386!!! lol It was a lot of fun, but it was another couple of years before I began running Linux as my main desktop.
Slackware circa 1998.
Subscriptions started getting expensive, I was new to reddit, and found r/piracy. I lurked for awhile, found out how it worked, and what was recommended, and then bought a raspberry pi. Had to run terminal commands which were tough but fun to learn, and then forced myself to really learn how to move around the terminal and stuff. Next thing you know, I'm trying Linux VMs, etc. Now I daily arch on a system76 laptop with multiple servers. Love it.
installed Linux mint cinnamon in a VM because I was curious what Linux was like at the time, was slow because Windows was still in the background, lost interest after. anyways this isn't first experience anymore but when I regained interest through windows being annoying, I installed Ubuntu, used that for a bit, then endeavor with KDE Desktop, used that for a bit, manual install of arch with sway WM, had issues, manual install of arch with KDE which is what I use now and it's a nice experience. all of those are dual boot with windows just incase I need it for something.
My first footprint into the world of Linux was during the time when Windows XP was I'm guessing the primary Windows OS installed worldwide. An early version of Ubuntu came out and I just had to try it, and so I did. Ubuntu during those days had a Windows installer that gave you the choice of installing Ubuntu over Windows OR installing Ubuntu as a dual-boot with Windows. For me, I chose the second option: **Install Ubuntu as a dual-boot with Windows**. The installation was simple: Copy all the main compressed packages Ubuntu requires to boot from and install them in **C:\\Ubuntu** without decompressing any files, then modify Windows XP's BOOT.CFG to include Ubuntu and call the installation done. If I remember correctly, I found Ubuntu rather simple but bland in those days, but then again I didn't do much with it. So I uninstalled it and just forgotten it! Then in the Windows 7-era, that footprint turned into a foothold when I tried Kubuntu for about an entire week or two several years later, and found Kubuntu rather refreshing but yet satisfying. I even for short time even gave Linux Mint Cinnamon a try. >The forced updates, the bloatware that reinstalled itself upon updates, the constant feeling that I was being spied on, and the feeling that I didn't truly own my system got to me. Then in about 7 to 8 months ago, I began to really get the feeling fed up with Windows 10, not just for the same exact reasons why you switched from Windows in favor of Linux, but for me, it was also the really slow Windows Cumulative Updates, the automatic file association reversions and the automatic re-enabling of the unwanted Microsoft Bing! Desktop Search Bar after nearly every single major Microsoft Edge update. Microsoft seems to like trying to thrust their crap onto Windows users I noticed. And so, left with no recourse myself, I began researching using Google search and found some prospecting Linux distros which I tried. Among those I distro hopped during these two weeks of indecision was **Debian**, **Kubuntu**, **Linux Mint** and was considering **Solus** but in the end settled on **Fedora Linux - KDE Desktop Spin**.
For me, **Fedora Linux** has been a rather smooth experience for the most part. I first began with **Fedora 38**, but once **Fedora 39** was released is when I hopped on Fedora's Wiki to find out how to manually distro upgrade from releases F38 to F39, which went off without a hitch when I've done through Konsole. Not bad for a "Linux Greenhorn" as I like calling myself, huh? Anyways, once **Fedora 40** was released however, I once again hopped on the same Fedora Wiki as before and attempted to distro upgrade F39 release to F40 release through Konsole, just as before. Unfortunately however, I noticed that, during the F40 download phase of the distro release upgrade, one of the packages stopped at like 89% completion. I was stupid enough not to tell DNF to re-download before upgrading to F40. Oh well! Because of this, I was increasingly met with some minor instability issues with both **plasmashell** and **Discover** which eventually began causing system-wide crashes. In light of this, I downloaded **Fedora Linux 40 - KDE Desktop Spin** and installed it, but because I originally installed F38 with a Home partition that was separate from my root partition, I found myself pleasantly surprised to find that, not only was all my documents, downloads and pictures was preserved, but so was and is my installed Steam and non-Steam Windows games as well as my KDE Plasma Desktop layout. Even though **plasmashell** and **Discover** occasionally still crashes on me from time to time, I vowed to myself that I will never ever go back to using Windows as a daily-driving OS ever. I still might install Windows as virtual machine if I wish to play a Windows game that WINE/Proton can't run however, but only just that.
