Also gonna date myself, but I downloaded Slackware 1.1 or maybe 1.2 onto 20 or so 1.4MB floppy disks to install on my 386sx PC. Around 1994 or so... The pain of having to edit X config files to get X-Windows working in that era...
Every single floppy disk we had in the house.... recycled every "free AOL trial" floppy we had been sent with a piece of tape over the rw protect tab. And downloaded overnight because after 9pm, connected time didn't count against you with Netcom.
Yup.... Slackware 2.0(?) with kernel 1.2.13 was my first.
This is me too.
It didn't stay installed for long either, I was a bit over my head.. but man I spent about two weeks downloading disk images after school!
1994 is definitely before my era. I would have had to use it in school already. That may have been possible but ... I don't recall anyone else in class using Linux.
Even in 2004 it was more rare.
Nowadays it's not quite as uncommon, even though it is still a niche thing.
I remember these. I also remember when Ubuntu was first put in a magazine, and when the magazines tried out DVDs so they could put more than one distro out at a time.
I tried and failed to download some distro in the days of old fashioned modems (no broadband - those days you needed a leased digital like to get 1mbps).
An year or two later I bought a Mandrake CD from a bookshop - it came with a manual in a nice box.
I only bought one boxed version of Linux.
It was secondhand Caldera OpenLinux, by a company that later became The SCO Group and decided Linux was infringing their Unix copyrights (which it turns out they didn’t own either). SCO v IBM was finally resolved in 2021. I enjoyed owning a piece of evidence.
I remember when it was just SuSE before Novell, then when Novell bought them you could order free pressed CDs in the mail (way before Ubuntu did it). I got them just because of the sweet Novell logo.
Same here, I got a copy of Corel Linux with a magazine. I tried installing it but couldn't make heads or tails of it, gave up for a couple of years and then tried some kind of ancient version of SuSE, got a little further and then gave up again, and then eventually got an early version of Ubuntu up and running and have been using Linux in some form or another ever since. :)
Despite a great experience with a Pi 3, it took me a while to believe that Linux could be a usable desktop like Windows was... I didn't fully fathom that Linuz had competitive DEs and userspace software.
Then I dual booted and from that day on I only ever entered Windows to use commercial CAD.
\^ This
That's why I moved to OS/2, before discovering Linux. One of the IT admins at work was OS/2 curious, so I volunteered to test drive it. She set me up with OS/2 along with the Lotus OS/2 suite of programs. It was glorious! It was so glorious in fact, that I bought OS/2 for my machine at home.
OS/2 was da bomb and a much better Windows machine than Windows ever was!
Windows has not been crashing much since Vista.
If crashes - there is a good chance your hardware has gone wrong.
If Linux works on the same hardware - then linux dirvers don't fully utilize it.
That makes... Literally no sense. Linux drivers not utilizing your hardware doesn't magically make it stop erroring out. Typically Linux drivers do about the same thing as windows drivers (in most cases). Also the "good chance" your hardware is bad if windows shits itself is like 20% of the time (in my personal experience). Also Linux doesn't kernel panic when an app is accessing memory it shouldn't, it just stops it from accessing the memory (a very common blue screen error).
In my case nouveau silently freezes the whole PC...
well network might work but keyboard is dead locked too
The card is stated as fully reverse engineered :-)))
My dad bought a copy of SuSE 5.3 in 1998 and quickly lost interest. But I couldn't get enough of it, spent ages going through all packages from the CDs and compiling my own kernels. All without an internet connection. My proudest moment was when I finally got sound working after a few months.
That's the best way to learn. My parents were not tech-savvy so that would not have worked for me. But one other kid in school was a computer nerd. Both his parents used computers professionally so he kind of got into Linux early on.
I'm older than most here: My 7 year old kept getting virus' on my windows machine playing dumb kid games on websites. I had a windows machine because I had needed a new PC and that's what it came with. Prior to that, I had been using OS/2 Warp but IBM had dropped support for non-commercial versions.
About the third time I had to reinstall Windows to clean it, I went looking for something else and found Mandrake KDE Linux. I bought it and installed it from 3.5 floppy disks - about 12 IIRC. That would have been 1998. KDE was version 1.0
Sort of. I didn't technically buy "Linux", I bought a box with the disks and a manual as souldrone already explained. Honestly, I'm not even sure downloading would have been an option at dial-up speeds. In '98 I would have been using a 19.2K modem. Higher speed modems were out but hideously expense and not often supported by the sending modem.
Two guys with ugly glasses and beards came into the computer shop to buy a hard drive or something.
They gave me a CD with Slackware 1.0 on it... and also mentioned the mysterious "Perl" language...
Had to install Linux for a course, but we ended up never using it
After messing around with my distro I was like "Why would I go back to Windows" and here I am
I started using IBM AIX and SunOS Unix in 1991 in high school. Started college in 1993 and it was mostly Sun SPARC Solaris, DEC Ultrix / MIPS, HP-UX on PA-RISC machines. I wanted that myself. DOS was garbage. One program at a time. Just one user. No memory protection. Windows was horrible too. Constantly crashing.
A friend a year older told me about Linux and showed it to me on his PC. He gave me an account on his machine and I would login to his PC from the computer lab just for fun.
I saved up my money from my summer job and got a Pentium 90 in summer 1994. Within a week of school starting I had partitioned my hard drive and installed Slackware.
I used DOS for some games but even Doom ran on Linux back then.
Similar story for me. In college all the computers in the engineering lab were running Solaris on SPARCStation 10s, and that's what got me hooked on UNIX. After graduating I wanted to run a UNIX system at home, so I bought a Red Hat Linux 3.0.3 CD and installed it on a used Compaq Prolinea 486 PC I bought for cheap at a computer show. I continued with Red Hat Linux up through version 9, then continued on with Fedora Core 1 up through Fedora 36 today.
I got my first laptop at the age of 13 by doing small work over the summer
I got one with no OS and my cousin told me he'd get me 2 OS's (🙀) aka dual boot Windows and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
I never really cared for that second OS until some day I decided to check it out for some reason. I decided to boot it up because I'm a nosey little shit. I tried to update it but it said that there where broken packages. After some googling I came up with the idea to delete them... After deleting, as far as I remember, there came up a few billion (exaggerated tens) of dependencies... I decided to reinstall... Then I got into the vacuum which can be summed up like this: Ubuntu, get into r/linuxmemes, try Linux mint, no wifi, try pop os, yes wifi, try debian, fuck everything up, retry Windows/Ubuntu but accidentally convert GPT into MBR, unable to dual boot, blame it on Debian, purge windows, try pop os again, try mint again and learn about drivers, download wifi driver with Ethernet, enjoy Linux Mint, get curious again, try installing freebsd, fail numerous times, discover that the necessary driver for my wifi isn't even available on freebsd, give up, try Manjaro, try installing Arch, I made it, still not satisfied, waste 4 months trying to get Windows back into the dual boot only to learn that the partitioning table needs to be GPT and that is only possible with UEFI mode, after some days, get dual booting back, go back to mint, go back to pop os, go back to Ubuntu, go back to pop os, try trisquel twice, it's fucking unusable for me, distrohop for a bit more, I hate myself, go back to windows, I hate myself more, dual boot Ubuntu, miss space in SSD, delete Ubuntu, unable to merge partitions, hate myself x3, dual boot Windows and pop os, hate myself x∞, gonna try to dual boot Windows/Arch with KDE now knowing a lot more about Linux than the first time, gonna try ricing i3 wm
TL;DR in my country (if nowhere else) they say that curiosity killed the cat, thankfully, I am not a cat but my happiness must have been lmao
Around 2015 or 2016, a friend from my uni had a laptop with Ubuntu installed on it. I thought that was pretty cool, so I asked him about it and here I am.
Some day in the 90s i heared about a free alternative to windows... too bad there was no internet to get it and no driver or programms for it.
1999 I tried to install Corel Linux (was an addition of a computer magazine), but it did not work on my machine.
In 2006 I heared ybout Ubuntu, making Linux easy. I tried it, but still wasnt completly satisfied... took some years to get into it, slowly slided to Ubuntu and Mint after that ;)
My City has a project where they take old Laptops and Desktops, clear their Hard drives with DBaN and install Ubuntu on them, so they can give them for no charge to People in need
Grew up with Unix, used Linux through university in the early 90s, have been a fan ever since. Redhat and Mandrake were my first. Couldn't go back to any other OS now without significant pain relearning the limitations imposed upon you. Linux = Freedom (to learn, fuck up, then learn some more).
I ended up starting to use Linux mint after I had installed it on my dad's computer. He had the habit of downloading mallware and viruses on his computer. He had bricked two hard drive cause of this. Installed mint on all of my computers and haven't looked back since. About the only time I use windows anymore is at work.
I had a spare PC and obtained a copy of Red Hat 7.0. Yes, Red Hat 7.0. 2.2 Kernel. Xfree86. Manual xf86config editing. GNOME complete with the foot. rpm -ivh, oops, missing dependency, go search the internet, download dependency, rpm -ivh, oops, missing a dependency for the depenency, rinse, repeat, it's a wonder I still use Linux. :)
I didn’t use Red Hat or Fedora for decades because of that. They were in versions in the 20s when I gave them another shot. I think I entirely missed yum and went straight to dnf.
Oh... I haven't thought about that magazine in forever. We used to get it at some of the bookstores here in the US. (Or maybe we still do. I don't know. I have a couple of the back issues somewhere at the house.)
I was into modding Nextels back then. I was looking up mods for the PS2 and found how to install Fedora IIRC. Then I looked up fedora and found an entire new world.
A friend at that time, quite a nerd, had bought a box with Suse Linux 6.x. I borrowed the box from him out of interest. That must have been around 1999. Or 1998? I don't know.
Sometime in the mid to late 90s I got into MUDs- Multi-User Dungeons. Think text based MMOs before MMOs we’re a thing, and a smaller scale. Also, many MUD, MUSH, etc codebases were open source.
I tried really hard to get my own server running under Windows 3.11 I think it was? But I was limited, if I recall right it’s because I could only run 16-bit executables, and these codebases weren’t really designed to run under Windows anyway- I was using Cygwin and clumsy hacking to get them to work.
I don’t remember what my first distro was at all, but I finally got frustrated enough to get one on floppy disks and install it. It’s been a wild ride ever since.
Lensmoor is still up and pretty solid. He’s been running it since at least the early 90s if I recall right.
And last I checked, if you donate one time, you get permanently protected from character deletion :)
Don’t know how many still play however.
Roughly 2018, I wanted to try something other than Windows since I hated the bloat and preferred older versions. I'm getting a laptop again, soon, and I won't even touch Windows. Open-source and privacy-friendly >>>>>>.
I initially wanted to make a Hackintosh install because I was simply curious of trying another OS than Windows XP. Turns out it was rather complicated and that Ubuntu Live-CD thing was quite impressive.
What is it you say? Free software? As in you're not just trying to lure me in then lock features away so I pay for the license later? Like, really free, free? I can do whatever I want with it and it exists only because a bunch of people wanted to do something for the common greater good?
Sure Compiz and the cube desktop was fire but open-source software philosophy blew 16 year old me away. Still does 15 years later.
I asked my computer class teacher if there were any other OS besides Windows and DOS, and he mentioned a few things, but the only word i remembered was Linux. A few years later i heard that the Ubuntu free install CD did reach my country, so i ordered it right away and a few months later i had it in my hand. After that it was all history...
OP specified no time period.
Probably in 90s it was a word from one to another and exchanging CDs. Those who didn't have Internet, but had modems - there was FIDOnet almost for free of charge.
In 2000s every IT magazine tried to post a few articles in a year and of course the news ribbon. So if you are in the World of computers somehow - you have a Linux CD in your collection.
PS:
Oh no! Read comments below, felt myself oldy-pants-shaking-dust.
