Linux

Heh, this inspires a neat little bio.

I had access to then-usual computer-related stuff growing up as a teenager in the late 80's/early 90's (C16, C64, Amiga, DOS/Windows on 286/386). One of the nicer things in that environment was a PostScript capable laser (well, LED) printer. At that time struggling with PageMaker and the likes, the possibilities of a page description language fascinated me.

Later, but still in teenage years, I came across NeXT(STEP) - first through a friend who had one, and its manuals and TeX documents out that PostScript printer like nothing I'd ever seen (done in-house) before. I was hooked. ;-)

A NeXT computer then became my daily driver through "college" and university, where at the time there also were Unix workstations by HP, Sun and SGI. DOS/Windows was all happening at that time, and it always felt to me like the VHS of operating systems - the technically worst implementation taking the market share.

When Linux appeared on the scene, I was obviously interested. The first distro I remember was SLS, followed by SlackWare and Red Hat. Mostly for communication/networking (UUCP, PPP, eMail, Usenet, IP connectivity, ...) I started to use Red Hat in 1996, with the NeXT keeping its place for its graphical desktop on my personal desk. At the time I started working for a software startup where we used a mix of Linux (Red Hat) and Windows (NT) desktops, and Linux (Red Hat) mostly for servers (some Sun and BSD as well, IIRC). Around 2002(?) maybe I had mostly migrated to Linux also for my home desktop, but I kept the NeXT around for a long time, most specifically because of Diagram!, a predecessor (in spirit) to OmniGraffle.

Moving to Apple/OS X never sat right with me due to its proprietary, closed-source nature. "It works great when it works. When it doesn't, you're even more SOL than on Windows."

When Red Hat went EOL in 2004 I looked around for alternatives and most seriously tried out gentoo Linux. I love the flexibility of being able to use one distro with consistent paradigms all the way from (almost) embedded through various server configurations to a fully multimedia capable desktop. I haven't looked back since, typing this into LibreWolf on a KDE Plasma desktop running on gentoo.

All the while, I've also been using, supporting, and developing for Windows professionally to some degree (in addition to working for/on Linux and other more Unix-y stuff). It's such a quality of life hit compared to open source - I remember phone calls with prominent Microsoft employees over weird support cases involving DCOM permissions (or rather, bugs therein) - Microsoft's reply certainly felt quite like de Maizière's infamous "some of those answers could unsettle too many people" quote, hinting at security through obscurity.

Whereas in the Linux ecosystem, I can analyze to their root and facilitate taking care of even decidedly weird corner cases.

One thing I still miss a lot from the NeXTSTEP desktop is its concept of "services": Global utilities that could/would operate on anything (of suitable data type, e.g. text, image) that is currently selected (and show up in what today would amount to the context menu of the selection, regardless of which program it's in). In the simplest case, this could be a Wikipedia lookup of the currently selected word. But, services also had the ability to replace the selection, allowing for all manner of things like unit conversions, 'intelligent' expansion (what this could do together with ChatGPT!), at-the-fingertips OCR and so on and so forth.

I think it was around 2014 and I tried Ubuntu 10 or 11. After using VM for a bit I tried it on my main PC with dual boot.

The problem I had was that steam wasn't ready at the time, let alone other games. Steam kept giving driver errors that required an obscure command to be run every time before booting and for some reason I couldn't get it to fix permanently.

Wine was wine. Sometimes it worked sometimes it didn't

In the end I recall the DE crashing and then I gave up for a few years on it.

Still turned out to be a huge benefit at the time with the advent of USB boots. I remember saving my PC at one point when the Vista endless reboots occurred, because I was able to boot into Linux and reach my drive from there to remove the update.

edit: jeez it had to be way further back than that. I clearly remember the vista incident and using linux, but vista was in 2007.

When I was about 12 I had a computer nerd friend who used linux almost exclusively. I used various linux distros at his house. I don't know what they were.

He gave me a knopix CD so I could use linux too and that was the easiest way.

I thought I'd try linux myself so I burned Ubuntu to a cd and tried to install it on a family computer as a dual boot. I did it wrong and deleted everything. My dad is a computer network specialist so he understood what happened and wasn't mad. He made a backup of the family computer a while ago and restored it. We still lost some things, but not everything.

My friend got me a desktop computer for free and put SUSE on it. My parents wouldn't allow me to have internet in my bedroom so I just played games and made stuff on blender with it.

My friend also got me a free laptop at this computer nerd conference we went to. We listened to a bunch of people talk about computer stuff. They also had free stuff we could grab. I got myself a laptop. It didn't have an operating system so my friend installed Ubuntu on it for me.