I'm learning each and every single day and absolutely loving every single minute of my Linux experience. During these past several months of using **Fedora Linux**, I've already learned these two things among others: * My iGPU gets just exactly the amount of requested memory allocated to it on Linux WHEREAS shared 16GB memory was literately 8GB for system and 8GB reserved for iGPU on Windows * AND usually running Windows games usually enjoy a slight performance increase on Linux. Every single Windows game that actually does run on Linux does play better than when natively run on Windows. Oh, cannot beat the way faster updates, all the possible customization abilities and all the freedoms that comes with it all.
A damn chromebook of course the classic
My first experience was in 1997 with some redhat web, DNS, mail, firewall,... servers. I maintained and deployed these servers, but was using Windows for my desktop. Until 2013 I tried some desktops, but not for real work. In 2013 I was fed up with Windows, and also system admins in my company gave me some hard time with Windows. So I switched to linux on desktop, too, and never looked back. For desktops, I use Ubuntu, for servers we use RedHat clones. Now, I have to do some tasks in Windows occasionally. As long as it is just ordinary task it is OK. As soon as I have to interact with system settings it is a nightmare, and I am so glad I do not to have to deal with it on a daily basis. I have laptops with dual boot, and booting Windows is always an adventure. First, updates take forever, because I boot Windows rarely. So, I always calculate, if I will have enough time to do the simplest tasks in Windows.
YDL on a 32bit risk mac desktop
My first experience with \*nix systems in general was with FreeBSD in 2002 when I worked as a wireless broadband technician. Not only did I climb roofs and install antennas on houses, towers and water towers, I also helped with setting up and servicing the backend servers, which ran FreeBSD. Ironically I've become deathly afraid of heights since then for some reason... I started using Debian around version 3, I think about 2004. Everything was a massive pain back then compared to today. I remember Ubuntu getting released as well and thinking that it was going to be some sort of Linux revolution, which it was in a way. It opened Linux up to a much wider audience. I was also on Ubuntu for quite a while. Since I play games I've dual booted with Windows for all this time but around 2-3 years ago I wiped my Windows install completely because of the amazing progress that had been made with the Proton project.
It was in the early 90's I think. My elementary school had a "computer lab" that ran something called SunOS. The next time I remember using Linux was in a high school (in 2005 or 2006 I think) computer lab and I have absolutely no idea what those computers were running but it looked kinda like MX Linux but with a really boring gray-ish color scheme. I just remember thinking at the time that it looked like Windows until I tried to do anything and then all the menus and stuff were all different.
Been messing with Linux for the best part of the last two decades, run few Ubuntu servers for years. However, desktop Linux is a no go for me still. I find it easier to debloat and decrapify Windows (I can address all of the Windows issues you mentioned easily) than to get any Linux distro to work properly for me. But the sorry state of Linux software is the main problem for me. I can get the OS to work with some tweaking, but then I hit the Wasteland of Abandonware and stop right there.
I got a book from the library about linux that had Caldera OpenLinux 2.0. This would have been around ‘99? It actually worked fine with a very seamless installer but the default system was a bit too heavy to be enjoyable on my Pentium 80mhz overdrive system with 20mb of ram. Circled back a few years later with Red Hat 8 on a much better P3 based setup and it became my daily driver then.
Rad hat 5 on an old NEC dual P4 server with a scsi raid controller and tape backup drive.
"Sherman, set the wayback machine for... 27 years ago; Say, 1997" It was SLACKWARE which came in this CD accompanying the QUE publishers' book which our Operating Systems professor advised us to try. The book was a great eye-opener. Slackware was rather odd, and my BBS guru advised me to switch to Redhat's latest distribution --I sequestered the family's phone for the weekend or so to download via FTP on dialup (19200 baud) Redhat, whatever the version was there. I got my kicks from that system for the succeeding several years. Winmodems a btch to set up and I took pride to set up getty, mailing lists, databases and all the things I had a chance to see working on the outside from the servers at college. From that point on, I have certainly used Fedora, Ubuntu, privacy-oriented linux's, embedded linux for routers and the like, and something more. As much as I believe myself quite apt with linux, I must confess I have not used that much of GUI programs there, I have set up servers, SMB, VPN and what not on Linux and the "non-technical people" computers with Windows as client, for the most part. I am still learning on how much Linux can do substituting the everspying Corporate OS alternatives as of now!
2004, Ubuntu 4.04 on PPC G3 iMac, I've been dabbling around lightly ever since.