Excuse me, but if you didn't hear about Linux since 2005 and onwards - that was your problem why you didn't hear about Linux. 😛😃
I first tried Linux with Ubuntu 8. Bought burnable discs just to try it out. I quickly realized it couldn't play my favorite games, so I switched back to Windows until this year haha. All the annoyances around Windows 11 and Proton being awesome finally gave me the push I needed. Over the years, though, I've built a few different desktop PCs and almost always used Linux to get them up and running and test the hardware. It's just so much quicker and easier to get going.
A lot of people turn up their nose at Compiz and desktop effects nowadays. But I kinda feel like wobbly windows and the desktop cube were *the* killer feature of desktop Linux in 2006-2009. It turned so many heads, in my experience
Those were good times, I remember Looking Glass WM was meant to be the future, Compiz broke all the barriers, 3D acceleration started to be a thing, WiFi started working without much hassle... imma search for a time machine to go back xD
had an acer netbook that I loved. it ran windows xp untill it died. tried taking it someplace to get it reinstalled, but they wanted over a hundred dollars. ended up getting a new laptop that ran windows 8 and it was awful. after venting to some furries on irc I looked at ubuntu and then into mint cinnamon and have been with it ever since
I discovered Linux via the Warez scene on Usenet, back around 2000. I first discovered BeOS that way, and became interested in alternate operating systems. This was back in the days of dial-up, and the one one or two distros I downloaded did not work or boot. Probably PEBKAC, I am sure.
I was in a bookstore browsing magazines, and discovered an issue of Maximum PC (or Maximum Linux?) that had a couple of Linux CDs. One had a couple of distros I can't recall, which of course did not load or install.
The other was a Mandrake 7.0 that DID boot and install just fine. I never went back to Windows fully after that, with my second-ever PC, which was my first home-built system, was Linux and BeOS -only.
So, in a strange way, my searching for free Photoshop compatible plugins for my crappy Adobe PhotoDeluxe software led me to to Linux.
I think my first was Ubuntu? Can't remember if it was Ubuntu or Mint first.
Dell swore Windows was broken, Microsoft said the laptop was broken... Linux said yeah, I can run that.
I followed alt.os.linux (IIRC), I'd been primed with Minix(ran on i386). I'd used Unix and knew what I wanted.... This would have been in c. 1991. Jumped to linux at home in the following year and then work in the next 6-12 mo.
First encountered UNIX (sunos) at uni in the early/mid 90s and had an epiphany, "so the shell expands glob patterns, not the programs that get invoked - that's absolutely the right way to do it, and the opposite of DOS! I love it!". Spent weeks absorbing manual pages. Started writing little utility scripts. Played pranks on friends with write(1) (was big multi-user system).
Amateur radio housemate installed slackware on a PC for me. Faltered a bit, went back to Win9x for a couple of years. Finally installed SuSE from a magazine cover disk and stopped booting Windows in the late 90s.
There have been times when I have cursed it (xf86config anyone?), but overall I feel so much relief at being out of the Windows ecosystem. Dabbled with OSX when the iBooks first came out (because unix with nice GUI), but it didn't stick because of the relentlessly expensive upgrade cycle.
I'd do it all again.
I started very late, because from my school days I was heavily trained on Windows. I have used windows for 15 years for all kinds of tasks, from using paint in standard sixth to booting Kali linux to learn ethical hacking. The first time I encountered Linux was when I joined a research lab in PhD. All the systems were atleast five years behind with so many issues with update. I had problem even installing chrome browser and hence I figured that Linux is way to difficult(it is not actually, it was not maintained correctly). Didn't touch it for another six months until windows decided to create huge issues for me. Extremely slow and buggy updates irritated me so much so that, I impulsively dual booted it. Used both of them for sometime until one day, I decided to take the leap of faith and removed everything and booted Pop OS. No more windows as a crutch.
Turns out I was pretty good with Linux, bash and sysAdmin stuffs. Eventually I kind of fixed the issues with my lab servers. I still use windows 11 sometimes to stay updated with what is going on but will never ever go back there. It was a torture.
p.s : For someone who might think Linux is tough from my experience, let me tell you it is not. Its just that I was unfortunate enough to get a badly maintained old system. Newer distros are way way more friendlier than you can think.
i started using it in 1995, i’d heard about unix from reading the cuckoo’s egg and byte magazine. then when logged into a bbs, took some geek quiz that mentioned “a free x86 unix clone called linux”. i investigated more, found walnut creek that sold slackware linux and freebsd on cd, ordered it, and tried them both. stuck with slackware because i couldn’t get x11 to work in freebsd on my crappy packard bell 486.
i was a sophomore in high school then, needless to say i was not one of the popular kids!
Brazilian public education system used to use a distro made by the Ministry of Education called Linux Educacional on yellow PCs. When I used it we were on version 3.0, with KDE 4 and based off of Ubuntu 8.something.
I loved using it at school and always thought "Why doesn't XP look this good?" I kept using Windows XP and then 7 at home, but after having problems with 10 I gave Ubuntu 16.04 a shot.
I was blown away, looked so nice, was so much faster and most of my games worked (I was basically only playing Valve stuff and emulators back then). Can't go back to Windows now.
I have used Windows a lot since then, at work, on my dad's laptop, etc and I don't hate it at all, I actually really liked Windows 11 - but man, I can't imagine myself using something other than Fedora now.
I found out about it long before using it. I tried to install some type of Suse on a desktop but the NIC didn't work and I gave up.
I started using it properly when Windows 8 came out in 2012. I tried it and HATED it. This was before MS rolled back with 8.1 and I thought if this is the way they want to go, I am out.
At this point hardware support in Linux seemed to have crossed a threshold where it 'just worked' in 99.5% of cases. This would have been Mint 13.
Read about it in some magazine back in 1996 (I was 11yo), in 1997 I managed to get in my hands a copy of SuSE Linux, tinkered with it, didn't understand crap, went back to Windows, next year a copy of Corel Linux came in a magazine, gave it another try, destroyed my hard drive in the process (my beautiful 2GB drive!) by 2002 I understood more concepts and started distro hopping like crazy, 2004 I installed Gentoo head on, then moved to Fedora, then to Arch Linux (since 2010 or so) and that's about it.
For me, it was only about two years ago. I was looking to buy a Chromebook, not really sure why in hindsight, but I wanted to try one out first. I found online, an OS you could boot off a USB as a live session to try, that was based on chromium. It was cloudready, by Neverware (from what I understood Google bought them out and then made Chrome Flex?? Something like this).
Anywho, I enjoyed the little experiment, and started to see just how little I actually needed windows specifically, so I browsed around online for other OS that could be tested through USB...and I found everything Linux. Started off with Ubuntu, then Mint, then Pop Os, then all the Ubuntu flavours before landing on Peppermint.
Had an XP drive completely die out a day after I bought a laptop. Had to buy a new drive and didn't have the spare loot for a Windows install. Booted up that Ubuntu disk I'd been eyeing for a while.
The laptops my wife and I use both originally shipped from Dell with Vista. Today, mine runs PCLOS and hers runs Mint, and they both work better in 2022 than they would have in 2009 with Vista!
The top case on my old laptop broke a year ago, and I just bought a new old-stock one for $18 online and installed it. There are so many parts now that are cheap, why not? My wife's got upgraded from 768p to 900p on the screen.
I'd heard of Linux in high school, but it was described as this arcane thing that only magicians and hackers used. A few years later, I got my first college laptop, and it came with Windows Vista. It took less that two weeks to start looking for alternatives. I decided to try an Ubuntu live CD, and a few days later I installed it. It took about 8 mouse clicks. I felt like a god.
That was 14 years ago. Basically everything in my house runs some flavor of Linux now. I don't claim that Linux is objectively better or anything, but it's like slipping into an old pair of shoes at this point. Familiar, comfortable, predictable, and easy.
I have worked in IT since the early 70s. I used Multics in the late 70s. It is the precursor to Linux. I have been aware of Linux since it was created. much later, in the 200s, I was recovering from a virus on my home Windows Pc. I was struggling for 3 days to put things back together. My daughter suggested I install Ubuntu. It took minutes and I have been happy with it ever since.
I heard about it in a programming tutorial, but I was skeptical about it then windows did what it does best i.e. I had a ubuntu live boot usb , installed Ubuntu 20.04 as my first distro, fell in love with Linux and Never looked back.
Was going through a rough phase, laptop broke down. Tried using dusted old PC from school time but it was too old to run latest windows and was sluggish. Decided to try Ubuntu 20.04 (knew about it from college times) and it works like a charm.
Deviantart. I wanted to use macOS but as a teenager I didn't have the financial capabilities to do so and saw all kinds of cool desktop screenshots on Deviantart that looked like macOS rip-off’s. It turned out to be Ubuntu so I started playing with that and have been using Linux since then alongside macOS and Windows :)
Ubuntu will be able to update as they are based in the UK. Fedora and Red Hat is American so they must obey US sanctions. For example you can’t use Fedora in Syria or North Korea.
Started using Redhat at the end of the 90s because it was a college course we had to go through... Setting up servers and so forth.. Ended up using opensuse after a while because i liked yast.. Slott og cd-copying at that time😀
Well I was set on going into CS so it would eventually come the day for me to switch.
But if I'm honest, I just did it because a friend of mine did it first and a) it looked like a nice challenge and b) I really liked the Pacman update progress bar aesthetics on the terminal x)
This was 2008 so I started with Ubuntu to ramp up the difficulty, and only made the transition to arch a couple years later.
It was GNU/Linux Mint(mate) for me about 7 years ago, but very soon after that I switched to Debian stable. After a couple of years of using it I switched to Trisquel with a libre kernel and I am still using it as my daily driver. I like the thing that I am able to use it on my job and that the kernel is deblobbed.
Many years ago now so i don't remember specifics. Was having an issue with my Windows machine. Did some research online and i kept seeing Knoppix over and over again. Boot into Knoppix and try xyz. It worked and i was like what is Knoppix? So i did more reading. Turns out Windows and Mac werent the only operating systems around.
About eight years ago I was interested in getting a job at a local web hosting company, saw that they used "linux". I was intrigued, decided to give it a try, and downloaded Linux Mint.
It was a good thing I did, since around that time my laptop suddenly had severe heat issues and Windows couldn't run with overheating and shutting down. Linux was apparently lightweight enough that it didn't cause the same problems.
I later fixed the heat issues with a good cleaning, and there were things I couldn't figure out how to do that I needed so I switched back to Windows. It'd be six more years and three more attempts to switch before I finally dove in and switched to Linux for good. Boy am I loving it though.
Raspberry Pi 3. I was blown away by the versatility of the little device.
The UI (Pixel DE based on LXDE iirc) blew me away and I remember thinking it was so good for the 1GB onboard RAM.
People often ask the secret to pushing Linux mainstream. My answer would be Raspberry Pi. Yes, you get only 1 kind of people then (those who wanna mess around with electronics, are computer science enthusiast etc.) but imo it is the most effective way.
Put new video card in Win95 (or 98? maybe) computer, drivers were shite, constant blue screens, sometimes at boot (but not every time).
Read an article about Caldera Linux and how easy it was to install and use. (This was well before it became part of SCO.) Tried it out. Dual booted for a while, mostly for gaming. Within a year or so was Linux only. Did a lot of distro hopping just to check out new things.
BTW, while I was dual booting (so around 1999 / 2000), Quake III Arena had better performance on Linux than it did on MS Windows on my hardware. Just saying.
I've used Linux for a good 11 years. I remember searching for something different to Windows because I was bored. And I stumbled upon Ubuntu. I had a very low spec Pc at the time: 2GB RAM, 128Gb HDD. I installed it and my computer went `whoosh!` like a rocket. I was impressed. After that I got a bit bored of Ubuntu (3 years later) so I searched around and found Arch. Tried that and I was not bored for the next 6 years.
After that I've used a lot of OSes like openSUSE, Gentoo and whatnot. I've just settled on using NixOS. It's a great distro in my opinion.
I like rolling release distros a lot, that's why I used a lot of rolling release distros in my Linux days. Even NixOS is rolling release.