Eventually that laptop and my desktop stopped working and I never used linux again. After reading about linux here I started to miss my Ubuntu laptop and I'd like to try it again, but I don't want ruin my current laptop like I did with the family computer.

I installed Ubuntu, ran it for a few hours on a pentium 4 box. Thought it was neat but not neat enough to switch over after I realized I couldn't play the games I wanted.

I eventually got fed up with windows updates and instability with random shit and developers shitting in the registry and weird permissions issues and all that and switched. Now a days I run pop os on my laptops and desktop with a side rig just for finicky games and windows only shit id rather not configure for my main systems. I have a steam deck too. I'm 👌 close to giving up windows all together but I still like having trash box I can format at anytime.

I'd been a Fidonet BBS sysop for years when I read Torvald's post on comp.os.minux and I was interested, as MS-DOS was too limited. So I downloaded my first "not distro" on a midnight call (300 baud!) to Finland. It wasn't even a distro back then, just a bare kernel and a few programs. Then SLS came out in late '92 and I was off and running.

I've hopped all the major distros just out of curiosity and torture/fun, many times, too many to count. Each has it's own quirks and usability, but they all have the kernel. So it doesn't matter which you run as long as you like it, you're having fun exploring, and it does what you want it to do.

2006 is when I first dipped my toes into Linux, I recently verified this with some old SomethingAwful posts I had made way back then. I think Ubuntu was starting to get really popular, and I wanted to give it a shot. That's what I remember anyway.

I immediately loved it, and have been using some form of Linux on my Laptop since. My Dekstop still runs Windows, but that's mostly for Gaming and a few other applications that don't play well under Wine or Proton.

That would have been Slackware, which in those days came on a stack of 3.5" floppy disks. So early 90's (and hence I was in my mid-30s) but I was still mainly using Windows 3.1 and Trumpet Winsock to connect to the Internet.

I think the first time I really took it seriously was in the mid 90's with Debian, a copy of which was posted to me, on CD-ROM I think, by Ian Murdock himself (back in the days when he was still with Debra 😏).

I mostly installed Ubuntu on old machines after nuking them with dban right before selling them. Stuck with Windows until 7 stopped getting security updates. I'd still be fully on 7 if I could, tbh. Though living in Linux is helpful for selfhosting.

I know it was some time in 2002. IDK what my first Linux distro was TBH, but I quickly returned to windows. Then Shortly after I took a dive off the deep end to try to really learn Linux some and spent days installing Gentoo on some probably 400-600 MHz single core box (was in college at the time). That, while being pretty painful overall, was a good learning experience. I was in school for computer aided drafting, got my associates, and here I am 20 years later as a DevOps engineer. I am comfortable with the big 3 OSes, tho mac would be my weakest. Gaming keeps bringing me back to a home Windows desktop, tho. Actually just set up a USB stick with nix plasma to check out this weekend as I think I'm missing the train on nix.
Edits: mostly spelling, originally posted on phone, typos galore
Edit2, hey, this was my first comment on a post on kbin/lemmy!

I was in high school and decided to use Lubuntu as my daily driver while in my network engineering class. It was a novelty to me but I didn't really take Linux seriously.

I didnt have access to good internet, this was back in dial-up era in the 90s and even though my pals had 56k, I was still on a very spotty 33k modem. I bought "Corel Linux" on disc(s) from Costco. It wasn't particularly great, but I definitely learned a lot about getting linux to play nice with hardware!

I've been a Mac guy since 1985 but I've always had additional machines running other OSes (including Windows). My first Linux experience was with Yggdrasil, which my small company was trying out. We never got it to boot. After that, it was early Red Hat, which I ran for years until the hardware I was using died. After that, it was various versions of Ubuntu on machines at work. Now I've got a couple of Raspberry Pis running Raspian.

Red Hat 5.2. 13 years old. Came from WFW 3.11. Used Red Hat for about six months, then switched to FreeBSD for the next decade.

Never went back to Windows. Windows has always been a thing that school and work computers use. My kids have never used it.

Accidentally fried the windows install on my first laptop in 2005 or 2006. My friend told me to try Ubuntu and I loved it. A few years later I had an art school GF and she introduced me to Macs. I wanted to be cool so I upgraded to a 2008 unibody MacBook. I used Mac OS for a while until apple started to really wall off the garden and the laptop was no longer supported. Got a new Dell XPS around 2016 and got back on the Linux train. Not hopping off again except maybe for a BSD.

I think it was about 1995. I was going to the university and was looking for something Unix compatible I could use at my home computer to perform assignments instead of needing to go into school computer lab. Remote work basically. Think I was using LessTif instead of Motif for some coding task.