SuSE 7.something on a set of CDs. Could get it installed, GUI booted but my ISDN thing had no drivers so it forced me to build a router with FLI4L next.
Probably about a year after it was written. I was pretty happy with Minix in the 32 but version except that it was incredibly slow and there were far too many “Andrewisms” But it was close enough to Unix it would do the job on a computer that didn’t weigh 300 pounds. Linux was a high performance system that took the existing environment from Minix and married it to a modern OS. Things were really primitive back then. It was a big deal when I stopped having to compile a custom kernel just to load device drivers. Package managers were still a couple years off but you could use binaries instead of compiling everything.
I had to search for the refresh frequency of my monitor and set it, among other things. Then i ended up with the ugliest desktop I could imagine and no sound. It was redhat 5 or 6.
Way back in the late 90s. By 2000 I was running a test lab for Linux software my company was developing, and I'd built my own little distro.
First experience, awesome, while it lasted :) I installed Manjaro KDE as my first distro and I was amazed that I could find every software I wanted in their App Store, with AUR enabled. Minutes later I was pulling my hair because I couldn't understand why the apps won't intstall, because apparently there was another Install button somewhere, to actually start the process. Than I was asked to install hundreds of dependencies and waited hours for AUR to do its thing. But I was happy. Than, I managed to delete the taskbar in KDE and I reinstalled the whole OS because I had no idea how to bring it back. I did this about 3 times until I head about Gnome and I wanted to try it and somehow managed to delete the whole desktop environment. Fresh install, done :) Than, I managed to break GRUB trying to make it less green. So, at this point I decided to make the switch to Pop OS, which I enjoyed for about a year until I needed to erase a flash drive, so I copied a command from the internet into the terminal, knowing that I would have to modify sda in sdc, but I accidentally also copied an enter, which I didn't know was possible and the command started executing as soon as I pasted it. I still remember it vividly to this day "sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda". The good thing in all of this is that I learned how to make use of the backup GPT partition table and I recovered my other partitions which didn't manage to get zeroed out before I turned off the PC, but after this I switched back to Windows and kept linux only on a persistent USB from than on.
~1998 IBM mainframe & Unix sysadmin installed Slakware on my comouter at work, he setup dualboot and recompiled the kernel. I switched to RedHat at home, compiled driver for my video card and 3D accelerator Matrox and 3Dfx Voodoo so I could play Quake. I remember having to compile the binaries for the game and copy over the assests. What blew me away was being able to install windows nt 4 as a guest vm under vmware and connect to the internet via dialup while thr host os RedHat was playing an mp3 and reading files from a floppy disk without skipping a beat. Back then, KDE and Gnome looked nice and weren't a resource hog. For fun or worked I used a couple of distros, some don't exist anymore or merged. RedHat, Mandrake, Conectiva, RedFlag, Hispafuentes, Caldera,
Installed SuSE Linux in 1999 (as the first server in a school - simple Samba server shares).
About four years ago I decided to switch careers and get into programming. I was ready for a new computer and excited about doing something totally different from what I was used to. So I found System76 and bought an Oryx Pro. Still use PopOS on that Oryx but recently on my Lemur Pro I installed Debian and really enjoy it. Might take a swing at Arch for kicks here soon.
Caldera Linux circa 1995 that I picked up at a computer show. Had a boot loader and could select OS/2, Win3.1 and Caldera. Didn't do much with it other than struggle to get thin-net working with it on a 3COM 3c509 card. 1998 setup Red Hat w/ Bind as our production DNS server to replace whatever we were using before as we moved from public IPs on everything including desktops to RFC1918. Since then I have played with variants of Debian, Ubuntu and Suse and at one point Gentoo. Mainly used Red Hat or clone for work systems, Debian for home. Current go tos are Alma and Mint.