I found an old copy of Linux for Dummies in a remainders bookshop. It had 2 CDs on the front with what claimed to be a free operating system. I ended up installing it on my old computer when I bought a new one the next year. I became a full-time Linux user around two years later.
College.
The computer lab in college only had Ubuntu. I would use putty to log into the lab computers to work on assignments from home. It was how the instructors enforced using same compiler and versions of everything.
It wasn't until my first job as a software engineer where I started actually using it on my personal computers. Started with Ubuntu for a few years, then Pop when snaps became mandatory, then mint because my new job uses that. All my servers run Debian though.
I found out it existed when I read a newspaper article around 1995 about Red Hat.
The first time I actually tried to install Linux was in 1999, but it wasn't until around 2008 when I first did anything useful with it, installing Puppy on very old hardware.
Class in 1993. Student mentioned Linux. Prof mentioned OS/2 (why hasn't this been open sourced?). Downloaded some boot media (on floppy) and booted my Windows 3.1 box. Couldn't figure anything. Ordered the Slackware CD. Had to get a job were I had to work on UNIX a bit before I started to officially switch, which was 1999.
> why hasn't this been open sourced?
OS/2 is actually still going, now as [ArcaOS](https://www.arcanoae.com/shop/arcaos-5-personal-edition/). It's proprietary with no free ISOs, unfortunately.
In 1994/1995, I was a kid running DOS, and occasionally starting up Windows 3.11. I spent a lot of time on local BBS's, and started to hear some details of the eventually to be released "Windows 95" in the forums and via chat. Apparently it would replace DOS and the system was going to boot straight into Windows... Yikes. But I'd also seen something called "Mini Linux" (lives in a FAT directory, 'boots' from DOS) on the board, which I played around with for a bit before taking the plunge and downloading the full set of Slackware disk images and copying them to a giant stack of floppies. For the next few years, I had systems set up to dual boot just in case I needed DOS/Windows for something, but had quit bothering with dual boot that never actually got used by around 2000.
I found out linux existed when one of my cousins came over. When she turned on her laptop GRUB came ip and I asked what that was for. Fast forward a couple years and I now daily drive Void.
Windows bluescreened left and right. And sometimes it just corrupted the whole filesystem. I had really bad luck with it. So I tried Linux (first ubuntu in a vm and then zorin os) and it worked flawlessly. Now I use arch btw.
I’ve always kind of knew about Linux. However, it wasn’t until my boyfriend explained to me how a laptop like mine (a 2nd gen AMD laptop) could run far superior on Linux that I actually looked into it.
First was when me and my friend started watching Mr. Robot, so we installed Kali Linux. It was fun, but aside from "wow we are le epic h4ck3rs" we did nothing actually.
Years later in university one of my profs (a very kind and helpful man, but he liked to tease us and joke with us, nothing negative or offending) stood next to me in lab, looked at my laptop, and said "Wow, thatRoland, really, you are using Windows? Of all people? What a shame." So I decided that yeah, I'm gonna show it to him, I've installed Ubuntu to dualboot. In next lab, he saw that I used Linux, stood next to me, and said: "Wow, you are really using Ubuntu? That's too easy." In the end, I actually started liking it, so I stayed on Ubuntu for a while.
I heard some things from friends on how cool linux was. I was 14ish my step dad got me a debian CD. This was was around 93 / 94 or so. After numerous attempts I finally got it installed and was greeted with a command prompt. I was like wtf is so cool about this. But I've been using it since, and I've actually been working at SUSE Linux for nearly 12 years. I've been windows free for 20 years.
That creepy early 2000s IBM commercial with people lecturing a frightened-looking blonde child in a blank white room while a voiceover goes on about how awesome he is for just existing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7ozaFbqg00
Apologies in advance if I err. This was more than half my lifetime ago! Memory a little sketchy - especially during my early 30's working in the city (too much good stuff = blank spots).
The year was 1993 - long hot summers with little thought of global warming. I was 22 (so nearly 30 years ago!) and working for Logitech in the UK.
We were visited by the global head of tech support. He didn't have an RS-232 cable for the modem, so fashioned one from a few (maybe 3 or 4) paperclips, connecting his DB9 on his laptop to the DB25 on the USRobotics 9600 modem.
I was fascinated by his screen - just a login: followed by password: prompt. A few commands and I watched as he issued AT commands directly to the modem.
My access to the internet was at that time very limited. Connection was via CIX and latterly Compuserve, before (some years later) having a demon account - yes, I was larcombe.demon.co.uk :-)
Anyway, discussions of Linus ensued. A video of Richard Stallman with his long hair, beard and sandals, just dancing with himself a few inches from (and facing) a brick wall... that was it - my journey had begun.
I ordered the disks (and I think they might have been FREE) to be delivered to the Logitech office. I could have been Slackware (but I am not 100% sure), and they were 3.5" 720Mb SDs (not even the 1.44 HDs!).
The first dozen or so attempts were painful - but I was using a spare tech support PC, so didn't really care. My POS Windows 3.1 machine was still available for me to do my day job.
When I first got my linux terminal to connect via PPP to demon I was in heaven. ELM for mail. ftp directly from my terminal - no staging area to download what I had already downloaded. Linux made me (my machine) part of the Internet - instead of just a consumer.
Since then, I have been linux all the way!
twitch streamer was using ubuntu to play this game and i had a windows pc that i was about to toss, installed ubuntu which quite literally breathed new life into what i thought was trash, changed everything i thought about computers and now im in IT
About 2 years ago, I started having problems with my 2018 Dell laptop, which ran windows 10. I was a college student and didn't have time for my computer to fail, so I took a 2009 Sony Vaio laptop and put Mint XFCE on it to see if the problems I had with it would be fixed. Surprisingly, the Sony worked better than the Dell, however, I was limited on the hardware in the Sony. Still use both depending on what I'm doing.
when I was about 11-12, I used my 8yr (it was 8yr old that time) old Lenovo laptop(hand me down from parents) and it was average performance, so I booted up Linux after discovering and learning basically everything in about a year
I remember it vividly. It was about 1996, I was thumbing through my Popular Science and saw two pics of Windows alternative desktop environments and I had to have them. I already hated Windows back then. So, I was on a quest. I joined a local Linux Users Group. We would meet up and nerd out. I was a practicing Chiropractor at the time and would compile Linux kernels between patients. Ultimately, it lead me to change changing careers. I went back to school and got a CS degree. This is 100% due to Kim Kommando's article in that Popular Science issue, which I still have. Kim Kommando literally changed my life with that article.
I've only been using Linux for about 3 years now, I was building a gaming PC and didn't want to pay for Windows, and decided to try Linux instead, and oh my gosh I was amazed by how nice it is, I quickly converted to open source and have never once thought about going back
The field I entered for grad school leads to a lot of heavy number crunching or data science, which often leads to super computers, which mostly use Linux. So, it was a requirement that we installed Linux on our machines. I installed Linux Mint on my laptop, and then proceeded to almost never use it for several months, opting to use WSL instead. Eventually, I started seeing some of the things you could do with Linux on the desktop side via YouTube and gave it more of a chance. Wound up making the switch over to using it as my main OS after distro hopping from Mint to Pop to Manjaro and then to Arch. A few years later, and I honestly don't see myself going back.
A former housemate of mine ran BSD on her computer and suggested I give it a try. She was really big into privacy and having full control over her own computer.
Found out from a good friend whose been using Linux for 10+ years. Switched shortly after Microsoft started pushing Windows 11, haven't looked back since.
1997 I started studying computer science, taking my first programming class. Programming assignments were all in C++ on Sun workstations, which meant spending an ungodly amount of time in the lab. I wanted to work on my assignments at home, but didn't have a dedicated phone line, so telnet sessions were being constantly interrupted. I searched USENET for "unix on pc" and found Linux. I downloaded slackware onto fourteen 3.5 inch floppy disks and went home to install it. After half a dozen attempts I got it installed. Working from home was luxurious. I still had to spend a little time in the lab making it work on the Sun workstations. It took me about a month to figure out how to make slackware dial in to the campus network, but once I could do that I could upload my code to a Sun server and quickly test/tweak it to make sure it worked there, and submit it to my professor.
I had a teacher in high school that was into Linux and took the chance to talk about it in class a few times. It was a computer basics class but she did a good job of explaining the bigger-picture stuff behind the basics. I had already heard about Linux before, but we got to talking about it one day and I got really interested. I think I went home and installed Slackware. Talk about jumping into the deep end lol. I eventually came to like it a lot, learned about things like slapt-get (is that still a thing?) and how to compile stuff I found.
I mostly use Linux for pragmatic instead of idealogical reasons, though with how Windows is getting these days I'm starting to appreciate the idealogical differences more and more.
My dad was a programmer in the 80's and we had dumb terminal in the house so he could do the occasional remote work. He worked primarily with VAX systems running VMS , which I suppose is Unix adjacent. Anyways, he would let me sit on his lap while he worked sometimes.
At one point in the late 90's or maybe it was early 2000's, my daily driver was a Sun Microsystems sparc 10 that I got for like 40 bucks at a computer show.
Anyways, I'm a big old nerd.
First time I learned about Linux was when I was young teenager (maybe 12, 14) from my chiropractor doctor who looked like old grandpa who was evaluating my spine and he shared a fascinating rant story about how Bill Gates is a thief, Microsoft monopoly, how a monkey can easily without any effort go through Windows installation and urged me to learn Linux and added that Scandinavian countries in government agencies use Linux Desktop not Windows.
was interested in the dark web so i flashed linux mint to a USB stick abd installed Tor on it. booted it on school laptops when i had free time (also made some chiptunes on there as well with openmpt). customization was nice so i kept using it.
i then proceeded to wipe a windows partition while trying to install a distro onto another usb stick, once i realised the win partition was replaced wit hgrub i just put the distro on the thing. been using linux ever since (i'm on arch now)
Use OSX for a while, got used to the terminal, zsh and the like. Got addicted, ditched windows and installed Debian on a laptop.
4 years later, I have 4 linux machines at home, a personal infra running nginx to reverse proxy a ton of stuff, and I ain't looking back. Only using win10 on the desktop gaming rig.
I can't remember when I first heard of Linux, I imagine a very long time ago but I started actually using Linux in 2013 I think. I was unimpressed with the performance of my HP Pavilion so I decided to dual boot it. Soon enough I never booted into Windows so I just wiped it and stuck with Linux, hopping through a few distros.
I had a friend at school who knew about Linux. One day I told him how slow Windows is and told me about cloudready. I was confused about it and later on I discovered Ubuntu. He also knew what Ubuntu was and I began using Linux from that point forward.
In '17 I inherited my father-in-law's lap top. The hard drive was fried, so I had to buy a new one. Since it was going to have no OS, someone recommended installing Chrome or Linux onto it.
Being Google-averse, (I use it only when I ***absolutely, absolutely*** have no other alternative,) I looked into Linux. As, they say, down the rabbit hole I went. Found a really nice article that kinda-sorta demystified the installation process and made some solid recommendations for non-technomancers like me. What really sold me was the overwhelming amount of choices I had.
Since it was an older machine, I ended up installing Peppermint (which was ok, imo. A good place to start, at least for me.) But since then, I've got a new(er) old laptop, and have tried: Bodhi, Mint (installed on old desktop on a SSD I bought), Zorin, Lite, Pop!, elementary, and deepin...which I liken to that captivating face across the room that you cannot take your eyes off of. (Still like to download and try others every now and then.)
Currently using Ubuntu. I like it a lot.
My story is fun: I had a cousin (he passed away about 10 years or so ago now) who would take contract jobs with the Army in the early 2000s in war zones to deploy computers for civilian use. The OS of choice? Red Hat.
He knew I was into computers but at the time I was studying to be a Windows admin while also learning digital photography/videography on Mac OS X. But man, that expose to Red Hat at that time. I got a \*nix-based system at zero cost (because this was pre-RHEL) and all of this software and I didn't need to go on Kazaa to get it?!?!?! I was blown away.
