Where, and when, did you start using Linux? Where are you now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Been at it a long ass time now lol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RealMedia once made a program called RealJukebox. It let me rip CDs and play music with minimal nonsense. One day I got online and RealJukebox forcibly converted itself to RealOne, which was useless garbage. No amount of restoring from backups or fighting registry settings would bring back the program I relied on.

This was where I learned to care about software freedom. Or rather, when I first demanded it, but could scarcely express the concept. I knew I was betrayed.

All of this went down on an eMachines 566i2 that shipped with Windows ME. It was my first computer. The prior family computer ran Windows 95, which despite being five years older, was plainly a better experience. So while I was never the guy calling Bill Gates the devil, I was already well aware that Microsoft was a lumbering giant that could easily fumble that big picture.

So it's kind of bizarre my first Linux experience was through someone selling their SuSE 7 CDs at a boot sale on another continent. We'd moved to Germany (military brat) and I think I was running a Windows XP developer build that one ultranerd friend had burned for me. (I paid this back by making like seven copies of everything I pirated. CD-Rs were so beautifully cheap back then, and my entire hard drive fit on a dozen.) Some guy with a pile of ISA and PCI cards atop plastic milk-crates on a chilly sports field had a folding paper sleeve labeled "Linux," which I'd vaguely heard of, and I figured yeah sure that's worth a couple bucks to try. He tried gamely to explain that it wasn't selling or buying, because it was "free software," but even looking back now I think he was more confused than I was. Dude still took money for a professionally-made ordeal. I still have the stickers within arm's reach. I ran that for a few months, I guess? Lots of nights on non-numeric roleplaying over IRC. Went back to some Windows after that, until the next move and my first laptop, a proper IBM T42 running XP.

In college I was enamored with Ubuntu's initial promises (and any form of 'e-mail us to get free discs') and handed out a bunch of earth-tone paper sleeves for an OS I guess I was dual-booting. I still used XP throughout school, on that laptop and on a tiny little desktop my long-distance boyfriend sent me so we could play City Of Villains together. I'm a little fuzzy now - but I was using Ubuntu for a while after school (and after that boyfriend), until Mark Shuttleworth declared all windows would be left-handed, and I felt that familiar sense of betrayal. I switched to Mint for a while and then decided I cared too much about video games to bother dual-booting all the time.

I was on Windows 7 from about 2010, and exclusively from about 2013, until about the end of 2020. When I built my new machine - the one I'm typing this on - I knew I was going all-in on Mint. It still has problems, believe you me. But they're all my problems, and potentially fixable. They're not locked into a decade-old OS that was honestly the pinnacle of Microsoft's oeuvre. They're not ever-shifting betrayals of a product where you are not the customer. They're plain ridiculous technical goofs, plus the occasional conflict between user demand and common sense.

I wholeheartedly recommend Linux Mint with Cinnamon to anyone who gives a shit about their computer's operating system. It is good software. It runs with negligible bullshit on my at-one-point higher-end desktop with a dozen cores, and my thirdhand beater laptop with Windows Vista stickers. I'm still using Foobar from my late Windows days and IrfanView from my early Windows days. It is the least bullshit solution, for someone who is prone to call bullshit on just about anything.

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

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

Started in Brazil, at home, in 1998, using Conectiva Linux (a Brazilian version of Red Hat on steroids); migrated to Slackware in 2000-2001, and then to Debian, in early 2003. Still using Debian in 2024! 🧡🫶🍺 I use Linux for everything, from desktops/multimedia/blender/daw/games (I used to play WoW on Linux back in 2004-2005; hahaha; was a pain to tune it + wine) to routers, to servers... I loved my old Linux mobiles too (Nokia N900 & Nokia N9)! My N9 is still working (but I don't use it anymore)! 🧡

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freshman year of college, about 11 years ago.

Been using Manjaro exclusively for about 3 years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. College. Kernel 1.2.10 I think.
2. Ran out of money before a degree. Haven't stopped working since.

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

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

Now I am using Arch btw.

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

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

2005-ish I took an intro to UNIX course at my college (which was just Linux obv). Around 2007 I made the switch full time to Ubuntu.

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

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

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

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

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

I started dualbooting 12 years ago, never used linux. Started again dualbooting 9 years ago, never used linux. Purged windows 2-3 years ago

I'm on silverblue and I don't care about the system anymore because I don't interact with it. It auto updates and I've got a fedora distrobox. I'd probably do the same if I were on opensuse or arch, meaning nothing would change for me if I would distro hop.

Edit: I fancy with opensuse Aeon but I don't really gain much. Maybe I'll install it on my next machine

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

Dabbled in it since 2006. About 2012 i had problems with my network card on windows, flipped out and just installed Linux on my main home computer and have not used windows at home since.

Started with Ubuntu and it's flavors, recently had problems with snap packages, flipped out and installed the first non Ubuntuoid distro that promised an easy install so I could get back to whatever I was doing at the time. I currently have Manjaro at home.