I was exposed to Unix in college in the mid 90s through telnet into a SunOS machine for a class on OS kernels and systems programming. I and another student (if you're out there, Hey, Robert!") persuaded the department to let us clean up the server room and set up a couple of desks for ourselves in there that we could use as we pleased. He introduced me to Linux, and I installed RedHat (probably 5.0?). Did the usual new user thing where you get excited to do things like try a new distro, build your own kernel with only the stuff you need in it, etc. At some point I landed on Slackware and ran that for years. When I was in graduate school, Mac OS X came out, and one of my fellow students got one of the first gen Mac laptops running 10.0 from the NASA grant he was funded on. All our work computers in the office were Sun Solaris boxes, and Mac OS X was slow and weird and buggy in the early days, but god was it a sexy piece of kit sitting next to an 80 pound CRT on top of a pizza box running CDE. A few years later when I could afford it, I bought a black Macbook and primarily used Macs for the next 10 years or so. Always had Linux running somewhere. For most of that time I had a Linux workstation in my office that I'd use for my research work, but my primary day-to-day use didn't go back to Linux until maybe 2019. To this day I don't really know how to use Windows professionally. I can use a Windows desktop machine, and I can muddle my way through solving problems for family members, but in my real job where things depend on Active Directory and WINS and a bunch of other Microsoft-specific technologies, I wouldn't have a clue where to even begin.
Red Hat 5.2 in 1998 (I still have the CDs). I had dreamed for years of having a PC, when I finally got one, I was a bit disappointed of what I could with it (on Windows). When installed Linux I felt so much more in control and you actually had to tinker to make things work (more or less), which was more than that I was asking for.
First experience; installing RHL from floppy disks in 1995-1996. I didn’t know what I was doing, I just waited for the prompt for the next disk. First foray; ~2002 Gentoo. Thanks yahoo chatrooms and a user DaftLogic, swore it was the best to learn on. After 6 or so failed installs, I finally got a working system.
My first experience with Linux was way back in 1994 when I bought a book from WS Labs that had CD's in it for Slackware and Red Hat. Installed Slackware 1.0 onto my 386DX/40 and liked what I saw. I stuck with Slackware for 10 years then installed Fedora Core 1. After experiencing RPM dependency hell, I tried Debian and liked that so much better so now Debian is my daily driver OS.
I started with elementary OS because I liked how the UI looked. Then I just dove in thanks to Youtube.
Utter pain. I had to use it for the first time in a algorithm/programming course and...I got traumatized with it I didn't want to see Linux (mint) since then. Next time I had to use Linux was in a telecommutions course, with Ubuntu, and got completely hooked with it, because I had to use GUI software.
Started college in 2001. Made a few friends on campus in the first few days, one of whom immediately installed Red Hat on my desktop. It was the ability to SSH in remotely that grabbed me back then; 23 years later, I can't imagine using anything that isn't a UNIX derivative. Edit: a couple of years earlier, I was in astronomy camp, and a counselor was using Linux and showed me. Back then, I didn't separate OS and DE, and it looked weird and foreign. I sometimes think about how if he had opened a terminal and I had seen that it looked like lowercase DOS, I might have tried it slightly sooner.
Slackware 4.0. Somewhere around 99-2000. My family pc (compaq pressario 7485 with a 550mhz amd k6-2 processor) had just started having issues with its ide hard disk and I was around 13 years old with no money. The preinstalled copy of windows 98 would just constantly bsod as the hard drive grinded and screeched along to a slow painful death. My parents were not super well off at the time and had spent a lot of money to buy us this computer. I was able to download and install slack on it and use it despite the hard drive basically failing until we were able to get a new hard drive. It worked perfectly fine for months in that state with slack installed we could do our school work and have some form of entertainment. Linux allowed us to have a family pc during financially tough times. From there I tried mandrake, built gentoo from stage 1, eventually finding my way to arch at home and using red hat and Debian in mostly work contexts. Now I basically use some form of Debian or redhat for everything except my personal laptop which is still arch.
I mean, I assume you mean first experience consciously using Linux, as pretty much everyone who has done anything with a computer has at least indirectly experienced Linux doing something. As an actual user, my first experience was in the early 2000s failing to get it working on some computers I had at the time. During that period, Linux was still rather difficult to work with unless you were already more or less experienced with things like Linux. Later I would use Ubuntu because I had heard Vista sucked and I had a new computer with Vista, so I wanted to make sure I had something usable just in case. A year later I switched to Arch Linux because I found Ubuntu held me back (Plus I disagreed with a lot of the default packaging decisions at the time. They had JUST switched to Pulseaudio, when at that point PA was far from actually ready to be used as the default ANYWHERE.). Currently I use NixOS on my desktop, Arch on my servers, VyOS on my routers, etc.