Ahh. Those were the days. Used modem to connect to school and connect remotely to the network using Linux. :)

Linux FT. From a magazine cover disk in around 1996. I was a teenage oik working at a company where I suggested setting up the Internet for email and support use. The manager at the time subscribed to bill Gates' belief that the Internet was a fad. I was granted an old 486 desktop pc, and modem and a basic modem account.

I setup a squid proxy and email server with dial on demand. It was slow but it worked.

I moved onto redhat 5 after (before it became the enterprise thing), we went to isdn and leased line and I even had a stack of usr courier modems under my desk by the end with dial in for both Internet and collecting mail (for sales mostly).

It only got replaced when the company actually paid for a full time IT manager (I was primarily a software developer, doing IT on the side) and they switched everything to windows.

Ubuntu ~2005/2006. I was introduced to Linux by my friend's older brother in highschool, then proceeded to nuke the windows install on my parents' PC.

That's when they decided to buy me a laptop, which I dualbooted ubuntu on. Now almost two decades later, I'm a devops engineer working professionally with Linux

SuSE @ 1999, then Slackware in the same year.

Tried SuSE (bought as a box) as an alternative to the annoying, unstable and insecure Windows 9x, it was also the time when Linux as an alternative desktop OS was starting to get hyped in the media. Especially in regards to stability and security. Well, it wasn't hard to beat Win9x in those areas. Tried it a bit, didn't like it that much (I think it was KDE 1.x) and also didn't understand much of it. I was still intrigued though and wanted to really learn it starting from the commandline, but I felt I couldn't with all the SuSE stuff like YaST being preinstalled.

So I bought a big book (by Michael Kofler), it was the de facto standard book for really learning Linux from the ground up back then. And I chose a distribution which would be much more minimalistic (because I felt that makes it easier to learn). So I installed Slackware. I used it for like 3 years and learned a lot (all the basics), it was a hard journey though and other distros started appearing and they promised to be more modern or better than Slackware.

So I tried Debian next, then Crux, then Arch. This was all around 2002-2006. I can't remember exactly how long I used each, but I do know I've used Slack for quite a lot, then Debian rather shortly, then Crux also not very long (basically I just wanted to test a source based distro but compile times were annoyingly long back in the day), and then it was Arch all the way. Arch was fast, rather simple, always up to date, and it had the great AUR. I didn't ever look back.

I did take a break from Linux as my primary OS from approximately 2009 to 2017, mostly due to playing a ton of video games (Windows only, not runnable at all on Linux back then) and also due to my career path making me work with lots of Windows Servers, Powershell and other Microsoft stuff.

Since about 2017/2018 I'm back to Linux as primary OS (Arch, again) and haven't looked back since. Even managed to fully delete all physical Windows partitions now (I only keep it in a VM in case I need to test something).

I'm testing NixOS on my notebook currently, it seems to be "the future", but my main desktop will probably stay Arch for a bit longer still.

Looking back at using Slackware early on, I don't regret it, since I learned a ton, but it was tough using Slackware around the 2000s. I still remember a lot of fighting with programs which wouldn't compile due to dependency errors or other compilation errors. And a lot of Google searches for various compilation errors leading to rare and hard to understand solutions found in random forum posts. Compared to that, any Linux distro feels like mainstream these days. But it was an efficient way to learn.

1998 - Mandrake Linux

I bought a random Linux magazine that came with a Mandrake CD, I installed it, struggled with everything, but fell in love with the idea of Linux. So, I kept trying distros until last year, when I finally settled on an Arch based distro called Crystal Linux.

When I was about 11 roughly two decades ago, on the first PC I got to actively use. I think it was OpenSuSe. My father had unix at work back then and saw no reason to use anything but a -ix system.

I liked it a lot, back then so was mainly reading things on the internet, no gaming needed.

Haven’t cycled back yet, since I play a few games that don’t run well on linux at all and use some proprietary software. I do find myself trying to use linux commands on windows from time to time, getting annoyed with it not working before remembering.

Once I got Warcraft 3 working on Wine on Ubuntu 4.10, I quit Windows cold turkey.

Erase disk and install Ubuntu

I was ~18. The first "OS" I've used was a BASIC interpreter. Then DOS. Then Windows till Ubuntu 4.10. I've also used Debian concurrently here and there since then. I've tried various other Linux OSes for fun. I've used both Ubuntu and RHEL for work. Currently I run most of my machines on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and done Debian. My work machine is on officially supported Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

94 my uni used HP-ux work stations. So many of us set up Linux on a home machine. Slackware at the time. I was forced to dual boot through most of my uni time. As many needed programs just did not have viable candidates on linux. But by 2000 I found windows annoying and rarely needed to use it. Was likely about 2005 before I stopped installing windows all together. But even now. I have a cheap mini PC with win 11. It is used rarely. But photography and ham radio being my main hobbies. I find many Chinese products have 0 linux option for upgrading firmware or some other configuration option. So keep a mini pc just for that.