When I was 15 or something I built a fli4l-router for our home internet. Routers were expensive back then, and my dad had an old 486 and a few ISA-network cards. No harddisk, the machine booted from a 3.5" Floppy, that contained Linux and everything. I didn't really understand much but I got it working. I kept using windows for many years and tried Desktop Linux a few times out of curiosity, but there always were issues, until ten years ago or something I just switched and I'm not going back. I still have a Windows computer for games, but I don't use it that often.
When I was 12 my best friend's dad had a computer running Ubuntu 9.10. I was given an old computer by a family member later that year - my first computer all to myself that I could do anything I wanted with - and after getting bored tinkering with Windows 98 and XP, I downloaded Ubuntu 10.04 and began the journey of teaching myself Linux. I still primarily used Windows for years after that point but I distrohopped and ran Linux in VMs and dual booted it and ran it on my server and took a Linux class in high school and so on until I eventually relegated Windows entirely to VMs.
My big sister, who isn't a computer expert, asked me about it in the early/mid 2000s because she heard it was for advanced (read: cool) people. How she heard of it, I have no idea. I got my start on Fedora Core 5 by burning the .iso to a CD, probably by using the program Alcohol 120% or maybe ImgBurn. I mostly used Linux in an on/off capacity on laptops until 2019, when I finally switched everything permanently. It has had some annoyances, but nothing is more annoying than running a proprietary operating system.
Originally the ifconfig command got me interested into Linux. I was preparing a presentation on networking devices and wanted to get a photo of it running on Linux. So I booted ubuntu, got a photo of the command in action, and then ultimately stayed on it because I liked it that much.
I'm a pretty new user btw, started in Jan of this year.
For me, I discovered it when I tried to convert my laptop into a hackintosh. I failed cuz i have an amd iGPU, so mac os wouldn't run on it. After that I discovered solus. I used solus for about a year in 2020. I switched to arch linux in 2021
my dad bought a laptop in 2013 if im not mistaken, dell vostro 5460... it came with ubuntu 14, i didn't even know its different OS until i need photosop and corel and can't install it, i switch to windows 8.1 6 month later
Someordinarygamer is the one who convinced me to start using Linux but I know about it way before him though I can't remember where from. Chose it for privacy reasons and because windows kept giving me audio issues
First time I heard about it was when windows on our family PC bricked itself and my dad had Ubuntu on a flash drive and we used it for a couple day till he fixed the windows install. Across the years I've found out that servers run on Linux, I became interested in programming, made a discord bot, didn't want to pay $40 a month for a Windows server so I dual booted Ubuntu, ported it from .NET Framework to Mono and I subconsciously was enjoying Linux way more so I stuck with Linux
Raspberry pi, but I really only used retropie on that. I really got into it when mental outlaw was recommended to me on YouTube, and I've been Foss and privacy focused since
About 14 years ago, I was taking my high school electrical engineering class. Loved that class more than anything else I was into at the time, built all sorts of crazy stuff. Wanted to kick it up a notch, and my teacher knew this. He recommended I get into computer stuff, and almost like a shady deal, he pulled me into his office and showed me the goods. He rebooted his computer and through grub, launched Ubuntu instead of windows. I was hooked. After a few weeks, we played with all sorts of Ubuntu based distributions and I got a real good idea of what I was working with. My first self installed distro was Ubuntu 8.10. I’ve been running Linux as my daily driver on almost every computer I’ve owned since. My main pc dual boots windows 10 and Garuda, my laptop runs Linux exclusively. Only reason windows is still around is for when I want to game. My old pc at the time was dual booted windows ME and Ubuntu 8.10 and I spent way more time in linux than I did in windows. I’m by no stretch a genius when it comes to Linux, but I know how to make it do what I want and I know how to learn/find how to make it do more. Wasn’t until a few years ago that I learned about ricing and tiling window managers and stuff. Finally made my home in Garuda xfce with bspwm as my window manager. One of these years I’ll do a traditional arch install, but I’m far too lazy for that now
After goofing off for the better part of the 80's chasing the sound I decided to buckle down and finally complete my bachelors degree. I actually decided to switch majors to computer science. It was 1989 and I came across an old edition of the Communications of the ACM from 1986 in one of the CS labs I was hanging out in between classes and I picked it up and started flipping through it and came across [Jon Bentley](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bentley)'s column called “Programming Pearls” where he ask Donald Knuth to write a program using the literate programming style that Knuth has been working on to read a file of text, determine the *n* most frequently used words, and print out a sorted list of those words along with their frequencies.He also asked [Doug Mcllroy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_McIlroy) to critique it. Knuth wrote his program in WEB (his literate programming system) and was fairly long and included a custom data structure built specifically for this problem. Doug gave his critique (mostly complimentary) but then added his own solution:
tr -cs A-Za-z '\\n' | tr A-Z a-z | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | sed ${1}q
I had to know how this worked and who Doug Mcllroy was (I knew about [Ken Thompson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson) and [Dennis Richie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie) but why had I not heard about Doug? I soon found out that McIlroy contributed programs for [Multics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics) and [Unix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix) operating systems (such as [*diff*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff), [*echo*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_(command)), [*tr*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr_(Unix)), [*join*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join_(Unix_utility)) and *look)* but most importantly, he introduced the idea of Unix pipes. This is at the heart of the Unix Philosophy and the beginning of my love affair with Unix (first with the [VAX 6000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_6000) running BSD) and then Linux in the mid 90s becoming my main desktop OS in the late 90s settling on Debian (which was my OS of choice till a few years ago when I switched to Arch.) Changed my life forever.
I discovered Linux because I subscribed to comp.os.minix and started hearing about this Unix like OS for the 386. Took me till 95 to finally get a usable OS With X-Windows working. I tried getting FreeBSD installed with no luck so Linux it is. I later tried again with FreeBSD in 97 but found I missed all the superior GNU versions of the command line apps so I soon returned to Linux with Debian in 98.
When I managed to brick my Windows XP Install on the Pentium 4 Machine I Had as a 10 year old and didn't have the license to reinstall Windows I looked for alternatives and found Debian.
Now I'm 20 and I've been using Linux on and Off for 8 years before finally ditching Microsoft completely 2 years ago.
1. Found out about Linux when playing Counter-Strike circa 2002. You would browse server lists and would see tux icon for Linux servers.
2. Learned more about it from an uncle circa 2005 when he helped me over the phone force an optical drive to eject when the button wasn't working (paper-clip) and then went on to rant about proprietary this and that, got me to switch to Mozilla Firefox.
3. Started working in web development in 2008 and began interacting with shared Linux hosting.
4. By 2011 I began managing a "Rackspace Cloud" VPS (migrated to Linode in 2014).
5. As a macOS user experimented with Ubuntu dual-boots on 2007-2011 MacBook Pros, a 2011 iMac, and a 2010 Mac Pro. Never used Ubuntu for anything productive though.
6. Circa 2019 I started playing with an SBC (rock64 before the rPi 4) for creating an offsite backup server running Ubuntu. Soon after, I learned about piHole and set one of those up for my home on a second rock64.
7. As a more seasoned software engineer and FOSS user with an interest in leveling up and a discontent with Apple hardware and culture, I watched this [YouTube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aJ9U5t9oD4) and soon after purchased an HP Z840 (to replace a 2010 Mac Pro) and installed Pop!\_OS on it. I ran my prior macOS install as a passthrough VM during a migration period.
8. By 2021 I had purchased a 14" System76 Galago Pro to replace my 15" 2015 MacBook Pro and been running Pop!\_OS daily since on both laptop and desktop.
My first foray was Xenix on 5 1/4 inch floppies (3) for the 286. Next I ftp'ed BSD onto 3 1/2 inch floppies. Played with SCO Unix on my Compaq 386 installed from a 150MB tape cartridge. Next Red Hat Linux 6,7 and 8. Daily driver was OS/2 until Fedora Core then openSUSE. Been on Fedora since 20 I think.
Edit:
Maybe been on Fedora since 15.
A neighbor was tired and pissed from helping me with my PC and gave me a live CD for Pardus v1.0 and then installation CDs for Ubuntu 4 or 5 I don’t remember. It was around 15-17 years ago.
From what I remember, Ubuntu just showed up in the results of a Google search I did. I don't remember what it was I searched, but I was intrigued by the idea of a free operating system. So I started with Ubuntu 10.10 as my first distro. I'm still nostalgic for that free culture song they included (I think it was called Swansong?).
Guys from a french open source foundation came to my high school to make a presentation.
They gave us ubuntu CDs, I spent the night installing and tweaking, never came back ! It was something like 13 years ago.
2011 Linux Mint 10, bought the DVD off eBay for £1. Living in rural France at that time and we only had dial-up, so it was to too big to download in a reasonable time frame. Did nothing with it for a few months, until Windows Vista, I had at the time, croaked it's last breath and the PC needed a new OS.
Tried Mint and loved it. Put it on all the PC's and laptop we had. Been using it ever since, updating to new versions as they came out.
Saw compiz effects on school and wanted to replicate it in my PC, broke my windows install and started using linux more and more until Windows had no reason to be on the disk, at some point I switched to Manjaro and uninstalled windows on the process, that was the last time I used the os named after a wall hole
Literally the same path. My laptop was aging and Windows bogged it down. I had known of Linux, but never used it. Installed Mint on it and it worked great. So I put it an old desktop which revitalized that. I now have it on a newer desktop and it works great. I do have a newer laptop with Win 11, but I keep my desktop on Mint.
During Windows 95 times, I heard about a new operating system that never crashes and where no viruses exists and that is unhackable. I even somehow got it installed, but could not get X to work and with no internet to look up things, the joy was very short lived and I went back to Windows 95 quickly. However a few games even worked without X, or as I called it, worked on DOS-Linux compared to most of them that required Windows-Linux.
I have heard for a long time about some misterous Linux. Then went to a party of geeks. Some of them brought desktops with them. Our whole group was playing with a dark screen and green letters all night long. That was mid 90’s
Gonna date myself, but got a copy of Redhat in a pc magazine. Then got a copy of openSuse from another magazine.
Also gonna date myself, but I downloaded Slackware 1.1 or maybe 1.2 onto 20 or so 1.4MB floppy disks to install on my 386sx PC. Around 1994 or so... The pain of having to edit X config files to get X-Windows working in that era...
Every single floppy disk we had in the house.... recycled every "free AOL trial" floppy we had been sent with a piece of tape over the rw protect tab. And downloaded overnight because after 9pm, connected time didn't count against you with Netcom. Yup.... Slackware 2.0(?) with kernel 1.2.13 was my first.
This is me too. It didn't stay installed for long either, I was a bit over my head.. but man I spent about two weeks downloading disk images after school!
1994 is definitely before my era. I would have had to use it in school already. That may have been possible but ... I don't recall anyone else in class using Linux. Even in 2004 it was more rare. Nowadays it's not quite as uncommon, even though it is still a niche thing.
Slackware in 1994 on a work PC for me. Easier working with all the NIX stuff we were doing than having to use Windows 3.11 or NT telnet sessions.
You aren't alone
I remember these. I also remember when Ubuntu was first put in a magazine, and when the magazines tried out DVDs so they could put more than one distro out at a time.
I heard about it on Usenet around 1993 and then found an ad in a zine where someone was selling Slackware disks.
I tried and failed to download some distro in the days of old fashioned modems (no broadband - those days you needed a leased digital like to get 1mbps). An year or two later I bought a Mandrake CD from a bookshop - it came with a manual in a nice box.
I only bought one boxed version of Linux. It was secondhand Caldera OpenLinux, by a company that later became The SCO Group and decided Linux was infringing their Unix copyrights (which it turns out they didn’t own either). SCO v IBM was finally resolved in 2021. I enjoyed owning a piece of evidence.
I remember when it was just SuSE before Novell, then when Novell bought them you could order free pressed CDs in the mail (way before Ubuntu did it). I got them just because of the sweet Novell logo.