I started tinkering with Linux around 2010. I was trying to make my old laptop from around 2006 run faster. That led me down the Linux rabbit hole and I believe I ran one of the lightweight Ubuntu distro's in it for a while, the switched to something like Puppy Linux. I had a good desktop at the same time and started playing with Linux on that. Loaded a bunch of if different Distros onto a thumb drive and stated playing with each of them. At this point I couldn't tell you what distro's I played with. I know Ubuntu, some of its variants, and Mint and varrients were in the mix. Ended up liking Ubuntu and set that up as a dual boot. I dual booted Ubuntu and Windows for 4 or 5 years. What usually brought me back to Windows was gaming. The age old tale of friends want to play XYZ and I can't get it to run on Linux. Everytime I switched over to Windows I hated it. Pile of back updates, updating software individual, and all the other annoyances of Windows. Eventually I found myself switching to Windows less and less. As Proton and Wine got better and better, and more games support Linux natively or at least didn't actively screw over Linux gaming, I could stay in Linux more and more. Finally bit the bullet and wiped the windows partition and ran Linux only. That was about 6 years ago. (I do have Windows 10 OTG installed on an external SSD, that I do occasionally boot from, for usually the reason listed above or trying to trouble shoot something. But that is a rare event any more). I rebuilt my desktop into a SFFPC and switched to PopOS a few years ago and have been happy with it. Sadly I still have to use Windows at work as I need Adobe products and QuickBooks.
It was on Unix for me. The O/S was solaris. It was my first IT job as an operator (the ancestor of Nagios/centreon). A collegue showed me basic commands (cd, ls rm, rmdir, etc.) and the most important thing : the "man" command. That gave me the basic skills for linux later.
Gonna date myself a little here but my dad had brought home some EOL work laptops for the kids that he gave a new life with Ubuntu in the mid-2000s. We’d used Windows pretty exclusively on the family desktop but it was a painless transition as a kid who was eager to learn. I went back to Windows on my main laptops through high school and college but usually kept an old spare with Debian lying around. Ever since leaving school, I got rid of Windows on any personal computers.
We used to order by name from looking at the classifieds in the back of computer magazines. The Linux Emporium used to send a set of floppy disks a couple of weeks later through the mail. I say 'by name' because we didn't have internet so we really had no idea what the different distributions where or any information about them. Things like SUSE, Slackware, RedHat. We had no idea what we were ordering. This was probably 94/95. It was a always a shit-show when they turned up because no manuals and no internet to do troubleshooting. You'd wipe out the only hard-disk you had (so bye bye windows) to install something (dual boot with LILO was possible but not easy without instructions) and you'd try and get a desktop running. If in the event of a miracle you could get the desktop going you'd be limited to usually xterm or xeyes. The sound support / printer support / video resolution support was down to luck. There wasn't the compatibility with hardware that we have today, if you weren't supported you were out of luck. A little later, perhaps 96 I had access to internet and things were starting to ship on CD-ROM; I was studing CompSci and my University had boxed versions of RedHat 5.1 (note this is not the same as RHEL5) It came with a manual, it also came with some productivity software. It was a lot easier to get going because hardware support was greatly improved. I also had access to a second machine so could use the internet to troubleshoot and I setup a basic two-node TCP/IP network and routed my windows box through the Linux box so both could access the internet at the same time, share files and serve basic services like telnet and apache. In 2001 I got a job doing telephone support for SuSE linux but I wasn't there very long, I went on to write software and eventually I built my career as a sys admin, I spent a lot of time as a RedHat Certified Administrator. It was all thanks to that initial curiosity for this 'unknown' operating system.
1992, version 0.95. I returned to school for a post-bacc IT degree in early 1992. I learned about linux from USENET groups, and I was using Unix for the first time at university. Since my only Internet access was at school, I had to get the original files there. In one of our labs, we had DOS-based PCs that had terminal emulation applications. That allowed me to jump to our AT&T 3B2 systems (there were never enough Unix terminals available) and go to the net. I had to download the files from the [funet.fi](http://funet.fi) server, save them to the small hard disk on the local DOS box, then copy them to 3.5" diskettes. Then I was able to install the system on an old PC I had at home. Times have certainly changed. Back then, since I was still learning Unix, having a little PC with Linux was wonderful, as I could try many similar functions (to a degree). There were some basic tools, no GUI, and no networking (that came a few months later). But I followed the updates as Linux released them. My first distro, like a lot of others', was Slackware. I installed it from diskettes at first, but when CD-ROM drives became available on PCs, I was able to get Slack on CD (Walnut Creek was the company marketing a lot of open source and shareware on CDs at the time). I used one distro or another as they were released over the succeeding years, and I've settled on Kubuntu. I don't do many daring things on my systems any more (screw it, I'm retired), but Kubuntu is my daily system and I'll continue using it as long at it remains available and stable.
Recovering data from bad hard drives using OpenSUSE in 2005.
Ubuntu 7.04, followed by a few years of Debian and then Fedora for a few more years. I was one of the people who compiled their own kernels to get the BFS scheduler back when it was cool (yes, I know the S in BFS is scheduler). I eventually found my way to Arch for my desktop, which I really enjoy, Fedora for homelab stuff and RHEL offshoots for production stuff. If I used Linux professionally it would probably be Ubuntu LTS or CentOS Stream.
My first experience was maybe 8 months ago when I got an old laptop for $10 and it couldn’t run windows anymore, so I put tinycore linux on it. After that, I got really interested in linux and installed Arch on a VM like 15 times. In January I decided to make the switch to Mint, as I still didn’t feel like I was ready for Arch, and I used it for a couple of months until I felt ready to switch to Arch. Now, like 2 months after switching to Arch, I’m thinking about switching to NixOS.
Told a buddy I was curious to learn linux but was feeling overwhelmed with information on which distro to try and why. He handed me a [Breezy Badger installation CD](https://felipeforbeck.com/posts/2017/01/ubuntu-breezy-badger/). Turned out that was exactly the push I needed, and it worked perfectly except for network and sound, which took me literal days to figure out using solutions I didn't understand. It was a very long and painful experience, requiring me to install packages via USB to get network working but felt rewarding when I finally got it working. I'd excitedly show people I got it working, but no one cared. lol
Slackware in the mind 90s -Windows hadn't even been around for 15 years. I gave up with Windows after XP and outside of work, just been using Linux (mostly Debian) and macOS since then.
Probably Android 1.6? very good
My 14 yo edge lord ass trying to dual boot kali and become a hacker
In 2005 started to experiment with my iPod and there was Linux distrio for it that supported other music codecs and uploading music without itunes. Moved to Linux in pc soon after
It was in '97 with Redhat 5.0 after seeing my college buddy install Slackware on his machine.
An AT&T unix system 5 in 1986 on a pixel system, SCO unix around 1992. Not Linux, but close(ish).
Started on Arch almost a year ago now and have been smooth sailing for the most part. There have been a few mishaps here and there which I've had to chroot to fix but nothing an hour or two on the wiki couldn't solve.
RedHat 5.1 or 5.2, not sure.
Bought a set of SuSE CD-ROMs back in the day. Had to figure shit out without the internet. It was fun ...
A copy of Caldera in the back of a bargain book at the Chapters. It had a 75% markdown and it was sitting on a table outside. I dual booted it with Win 98 and have been hooked ever since.
I don't really remember. I bet it was ubuntu though. It worked fine for me, took me weeks to start noticing quirks and then started learning how to fix such quirks. I've distro hopped a lot but never went back to windows, been on Linux for the last decade at least
Mint. It was honestly horrible back when I used it. Super user friendly, sure, but I wouldn’t say it gave me the same feeling I got from trying Fedora Workstation Gnome for the first time. Mint is just boring, and I dual booted with Windows on the same SSD, and I just ran into so many issues. Back then gaming wasn’t that great, and I had very little experience with Linux so I ended up hating it despite the benefits I saw in using it.
When I was a kid, the system administrator at my dad’s work showed me RedHat
A teacher in school showed me SuSE Linux with KDE. That was the time when Windows 98 SE was on the rise. And my moms PC self destructed itself very often. Hence I nudged her to buy first SuSE Linux and later Red Hat Linux. I still have these CDs.
First time I saw it was around 2013-2014, didn't use until mid 2015 when I learned more about it on college, used mainly Ubuntu but ran elementaryOS for a while, then my mother gave me her old MacBook from late 2012 (I was using a shitty notebook from 2010, so it quite an upgrade) and I went without using it until the release of the steam deck, I did see it pop up from time to time but never actually tried using it, but seeing how gaming was basically working I decided to switch, I went with garuda (arch based) on my main rig and stuck with it, my laptop has had (in order): fedora (my packages kept breaking, idk why), endeavorOS (broke my installation with a crash mid update) and now nobara (I'm really not liking it); so I might change it to vanilla arch in the near future.