Yea it may have just been suse looking back. This was circa 2005
Same here, I got a copy of Corel Linux with a magazine. I tried installing it but couldn't make heads or tails of it, gave up for a couple of years and then tried some kind of ancient version of SuSE, got a little further and then gave up again, and then eventually got an early version of Ubuntu up and running and have been using Linux in some form or another ever since. :)
Lol! Corel was my first attempt.found it dumpster diving.. total failure, discovered Debian and FreeBSD. ;)
Lol Date Myself...I started with Unix/Fortran on an IBM 360 in 1976
[удалено]
Yep! Same too!
same here
Despite a great experience with a Pi 3, it took me a while to believe that Linux could be a usable desktop like Windows was... I didn't fully fathom that Linuz had competitive DEs and userspace software. Then I dual booted and from that day on I only ever entered Windows to use commercial CAD.
Windows kept crashing and it pissed me off
I honestly thought I was running on negative fps on windows 10.
Wait until Win11!!!
\^ This That's why I moved to OS/2, before discovering Linux. One of the IT admins at work was OS/2 curious, so I volunteered to test drive it. She set me up with OS/2 along with the Lotus OS/2 suite of programs. It was glorious! It was so glorious in fact, that I bought OS/2 for my machine at home. OS/2 was da bomb and a much better Windows machine than Windows ever was!
OS/2 was amazing! I wish it had succeeded. BTW: has anyone ported the OS/2 desktop to Linux?
<3 I can relate to that sooo much ...
Windows has not been crashing much since Vista. If crashes - there is a good chance your hardware has gone wrong. If Linux works on the same hardware - then linux dirvers don't fully utilize it.
That makes... Literally no sense. Linux drivers not utilizing your hardware doesn't magically make it stop erroring out. Typically Linux drivers do about the same thing as windows drivers (in most cases). Also the "good chance" your hardware is bad if windows shits itself is like 20% of the time (in my personal experience). Also Linux doesn't kernel panic when an app is accessing memory it shouldn't, it just stops it from accessing the memory (a very common blue screen error).
In my case nouveau silently freezes the whole PC... well network might work but keyboard is dead locked too The card is stated as fully reverse engineered :-)))
Don't use nouveau then... The Nvidia drivers, while proprietary, do Work Most of the time.
😃 blob works days and days long. But there are dangerous waters ahead - the legacy blob will never support Wayland 😯 and Vulkan of course.
What GPU do you have that you need the 340/390 branch? 470 and 515 Support wayland Out of the Box.
very old 220 :-) When Win10 passes away it will be complete upgrade to a iGPU/APU, but not a discrete one.
Windows has a hybrid kernel, so a crash of a wifi/sound/gpu driver won't crash the whole system
My dad forced me to use it since I was 7-8. Learned a huge amount of knowledge about computers because of it. Love ya dad.
My dad bought a copy of SuSE 5.3 in 1998 and quickly lost interest. But I couldn't get enough of it, spent ages going through all packages from the CDs and compiling my own kernels. All without an internet connection. My proudest moment was when I finally got sound working after a few months.
That's the best way to learn. My parents were not tech-savvy so that would not have worked for me. But one other kid in school was a computer nerd. Both his parents used computers professionally so he kind of got into Linux early on.
Same. We had Suse Linux 7.1 on our computer back then, dual booting with Win98SE but I liked suse much more.
I'm older than most here: My 7 year old kept getting virus' on my windows machine playing dumb kid games on websites. I had a windows machine because I had needed a new PC and that's what it came with. Prior to that, I had been using OS/2 Warp but IBM had dropped support for non-commercial versions. About the third time I had to reinstall Windows to clean it, I went looking for something else and found Mandrake KDE Linux. I bought it and installed it from 3.5 floppy disks - about 12 IIRC. That would have been 1998. KDE was version 1.0
You bought Linux?
Sort of. I didn't technically buy "Linux", I bought a box with the disks and a manual as souldrone already explained. Honestly, I'm not even sure downloading would have been an option at dial-up speeds. In '98 I would have been using a 19.2K modem. Higher speed modems were out but hideously expense and not often supported by the sending modem.
Two guys with ugly glasses and beards came into the computer shop to buy a hard drive or something. They gave me a CD with Slackware 1.0 on it... and also mentioned the mysterious "Perl" language...
When a dude on comp.os.minix wrote about his new hobby os.
He said it was "self-hosting", so I gave it a try, because I wanted to use my computer at home instead of waiting for time at the school computer lab.
OG🗿🗿🗿🗿🗿
Had to install Linux for a course, but we ended up never using it After messing around with my distro I was like "Why would I go back to Windows" and here I am
I started using IBM AIX and SunOS Unix in 1991 in high school. Started college in 1993 and it was mostly Sun SPARC Solaris, DEC Ultrix / MIPS, HP-UX on PA-RISC machines. I wanted that myself. DOS was garbage. One program at a time. Just one user. No memory protection. Windows was horrible too. Constantly crashing. A friend a year older told me about Linux and showed it to me on his PC. He gave me an account on his machine and I would login to his PC from the computer lab just for fun. I saved up my money from my summer job and got a Pentium 90 in summer 1994. Within a week of school starting I had partitioned my hard drive and installed Slackware. I used DOS for some games but even Doom ran on Linux back then.
Similar story for me. In college all the computers in the engineering lab were running Solaris on SPARCStation 10s, and that's what got me hooked on UNIX. After graduating I wanted to run a UNIX system at home, so I bought a Red Hat Linux 3.0.3 CD and installed it on a used Compaq Prolinea 486 PC I bought for cheap at a computer show. I continued with Red Hat Linux up through version 9, then continued on with Fedora Core 1 up through Fedora 36 today.
I got my first laptop at the age of 13 by doing small work over the summer I got one with no OS and my cousin told me he'd get me 2 OS's (🙀) aka dual boot Windows and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS I never really cared for that second OS until some day I decided to check it out for some reason. I decided to boot it up because I'm a nosey little shit. I tried to update it but it said that there where broken packages. After some googling I came up with the idea to delete them... After deleting, as far as I remember, there came up a few billion (exaggerated tens) of dependencies... I decided to reinstall... Then I got into the vacuum which can be summed up like this: Ubuntu, get into r/linuxmemes, try Linux mint, no wifi, try pop os, yes wifi, try debian, fuck everything up, retry Windows/Ubuntu but accidentally convert GPT into MBR, unable to dual boot, blame it on Debian, purge windows, try pop os again, try mint again and learn about drivers, download wifi driver with Ethernet, enjoy Linux Mint, get curious again, try installing freebsd, fail numerous times, discover that the necessary driver for my wifi isn't even available on freebsd, give up, try Manjaro, try installing Arch, I made it, still not satisfied, waste 4 months trying to get Windows back into the dual boot only to learn that the partitioning table needs to be GPT and that is only possible with UEFI mode, after some days, get dual booting back, go back to mint, go back to pop os, go back to Ubuntu, go back to pop os, try trisquel twice, it's fucking unusable for me, distrohop for a bit more, I hate myself, go back to windows, I hate myself more, dual boot Ubuntu, miss space in SSD, delete Ubuntu, unable to merge partitions, hate myself x3, dual boot Windows and pop os, hate myself x∞, gonna try to dual boot Windows/Arch with KDE now knowing a lot more about Linux than the first time, gonna try ricing i3 wm TL;DR in my country (if nowhere else) they say that curiosity killed the cat, thankfully, I am not a cat but my happiness must have been lmao
Around 2015 or 2016, a friend from my uni had a laptop with Ubuntu installed on it. I thought that was pretty cool, so I asked him about it and here I am.
Some day in the 90s i heared about a free alternative to windows... too bad there was no internet to get it and no driver or programms for it. 1999 I tried to install Corel Linux (was an addition of a computer magazine), but it did not work on my machine. In 2006 I heared ybout Ubuntu, making Linux easy. I tried it, but still wasnt completly satisfied... took some years to get into it, slowly slided to Ubuntu and Mint after that ;)
My City has a project where they take old Laptops and Desktops, clear their Hard drives with DBaN and install Ubuntu on them, so they can give them for no charge to People in need
Based city
Grew up with Unix, used Linux through university in the early 90s, have been a fan ever since. Redhat and Mandrake were my first. Couldn't go back to any other OS now without significant pain relearning the limitations imposed upon you. Linux = Freedom (to learn, fuck up, then learn some more).
My gpu in the imac broke
I ended up starting to use Linux mint after I had installed it on my dad's computer. He had the habit of downloading mallware and viruses on his computer. He had bricked two hard drive cause of this. Installed mint on all of my computers and haven't looked back since. About the only time I use windows anymore is at work.
I had a spare PC and obtained a copy of Red Hat 7.0. Yes, Red Hat 7.0. 2.2 Kernel. Xfree86. Manual xf86config editing. GNOME complete with the foot. rpm -ivh, oops, missing dependency, go search the internet, download dependency, rpm -ivh, oops, missing a dependency for the depenency, rinse, repeat, it's a wonder I still use Linux. :)
I didn’t use Red Hat or Fedora for decades because of that. They were in versions in the 20s when I gave them another shot. I think I entirely missed yum and went straight to dnf.
Yum was a necessity and it took them a while to figure out how to essentially steal apt-get, which was around way before yum.
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Oh... I haven't thought about that magazine in forever. We used to get it at some of the bookstores here in the US. (Or maybe we still do. I don't know. I have a couple of the back issues somewhere at the house.)
I was into modding Nextels back then. I was looking up mods for the PS2 and found how to install Fedora IIRC. Then I looked up fedora and found an entire new world.
A friend at that time, quite a nerd, had bought a box with Suse Linux 6.x. I borrowed the box from him out of interest. That must have been around 1999. Or 1998? I don't know.
I was one of those friends evangelizing poor lost souls [with evaluation Linux versions from magazines](https://imgur.com/a/QHwkIPr).
Sometime in the mid to late 90s I got into MUDs- Multi-User Dungeons. Think text based MMOs before MMOs we’re a thing, and a smaller scale. Also, many MUD, MUSH, etc codebases were open source. I tried really hard to get my own server running under Windows 3.11 I think it was? But I was limited, if I recall right it’s because I could only run 16-bit executables, and these codebases weren’t really designed to run under Windows anyway- I was using Cygwin and clumsy hacking to get them to work. I don’t remember what my first distro was at all, but I finally got frustrated enough to get one on floppy disks and install it. It’s been a wild ride ever since.
Man MUDs were great. Awhile back I tried to find one to play but I don't think I had any luck. There used to be so many!
Lensmoor is still up and pretty solid. He’s been running it since at least the early 90s if I recall right. And last I checked, if you donate one time, you get permanently protected from character deletion :) Don’t know how many still play however.
Roughly 2018, I wanted to try something other than Windows since I hated the bloat and preferred older versions. I'm getting a laptop again, soon, and I won't even touch Windows. Open-source and privacy-friendly >>>>>>.
I initially wanted to make a Hackintosh install because I was simply curious of trying another OS than Windows XP. Turns out it was rather complicated and that Ubuntu Live-CD thing was quite impressive. What is it you say? Free software? As in you're not just trying to lure me in then lock features away so I pay for the license later? Like, really free, free? I can do whatever I want with it and it exists only because a bunch of people wanted to do something for the common greater good? Sure Compiz and the cube desktop was fire but open-source software philosophy blew 16 year old me away. Still does 15 years later.
Me too. My friends talk about their Photoshop subscriptions and whether to buy the new windows. I just shake my head in GIMP & Lubuntu.
I asked my computer class teacher if there were any other OS besides Windows and DOS, and he mentioned a few things, but the only word i remembered was Linux. A few years later i heard that the Ubuntu free install CD did reach my country, so i ordered it right away and a few months later i had it in my hand. After that it was all history...
OP specified no time period. Probably in 90s it was a word from one to another and exchanging CDs. Those who didn't have Internet, but had modems - there was FIDOnet almost for free of charge. In 2000s every IT magazine tried to post a few articles in a year and of course the news ribbon. So if you are in the World of computers somehow - you have a Linux CD in your collection. PS: Oh no! Read comments below, felt myself oldy-pants-shaking-dust. Excuse me, but if you didn't hear about Linux since 2005 and onwards - that was your problem why you didn't hear about Linux. 😛😃
I first tried Linux with Ubuntu 8. Bought burnable discs just to try it out. I quickly realized it couldn't play my favorite games, so I switched back to Windows until this year haha. All the annoyances around Windows 11 and Proton being awesome finally gave me the push I needed. Over the years, though, I've built a few different desktop PCs and almost always used Linux to get them up and running and test the hardware. It's just so much quicker and easier to get going.
Oh, and what pushed me to try it back with Ubuntu 8? I saw a video of someone with Linux doing 3D desktop switcher and I just had to have it 😎
A lot of people turn up their nose at Compiz and desktop effects nowadays. But I kinda feel like wobbly windows and the desktop cube were *the* killer feature of desktop Linux in 2006-2009. It turned so many heads, in my experience
Those were good times, I remember Looking Glass WM was meant to be the future, Compiz broke all the barriers, 3D acceleration started to be a thing, WiFi started working without much hassle... imma search for a time machine to go back xD
I started using ubuhtu because I liked the App Store in Ubuntu
Quake 1 test was out for Linux before Windows/DOS.
had an acer netbook that I loved. it ran windows xp untill it died. tried taking it someplace to get it reinstalled, but they wanted over a hundred dollars. ended up getting a new laptop that ran windows 8 and it was awful. after venting to some furries on irc I looked at ubuntu and then into mint cinnamon and have been with it ever since
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I discovered Linux via the Warez scene on Usenet, back around 2000. I first discovered BeOS that way, and became interested in alternate operating systems. This was back in the days of dial-up, and the one one or two distros I downloaded did not work or boot. Probably PEBKAC, I am sure. I was in a bookstore browsing magazines, and discovered an issue of Maximum PC (or Maximum Linux?) that had a couple of Linux CDs. One had a couple of distros I can't recall, which of course did not load or install. The other was a Mandrake 7.0 that DID boot and install just fine. I never went back to Windows fully after that, with my second-ever PC, which was my first home-built system, was Linux and BeOS -only. So, in a strange way, my searching for free Photoshop compatible plugins for my crappy Adobe PhotoDeluxe software led me to to Linux.
Vista.
I installed SUSE on my wife's laptop cause of vista.
I think my first was Ubuntu? Can't remember if it was Ubuntu or Mint first. Dell swore Windows was broken, Microsoft said the laptop was broken... Linux said yeah, I can run that.
I followed alt.os.linux (IIRC), I'd been primed with Minix(ran on i386). I'd used Unix and knew what I wanted.... This would have been in c. 1991. Jumped to linux at home in the following year and then work in the next 6-12 mo.
First encountered UNIX (sunos) at uni in the early/mid 90s and had an epiphany, "so the shell expands glob patterns, not the programs that get invoked - that's absolutely the right way to do it, and the opposite of DOS! I love it!". Spent weeks absorbing manual pages. Started writing little utility scripts. Played pranks on friends with write(1) (was big multi-user system). Amateur radio housemate installed slackware on a PC for me. Faltered a bit, went back to Win9x for a couple of years. Finally installed SuSE from a magazine cover disk and stopped booting Windows in the late 90s. There have been times when I have cursed it (xf86config anyone?), but overall I feel so much relief at being out of the Windows ecosystem. Dabbled with OSX when the iBooks first came out (because unix with nice GUI), but it didn't stick because of the relentlessly expensive upgrade cycle. I'd do it all again.
I started very late, because from my school days I was heavily trained on Windows. I have used windows for 15 years for all kinds of tasks, from using paint in standard sixth to booting Kali linux to learn ethical hacking. The first time I encountered Linux was when I joined a research lab in PhD. All the systems were atleast five years behind with so many issues with update. I had problem even installing chrome browser and hence I figured that Linux is way to difficult(it is not actually, it was not maintained correctly). Didn't touch it for another six months until windows decided to create huge issues for me. Extremely slow and buggy updates irritated me so much so that, I impulsively dual booted it. Used both of them for sometime until one day, I decided to take the leap of faith and removed everything and booted Pop OS. No more windows as a crutch. Turns out I was pretty good with Linux, bash and sysAdmin stuffs. Eventually I kind of fixed the issues with my lab servers. I still use windows 11 sometimes to stay updated with what is going on but will never ever go back there. It was a torture. p.s : For someone who might think Linux is tough from my experience, let me tell you it is not. Its just that I was unfortunate enough to get a badly maintained old system. Newer distros are way way more friendlier than you can think.
i started using it in 1995, i’d heard about unix from reading the cuckoo’s egg and byte magazine. then when logged into a bbs, took some geek quiz that mentioned “a free x86 unix clone called linux”. i investigated more, found walnut creek that sold slackware linux and freebsd on cd, ordered it, and tried them both. stuck with slackware because i couldn’t get x11 to work in freebsd on my crappy packard bell 486. i was a sophomore in high school then, needless to say i was not one of the popular kids!
Me a 13 year old computer nerd got a copy of Redhat 4 or 5 as a birthday gift from my uncle.......as a box set
Brazilian public education system used to use a distro made by the Ministry of Education called Linux Educacional on yellow PCs. When I used it we were on version 3.0, with KDE 4 and based off of Ubuntu 8.something. I loved using it at school and always thought "Why doesn't XP look this good?" I kept using Windows XP and then 7 at home, but after having problems with 10 I gave Ubuntu 16.04 a shot. I was blown away, looked so nice, was so much faster and most of my games worked (I was basically only playing Valve stuff and emulators back then). Can't go back to Windows now. I have used Windows a lot since then, at work, on my dad's laptop, etc and I don't hate it at all, I actually really liked Windows 11 - but man, I can't imagine myself using something other than Fedora now.
I found out about it long before using it. I tried to install some type of Suse on a desktop but the NIC didn't work and I gave up. I started using it properly when Windows 8 came out in 2012. I tried it and HATED it. This was before MS rolled back with 8.1 and I thought if this is the way they want to go, I am out. At this point hardware support in Linux seemed to have crossed a threshold where it 'just worked' in 99.5% of cases. This would have been Mint 13.
Read about it in some magazine back in 1996 (I was 11yo), in 1997 I managed to get in my hands a copy of SuSE Linux, tinkered with it, didn't understand crap, went back to Windows, next year a copy of Corel Linux came in a magazine, gave it another try, destroyed my hard drive in the process (my beautiful 2GB drive!) by 2002 I understood more concepts and started distro hopping like crazy, 2004 I installed Gentoo head on, then moved to Fedora, then to Arch Linux (since 2010 or so) and that's about it.
For me, it was only about two years ago. I was looking to buy a Chromebook, not really sure why in hindsight, but I wanted to try one out first. I found online, an OS you could boot off a USB as a live session to try, that was based on chromium. It was cloudready, by Neverware (from what I understood Google bought them out and then made Chrome Flex?? Something like this). Anywho, I enjoyed the little experiment, and started to see just how little I actually needed windows specifically, so I browsed around online for other OS that could be tested through USB...and I found everything Linux. Started off with Ubuntu, then Mint, then Pop Os, then all the Ubuntu flavours before landing on Peppermint.
Had an XP drive completely die out a day after I bought a laptop. Had to buy a new drive and didn't have the spare loot for a Windows install. Booted up that Ubuntu disk I'd been eyeing for a while.
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The laptops my wife and I use both originally shipped from Dell with Vista. Today, mine runs PCLOS and hers runs Mint, and they both work better in 2022 than they would have in 2009 with Vista!
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The top case on my old laptop broke a year ago, and I just bought a new old-stock one for $18 online and installed it. There are so many parts now that are cheap, why not? My wife's got upgraded from 768p to 900p on the screen.
I'd heard of Linux in high school, but it was described as this arcane thing that only magicians and hackers used. A few years later, I got my first college laptop, and it came with Windows Vista. It took less that two weeks to start looking for alternatives. I decided to try an Ubuntu live CD, and a few days later I installed it. It took about 8 mouse clicks. I felt like a god. That was 14 years ago. Basically everything in my house runs some flavor of Linux now. I don't claim that Linux is objectively better or anything, but it's like slipping into an old pair of shoes at this point. Familiar, comfortable, predictable, and easy.
I have worked in IT since the early 70s. I used Multics in the late 70s. It is the precursor to Linux. I have been aware of Linux since it was created. much later, in the 200s, I was recovering from a virus on my home Windows Pc. I was struggling for 3 days to put things back together. My daughter suggested I install Ubuntu. It took minutes and I have been happy with it ever since.
I heard about it in a programming tutorial, but I was skeptical about it then windows did what it does best i.e. I had a ubuntu live boot usb , installed Ubuntu 20.04 as my first distro, fell in love with Linux and Never looked back.
Was going through a rough phase, laptop broke down. Tried using dusted old PC from school time but it was too old to run latest windows and was sluggish. Decided to try Ubuntu 20.04 (knew about it from college times) and it works like a charm.
Deviantart. I wanted to use macOS but as a teenager I didn't have the financial capabilities to do so and saw all kinds of cool desktop screenshots on Deviantart that looked like macOS rip-off’s. It turned out to be Ubuntu so I started playing with that and have been using Linux since then alongside macOS and Windows :)
I asked a question on the Windows forum
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Are you Russian? You're dodging sanctions anyway, Fedora or other distributions may not be able to update either.
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Ubuntu will be able to update as they are based in the UK. Fedora and Red Hat is American so they must obey US sanctions. For example you can’t use Fedora in Syria or North Korea.
Started using Redhat at the end of the 90s because it was a college course we had to go through... Setting up servers and so forth.. Ended up using opensuse after a while because i liked yast.. Slott og cd-copying at that time😀
Well I was set on going into CS so it would eventually come the day for me to switch. But if I'm honest, I just did it because a friend of mine did it first and a) it looked like a nice challenge and b) I really liked the Pacman update progress bar aesthetics on the terminal x) This was 2008 so I started with Ubuntu to ramp up the difficulty, and only made the transition to arch a couple years later.
I found out about it by reading comp.os.linux.* almost thirty years ago. First installed and switched to it completely (from OS/2) in 2007.
It was GNU/Linux Mint(mate) for me about 7 years ago, but very soon after that I switched to Debian stable. After a couple of years of using it I switched to Trisquel with a libre kernel and I am still using it as my daily driver. I like the thing that I am able to use it on my job and that the kernel is deblobbed.
Many years ago now so i don't remember specifics. Was having an issue with my Windows machine. Did some research online and i kept seeing Knoppix over and over again. Boot into Knoppix and try xyz. It worked and i was like what is Knoppix? So i did more reading. Turns out Windows and Mac werent the only operating systems around.
About eight years ago I was interested in getting a job at a local web hosting company, saw that they used "linux". I was intrigued, decided to give it a try, and downloaded Linux Mint. It was a good thing I did, since around that time my laptop suddenly had severe heat issues and Windows couldn't run with overheating and shutting down. Linux was apparently lightweight enough that it didn't cause the same problems. I later fixed the heat issues with a good cleaning, and there were things I couldn't figure out how to do that I needed so I switched back to Windows. It'd be six more years and three more attempts to switch before I finally dove in and switched to Linux for good. Boy am I loving it though.
Mandrake Linux CDs in a magazine.
Raspberry Pi 3. I was blown away by the versatility of the little device. The UI (Pixel DE based on LXDE iirc) blew me away and I remember thinking it was so good for the 1GB onboard RAM. People often ask the secret to pushing Linux mainstream. My answer would be Raspberry Pi. Yes, you get only 1 kind of people then (those who wanna mess around with electronics, are computer science enthusiast etc.) but imo it is the most effective way.
Through an Ex. Installed it couldn't do anything, went back to Windows, but won't lie it's been a lifesaver for the past couple of weeks.