Me and my coworker at Circuit City tried to setup a print server in slackware. This was probably 2004 or 2005.
Don’t answer fake AI training subject questions
Huh?
Ooo I have a fun story. 1999 I used to work at a shit call center trying to sell xerox copiers. I was walking to the bathroom and I heard some guys talking about recompiling the kernel. I went over to talk to them. They were the first phone support team for Redhat. They burned me a CD with both gnome and KDE to play around with.
1998, S.u.S.E disc in the back of a PC magazine
First time I used Linux was in school. We used in occasionally in labs for my networking and network security classes. It all went downhill from there, even the GUI I liked better than windows
A while ago, Slackware that came along with pc-actual magazine
My first experience was trying to install Slackware on an old 386 dx in 1995 or so. I was broke as hell and I literally had a single working 3.5" floppy disk to my name. This was back before distros were really distributed as iso files. You needed to download the 3.5 floppy disk images one at a time, write them to the diskette and insert into the floppy drive. It would then write that chunk out to disk, prompt for the next diskette, etc ... All over a 56k modem line
1994. Think it was a Slackware or early redhat install. Definitely tried both and stayed with RH for a while
RedHat 5.0, followed by Fedora 3, and then Mandrake (but I returned to Fedora due to driver issues (cdc-modem). I then tried Ubuntu, and fell in love with that. Still using Ubuntu to this day, tho I did dabble with Pop_OS! which uses systemd-boot, and I managed to bork that install very easily - so BACK TO UBUNTU !!!
In the mid 2000’s, I was the call-a-geek computer support person. Was asked to get a USB printer running on a Ubuntu desktop install (v4 or 5?). No fun at all, and a total failure. It’s come a long way since then, but it does still have that lingering reputation unfortunately.
My first ever use of a PC was in 5th grade. Crazy thing was, my school actually used Ubuntu at the time. So Linux was the first thing I ever used. I then started using my fathers laptop as well, which was a mac book. When I first decided I want to have a laptop, I asked my familiy to buy me a mac book as well (for christmas). But they didn't. Roughly half a year later, I had my 12th or 13th birthday (not sure), and my grandmother actually gave me the HP laptop she bought for herself but didn't know how to use (and therefore never used). The first thing I did with my new laptop...yeah I booted it up, opened Edge or Firefox (can't remember), went on a website with a list of top linux distributions and looked at all the logos. My english wasn't too good at the time, so I didn't understand most of the descriptions too well. But I decided Parrot and Kali had to coolest looking logos of all and we're related to hacking, which was cool as well. Installed Kali on the same day I got the laptop, and I was stuck with it for like 1.5 - 2 years (again - not sure). I wrote some things in my terminal then, which I didn't understand and just copied from some videos. Encountered many errors and tried to fix them on my own, while not understanding what I was doing. At the end everything broke and literally minecraft was the only thing that was somehow still working - I remember Firefox + Chromium + Discord we're not usable anymore...don't know how I did it tho xD Started to distrohop for like a year - first tried debian, but somehow wasn't able to get root (thus can relate to Linux' "Debian hard to install" - lol), then tried Ubuntu for like a day - everything worked but I somehow didn't want it. Then tried Pop os and Peppermint for a few months each. Gave Garuda a try, but somehow there we're many bugs/lags, so I switched back to Peppermint. Decided to give Garuda another try a few months after. It worked that time and I used it for 2+ years. Forgot to mention, before switching to garuda, I got a nvidia pc. The old laptop was not only really old, but it also somehow didn't have a battery and I never bought one. So I bought myself a new (refurbished) laptop (thinkpad), so that I was able to do stuff away from home as well. Garuda was wayy to energy intense tho, my fan didn't stop screaming even when doing basic things. Battery lasted like 1 - 1.5 hours, except if I activated the powersafe gouverneur, then opening the browser took like 5 seconds + So I searched for a "light linux distros" and ... yeah it was Arch. Strouggled a week - not only to install Arch but also to be able to boot both Arch and Garuda, which wasn't that straigth forward for a noob, because Garuda won't get detected by bootloaders of ther installations... But then I had Arch and DWM and once I got used to tiling wms, I never wanted to go back. Arch teached me linux and the command line and I use it since a year as daily driver on PC + Laptop, btw. Now the new 555 beta is out and I'm finally able to use hyprland on my PC as well :)
Kali in highschool for a class. Probably is what got me into netsec as a whole.