Put new video card in Win95 (or 98? maybe) computer, drivers were shite, constant blue screens, sometimes at boot (but not every time). Read an article about Caldera Linux and how easy it was to install and use. (This was well before it became part of SCO.) Tried it out. Dual booted for a while, mostly for gaming. Within a year or so was Linux only. Did a lot of distro hopping just to check out new things. BTW, while I was dual booting (so around 1999 / 2000), Quake III Arena had better performance on Linux than it did on MS Windows on my hardware. Just saying.
I've used Linux for a good 11 years. I remember searching for something different to Windows because I was bored. And I stumbled upon Ubuntu. I had a very low spec Pc at the time: 2GB RAM, 128Gb HDD. I installed it and my computer went `whoosh!` like a rocket. I was impressed. After that I got a bit bored of Ubuntu (3 years later) so I searched around and found Arch. Tried that and I was not bored for the next 6 years. After that I've used a lot of OSes like openSUSE, Gentoo and whatnot. I've just settled on using NixOS. It's a great distro in my opinion. I like rolling release distros a lot, that's why I used a lot of rolling release distros in my Linux days. Even NixOS is rolling release.
I found an old copy of Linux for Dummies in a remainders bookshop. It had 2 CDs on the front with what claimed to be a free operating system. I ended up installing it on my old computer when I bought a new one the next year. I became a full-time Linux user around two years later.
College. The computer lab in college only had Ubuntu. I would use putty to log into the lab computers to work on assignments from home. It was how the instructors enforced using same compiler and versions of everything. It wasn't until my first job as a software engineer where I started actually using it on my personal computers. Started with Ubuntu for a few years, then Pop when snaps became mandatory, then mint because my new job uses that. All my servers run Debian though.
I found out it existed when I read a newspaper article around 1995 about Red Hat. The first time I actually tried to install Linux was in 1999, but it wasn't until around 2008 when I first did anything useful with it, installing Puppy on very old hardware.
2002 running xandros as the file server for my small business.
Class in 1993. Student mentioned Linux. Prof mentioned OS/2 (why hasn't this been open sourced?). Downloaded some boot media (on floppy) and booted my Windows 3.1 box. Couldn't figure anything. Ordered the Slackware CD. Had to get a job were I had to work on UNIX a bit before I started to officially switch, which was 1999.
> why hasn't this been open sourced? OS/2 is actually still going, now as [ArcaOS](https://www.arcanoae.com/shop/arcaos-5-personal-edition/). It's proprietary with no free ISOs, unfortunately.
In 1994/1995, I was a kid running DOS, and occasionally starting up Windows 3.11. I spent a lot of time on local BBS's, and started to hear some details of the eventually to be released "Windows 95" in the forums and via chat. Apparently it would replace DOS and the system was going to boot straight into Windows... Yikes. But I'd also seen something called "Mini Linux" (lives in a FAT directory, 'boots' from DOS) on the board, which I played around with for a bit before taking the plunge and downloading the full set of Slackware disk images and copying them to a giant stack of floppies. For the next few years, I had systems set up to dual boot just in case I needed DOS/Windows for something, but had quit bothering with dual boot that never actually got used by around 2000.
I found out linux existed when one of my cousins came over. When she turned on her laptop GRUB came ip and I asked what that was for. Fast forward a couple years and I now daily drive Void.
Windows bluescreened left and right. And sometimes it just corrupted the whole filesystem. I had really bad luck with it. So I tried Linux (first ubuntu in a vm and then zorin os) and it worked flawlessly. Now I use arch btw.
I’ve always kind of knew about Linux. However, it wasn’t until my boyfriend explained to me how a laptop like mine (a 2nd gen AMD laptop) could run far superior on Linux that I actually looked into it.
First was when me and my friend started watching Mr. Robot, so we installed Kali Linux. It was fun, but aside from "wow we are le epic h4ck3rs" we did nothing actually. Years later in university one of my profs (a very kind and helpful man, but he liked to tease us and joke with us, nothing negative or offending) stood next to me in lab, looked at my laptop, and said "Wow, thatRoland, really, you are using Windows? Of all people? What a shame." So I decided that yeah, I'm gonna show it to him, I've installed Ubuntu to dualboot. In next lab, he saw that I used Linux, stood next to me, and said: "Wow, you are really using Ubuntu? That's too easy." In the end, I actually started liking it, so I stayed on Ubuntu for a while.
I heard some things from friends on how cool linux was. I was 14ish my step dad got me a debian CD. This was was around 93 / 94 or so. After numerous attempts I finally got it installed and was greeted with a command prompt. I was like wtf is so cool about this. But I've been using it since, and I've actually been working at SUSE Linux for nearly 12 years. I've been windows free for 20 years.
installed slackware in 1993
That creepy early 2000s IBM commercial with people lecturing a frightened-looking blonde child in a blank white room while a voiceover goes on about how awesome he is for just existing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7ozaFbqg00
Apologies in advance if I err. This was more than half my lifetime ago! Memory a little sketchy - especially during my early 30's working in the city (too much good stuff = blank spots). The year was 1993 - long hot summers with little thought of global warming. I was 22 (so nearly 30 years ago!) and working for Logitech in the UK. We were visited by the global head of tech support. He didn't have an RS-232 cable for the modem, so fashioned one from a few (maybe 3 or 4) paperclips, connecting his DB9 on his laptop to the DB25 on the USRobotics 9600 modem. I was fascinated by his screen - just a login: followed by password: prompt. A few commands and I watched as he issued AT commands directly to the modem. My access to the internet was at that time very limited. Connection was via CIX and latterly Compuserve, before (some years later) having a demon account - yes, I was larcombe.demon.co.uk :-) Anyway, discussions of Linus ensued. A video of Richard Stallman with his long hair, beard and sandals, just dancing with himself a few inches from (and facing) a brick wall... that was it - my journey had begun. I ordered the disks (and I think they might have been FREE) to be delivered to the Logitech office. I could have been Slackware (but I am not 100% sure), and they were 3.5" 720Mb SDs (not even the 1.44 HDs!). The first dozen or so attempts were painful - but I was using a spare tech support PC, so didn't really care. My POS Windows 3.1 machine was still available for me to do my day job. When I first got my linux terminal to connect via PPP to demon I was in heaven. ELM for mail. ftp directly from my terminal - no staging area to download what I had already downloaded. Linux made me (my machine) part of the Internet - instead of just a consumer. Since then, I have been linux all the way!
twitch streamer was using ubuntu to play this game and i had a windows pc that i was about to toss, installed ubuntu which quite literally breathed new life into what i thought was trash, changed everything i thought about computers and now im in IT
About 2 years ago, I started having problems with my 2018 Dell laptop, which ran windows 10. I was a college student and didn't have time for my computer to fail, so I took a 2009 Sony Vaio laptop and put Mint XFCE on it to see if the problems I had with it would be fixed. Surprisingly, the Sony worked better than the Dell, however, I was limited on the hardware in the Sony. Still use both depending on what I'm doing.
when I was about 11-12, I used my 8yr (it was 8yr old that time) old Lenovo laptop(hand me down from parents) and it was average performance, so I booted up Linux after discovering and learning basically everything in about a year
I remember it vividly. It was about 1996, I was thumbing through my Popular Science and saw two pics of Windows alternative desktop environments and I had to have them. I already hated Windows back then. So, I was on a quest. I joined a local Linux Users Group. We would meet up and nerd out. I was a practicing Chiropractor at the time and would compile Linux kernels between patients. Ultimately, it lead me to change changing careers. I went back to school and got a CS degree. This is 100% due to Kim Kommando's article in that Popular Science issue, which I still have. Kim Kommando literally changed my life with that article.
I've only been using Linux for about 3 years now, I was building a gaming PC and didn't want to pay for Windows, and decided to try Linux instead, and oh my gosh I was amazed by how nice it is, I quickly converted to open source and have never once thought about going back
The field I entered for grad school leads to a lot of heavy number crunching or data science, which often leads to super computers, which mostly use Linux. So, it was a requirement that we installed Linux on our machines. I installed Linux Mint on my laptop, and then proceeded to almost never use it for several months, opting to use WSL instead. Eventually, I started seeing some of the things you could do with Linux on the desktop side via YouTube and gave it more of a chance. Wound up making the switch over to using it as my main OS after distro hopping from Mint to Pop to Manjaro and then to Arch. A few years later, and I honestly don't see myself going back.
A former housemate of mine ran BSD on her computer and suggested I give it a try. She was really big into privacy and having full control over her own computer.
My first was an old variation of Knoppix. I think that it was 3.4 maybe and I was hooked.
Found out from a good friend whose been using Linux for 10+ years. Switched shortly after Microsoft started pushing Windows 11, haven't looked back since.
1997 I started studying computer science, taking my first programming class. Programming assignments were all in C++ on Sun workstations, which meant spending an ungodly amount of time in the lab. I wanted to work on my assignments at home, but didn't have a dedicated phone line, so telnet sessions were being constantly interrupted. I searched USENET for "unix on pc" and found Linux. I downloaded slackware onto fourteen 3.5 inch floppy disks and went home to install it. After half a dozen attempts I got it installed. Working from home was luxurious. I still had to spend a little time in the lab making it work on the Sun workstations. It took me about a month to figure out how to make slackware dial in to the campus network, but once I could do that I could upload my code to a Sun server and quickly test/tweak it to make sure it worked there, and submit it to my professor.
I had a teacher in high school that was into Linux and took the chance to talk about it in class a few times. It was a computer basics class but she did a good job of explaining the bigger-picture stuff behind the basics. I had already heard about Linux before, but we got to talking about it one day and I got really interested. I think I went home and installed Slackware. Talk about jumping into the deep end lol. I eventually came to like it a lot, learned about things like slapt-get (is that still a thing?) and how to compile stuff I found. I mostly use Linux for pragmatic instead of idealogical reasons, though with how Windows is getting these days I'm starting to appreciate the idealogical differences more and more.
comp.os.minix
I took the privacy pill.
My dad was a programmer in the 80's and we had dumb terminal in the house so he could do the occasional remote work. He worked primarily with VAX systems running VMS , which I suppose is Unix adjacent. Anyways, he would let me sit on his lap while he worked sometimes. At one point in the late 90's or maybe it was early 2000's, my daily driver was a Sun Microsystems sparc 10 that I got for like 40 bucks at a computer show. Anyways, I'm a big old nerd.
First time I learned about Linux was when I was young teenager (maybe 12, 14) from my chiropractor doctor who looked like old grandpa who was evaluating my spine and he shared a fascinating rant story about how Bill Gates is a thief, Microsoft monopoly, how a monkey can easily without any effort go through Windows installation and urged me to learn Linux and added that Scandinavian countries in government agencies use Linux Desktop not Windows.
I was 5 years old and my dad made me play with super tux kart. Now i am here 13 years old and still using it. :)
was interested in the dark web so i flashed linux mint to a USB stick abd installed Tor on it. booted it on school laptops when i had free time (also made some chiptunes on there as well with openmpt). customization was nice so i kept using it. i then proceeded to wipe a windows partition while trying to install a distro onto another usb stick, once i realised the win partition was replaced wit hgrub i just put the distro on the thing. been using linux ever since (i'm on arch now)
Dual booting an old iMac with gentoo. After a few months, I just removed the HFS+ bullshit I no longer needed.
Use OSX for a while, got used to the terminal, zsh and the like. Got addicted, ditched windows and installed Debian on a laptop. 4 years later, I have 4 linux machines at home, a personal infra running nginx to reverse proxy a ton of stuff, and I ain't looking back. Only using win10 on the desktop gaming rig.
I can't remember when I first heard of Linux, I imagine a very long time ago but I started actually using Linux in 2013 I think. I was unimpressed with the performance of my HP Pavilion so I decided to dual boot it. Soon enough I never booted into Windows so I just wiped it and stuck with Linux, hopping through a few distros.
I wanted to learn programming, and I discover Linux, because of that, and I decided to try, and after that I never looked at windows again.
I had a friend at school who knew about Linux. One day I told him how slow Windows is and told me about cloudready. I was confused about it and later on I discovered Ubuntu. He also knew what Ubuntu was and I began using Linux from that point forward.
Free cd from pc magazine when internet so slow.
In '17 I inherited my father-in-law's lap top. The hard drive was fried, so I had to buy a new one. Since it was going to have no OS, someone recommended installing Chrome or Linux onto it. Being Google-averse, (I use it only when I ***absolutely, absolutely*** have no other alternative,) I looked into Linux. As, they say, down the rabbit hole I went. Found a really nice article that kinda-sorta demystified the installation process and made some solid recommendations for non-technomancers like me. What really sold me was the overwhelming amount of choices I had. Since it was an older machine, I ended up installing Peppermint (which was ok, imo. A good place to start, at least for me.) But since then, I've got a new(er) old laptop, and have tried: Bodhi, Mint (installed on old desktop on a SSD I bought), Zorin, Lite, Pop!, elementary, and deepin...which I liken to that captivating face across the room that you cannot take your eyes off of. (Still like to download and try others every now and then.) Currently using Ubuntu. I like it a lot.
My story is fun: I had a cousin (he passed away about 10 years or so ago now) who would take contract jobs with the Army in the early 2000s in war zones to deploy computers for civilian use. The OS of choice? Red Hat. He knew I was into computers but at the time I was studying to be a Windows admin while also learning digital photography/videography on Mac OS X. But man, that expose to Red Hat at that time. I got a \*nix-based system at zero cost (because this was pre-RHEL) and all of this software and I didn't need to go on Kazaa to get it?!?!?! I was blown away.
When I was 15 or something I built a fli4l-router for our home internet. Routers were expensive back then, and my dad had an old 486 and a few ISA-network cards. No harddisk, the machine booted from a 3.5" Floppy, that contained Linux and everything. I didn't really understand much but I got it working. I kept using windows for many years and tried Desktop Linux a few times out of curiosity, but there always were issues, until ten years ago or something I just switched and I'm not going back. I still have a Windows computer for games, but I don't use it that often.
When I was 12 my best friend's dad had a computer running Ubuntu 9.10. I was given an old computer by a family member later that year - my first computer all to myself that I could do anything I wanted with - and after getting bored tinkering with Windows 98 and XP, I downloaded Ubuntu 10.04 and began the journey of teaching myself Linux. I still primarily used Windows for years after that point but I distrohopped and ran Linux in VMs and dual booted it and ran it on my server and took a Linux class in high school and so on until I eventually relegated Windows entirely to VMs.
My big sister, who isn't a computer expert, asked me about it in the early/mid 2000s because she heard it was for advanced (read: cool) people. How she heard of it, I have no idea. I got my start on Fedora Core 5 by burning the .iso to a CD, probably by using the program Alcohol 120% or maybe ImgBurn. I mostly used Linux in an on/off capacity on laptops until 2019, when I finally switched everything permanently. It has had some annoyances, but nothing is more annoying than running a proprietary operating system.
Originally the ifconfig command got me interested into Linux. I was preparing a presentation on networking devices and wanted to get a photo of it running on Linux. So I booted ubuntu, got a photo of the command in action, and then ultimately stayed on it because I liked it that much. I'm a pretty new user btw, started in Jan of this year.
after watching a youtube test quiz about "how tech savvy you are" one of the questions was: "have you ever used linux?"
For me, I discovered it when I tried to convert my laptop into a hackintosh. I failed cuz i have an amd iGPU, so mac os wouldn't run on it. After that I discovered solus. I used solus for about a year in 2020. I switched to arch linux in 2021
my dad bought a laptop in 2013 if im not mistaken, dell vostro 5460... it came with ubuntu 14, i didn't even know its different OS until i need photosop and corel and can't install it, i switch to windows 8.1 6 month later
Got tired of Windows ME crap. Walking through CompUSA and saw SuSE.
Someordinarygamer is the one who convinced me to start using Linux but I know about it way before him though I can't remember where from. Chose it for privacy reasons and because windows kept giving me audio issues
98/99 in Community college. Slackware. All I can say is we've come a long way.
First time I heard about it was when windows on our family PC bricked itself and my dad had Ubuntu on a flash drive and we used it for a couple day till he fixed the windows install. Across the years I've found out that servers run on Linux, I became interested in programming, made a discord bot, didn't want to pay $40 a month for a Windows server so I dual booted Ubuntu, ported it from .NET Framework to Mono and I subconsciously was enjoying Linux way more so I stuck with Linux
Raspberry pi, but I really only used retropie on that. I really got into it when mental outlaw was recommended to me on YouTube, and I've been Foss and privacy focused since
My brother made me dual boot fedora with cinnamon and I got hooked.
About 14 years ago, I was taking my high school electrical engineering class. Loved that class more than anything else I was into at the time, built all sorts of crazy stuff. Wanted to kick it up a notch, and my teacher knew this. He recommended I get into computer stuff, and almost like a shady deal, he pulled me into his office and showed me the goods. He rebooted his computer and through grub, launched Ubuntu instead of windows. I was hooked. After a few weeks, we played with all sorts of Ubuntu based distributions and I got a real good idea of what I was working with. My first self installed distro was Ubuntu 8.10. I’ve been running Linux as my daily driver on almost every computer I’ve owned since. My main pc dual boots windows 10 and Garuda, my laptop runs Linux exclusively. Only reason windows is still around is for when I want to game. My old pc at the time was dual booted windows ME and Ubuntu 8.10 and I spent way more time in linux than I did in windows. I’m by no stretch a genius when it comes to Linux, but I know how to make it do what I want and I know how to learn/find how to make it do more. Wasn’t until a few years ago that I learned about ricing and tiling window managers and stuff. Finally made my home in Garuda xfce with bspwm as my window manager. One of these years I’ll do a traditional arch install, but I’m far too lazy for that now
Had to use a particular software framework for a project in a university club. Started by dual booting Ubuntu, later switched to arch Linux
After goofing off for the better part of the 80's chasing the sound I decided to buckle down and finally complete my bachelors degree. I actually decided to switch majors to computer science. It was 1989 and I came across an old edition of the Communications of the ACM from 1986 in one of the CS labs I was hanging out in between classes and I picked it up and started flipping through it and came across [Jon Bentley](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bentley)'s column called “Programming Pearls” where he ask Donald Knuth to write a program using the literate programming style that Knuth has been working on to read a file of text, determine the *n* most frequently used words, and print out a sorted list of those words along with their frequencies.He also asked [Doug Mcllroy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_McIlroy) to critique it. Knuth wrote his program in WEB (his literate programming system) and was fairly long and included a custom data structure built specifically for this problem. Doug gave his critique (mostly complimentary) but then added his own solution: tr -cs A-Za-z '\\n' | tr A-Z a-z | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | sed ${1}q I had to know how this worked and who Doug Mcllroy was (I knew about [Ken Thompson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson) and [Dennis Richie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie) but why had I not heard about Doug? I soon found out that McIlroy contributed programs for [Multics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics) and [Unix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix) operating systems (such as [*diff*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff), [*echo*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_(command)), [*tr*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr_(Unix)), [*join*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join_(Unix_utility)) and *look)* but most importantly, he introduced the idea of Unix pipes. This is at the heart of the Unix Philosophy and the beginning of my love affair with Unix (first with the [VAX 6000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_6000) running BSD) and then Linux in the mid 90s becoming my main desktop OS in the late 90s settling on Debian (which was my OS of choice till a few years ago when I switched to Arch.) Changed my life forever. I discovered Linux because I subscribed to comp.os.minix and started hearing about this Unix like OS for the 386. Took me till 95 to finally get a usable OS With X-Windows working. I tried getting FreeBSD installed with no luck so Linux it is. I later tried again with FreeBSD in 97 but found I missed all the superior GNU versions of the command line apps so I soon returned to Linux with Debian in 98.
Well guess who watched Mr Robot at 12 years old!
Everyone was using Linux in college
When I managed to brick my Windows XP Install on the Pentium 4 Machine I Had as a 10 year old and didn't have the license to reinstall Windows I looked for alternatives and found Debian. Now I'm 20 and I've been using Linux on and Off for 8 years before finally ditching Microsoft completely 2 years ago.
1. Found out about Linux when playing Counter-Strike circa 2002. You would browse server lists and would see tux icon for Linux servers. 2. Learned more about it from an uncle circa 2005 when he helped me over the phone force an optical drive to eject when the button wasn't working (paper-clip) and then went on to rant about proprietary this and that, got me to switch to Mozilla Firefox. 3. Started working in web development in 2008 and began interacting with shared Linux hosting. 4. By 2011 I began managing a "Rackspace Cloud" VPS (migrated to Linode in 2014). 5. As a macOS user experimented with Ubuntu dual-boots on 2007-2011 MacBook Pros, a 2011 iMac, and a 2010 Mac Pro. Never used Ubuntu for anything productive though. 6. Circa 2019 I started playing with an SBC (rock64 before the rPi 4) for creating an offsite backup server running Ubuntu. Soon after, I learned about piHole and set one of those up for my home on a second rock64. 7. As a more seasoned software engineer and FOSS user with an interest in leveling up and a discontent with Apple hardware and culture, I watched this [YouTube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aJ9U5t9oD4) and soon after purchased an HP Z840 (to replace a 2010 Mac Pro) and installed Pop!\_OS on it. I ran my prior macOS install as a passthrough VM during a migration period. 8. By 2021 I had purchased a 14" System76 Galago Pro to replace my 15" 2015 MacBook Pro and been running Pop!\_OS daily since on both laptop and desktop.
My first foray was Xenix on 5 1/4 inch floppies (3) for the 286. Next I ftp'ed BSD onto 3 1/2 inch floppies. Played with SCO Unix on my Compaq 386 installed from a 150MB tape cartridge. Next Red Hat Linux 6,7 and 8. Daily driver was OS/2 until Fedora Core then openSUSE. Been on Fedora since 20 I think. Edit: Maybe been on Fedora since 15.
A neighbor was tired and pissed from helping me with my PC and gave me a live CD for Pardus v1.0 and then installation CDs for Ubuntu 4 or 5 I don’t remember. It was around 15-17 years ago.
There was a lot of discussion about it back in 2000. The windows killer and stuff like that. :p
From what I remember, Ubuntu just showed up in the results of a Google search I did. I don't remember what it was I searched, but I was intrigued by the idea of a free operating system. So I started with Ubuntu 10.10 as my first distro. I'm still nostalgic for that free culture song they included (I think it was called Swansong?).
Guys from a french open source foundation came to my high school to make a presentation. They gave us ubuntu CDs, I spent the night installing and tweaking, never came back ! It was something like 13 years ago.
2011 Linux Mint 10, bought the DVD off eBay for £1. Living in rural France at that time and we only had dial-up, so it was to too big to download in a reasonable time frame. Did nothing with it for a few months, until Windows Vista, I had at the time, croaked it's last breath and the PC needed a new OS. Tried Mint and loved it. Put it on all the PC's and laptop we had. Been using it ever since, updating to new versions as they came out.
Saw compiz effects on school and wanted to replicate it in my PC, broke my windows install and started using linux more and more until Windows had no reason to be on the disk, at some point I switched to Manjaro and uninstalled windows on the process, that was the last time I used the os named after a wall hole
I think when was scrambling on internet searching about something idk I don't remember that's how I found about linux
Literally the same path. My laptop was aging and Windows bogged it down. I had known of Linux, but never used it. Installed Mint on it and it worked great. So I put it an old desktop which revitalized that. I now have it on a newer desktop and it works great. I do have a newer laptop with Win 11, but I keep my desktop on Mint.
During Windows 95 times, I heard about a new operating system that never crashes and where no viruses exists and that is unhackable. I even somehow got it installed, but could not get X to work and with no internet to look up things, the joy was very short lived and I went back to Windows 95 quickly. However a few games even worked without X, or as I called it, worked on DOS-Linux compared to most of them that required Windows-Linux.
I have heard for a long time about some misterous Linux. Then went to a party of geeks. Some of them brought desktops with them. Our whole group was playing with a dark screen and green letters all night long. That was mid 90’s