My dad got me a Raspberry Pi for my 10th birthday. I used Ubuntu Mate 16.04 and was amazed by the customizability. Switched my laptop in 2019, never looked back.

Oh gosh, it must have been 1999? 2000ish? I have no idea what distro it was or if distros were even a thing. It took me 3-4 days to get all of my driver's working. I clunked along with it for a week or two until an update borked the system and I didn't know how to fix it, so I went back to Windows. I tried many more times over the following decades, usually with similar results. About 6 years ago I really learned a lot more about Unix servers and therefore about Linux itself. So I installed it again and I've had it on at least one computer in the house ever since then.

Sounds like I might be the youngest here lol. I started with Ubuntu 11.04 which I would live boot off CD in my school laptop. After I got my own laptop with Windows 8, I used Windows for a good long while until the thing got super slow after having windows 10 for a while. That's when I got back in to linux.

Some version of kubuntu on some kind of hardware around 2001, it was a PC my parents built for windows 98

Or maybe a different distro but it had kde

I had an eccentric roommate around 2008 that was crazy enthusiastic about a computer he built that had a desktop with multiple workspaces he could access on a cube. I only cared if it could play Counter Strike; so not at all. It was my first exposure to the idea of something other than Windows. I had a problem with a Windows 8 license on a laptop I only used for Arduino stuff in 2014. I put Lubuntu on it and never looked back. I've been slowly grinding my way into Linux ever since.

2016 for me. I wanted a music production suite, and was given a new laptop for starting college (uk college, I was 15 at the time). I decided to try out Ububtu Studio, a media/art-centered branch of Ubuntu. I found that the incredibly slow laptop that I used to have just.... worked? It was somehow faster at doing day to day tasks than my much newer laptop. I also found the visual aesthetics (Ubuntu Studio was pre-Unity Ubuntu) really appealing.

As I kept using it, I found that more and more my time was being spent on my older laptop rather than the newer one. I started disteo hopping nefore setttling on Manjaro in early 2017. Then I went for i3 and dwm, which led to me using gentoo for a few years. In my last year of uni I found that my time maintaining my set-up was getting impractical on top of all the work so I went back to Windows briefly. Very quickly realised I couldn't use it anymore and so set myself back up with Manjaro.

Currently giving Ubuntu a go because my current laptop has dual amd/nvidia graphics and out of the box it just works much better on Ubuntu. There's been some frustrations but I can't see myself going back to Windows. I use it for work on my work laptop and the little things frustrate me to no end

Linux SLS distribution, circa 1993.

Slax live CD when I was around 13 in the early 2000s.

Still use it for dev env and servers (Debian) but prefer Win/Mac for a desktop manager

My first encounter with Linux was in 2008-9 when my dad bought a secondhand PC that came with PCLinuxOS. We mostly used it to play SuperTuxKart at the time.

Then a friend showed me Ubuntu (must have been 10.04 or something like that) when we started a website project together

I tried using Mint in college and ended up using it full-time by the end of the year. Then had a brief period of using Ubuntu (drive issues with Mint) before heading back to Windows when I bought a new PC for university.

I've been using Windows for study and work, and Linux for personal development when possible. I'd like to go back to Linux full-time, but I'm not sure which distro to use

My first experience with Linux was in the mid 80s when I was in the service working with AT&T 3B20 and Sperry UNIX servers as an admin. I enjoyed just about every aspect of the OS, but most government, contractor, and civilian jobs required desktop software that Linux either couldn't install or the open source equivalent just wasn't good enough.

Over the many, MANY, years I have kept experimenting with the various desktop environments, but with my current job a large percentage of our servers are Ubuntu or RedHat Linux (although we're being forced to migrate to Windows Servers for many of the same reasons yet again).

That being said, with the ability for many Microsoft Office365 products working well enough as web-apps, my home laptop runs 100% KDE Neon, and with the exception of needing a couple Windows-only programs (which no longer runs on Linux) I'd probably be running KDE Neon on my work laptop as well. If I can ever get Cisco ASDM to work with Wine and/or Bottles, I will be switching over soon after.

The DEs in the last few years are light years ahead, and I am personally very impressed with just how smooth everything works. My hope is to get back to a semi-40 hour work week in a few years and help contribute - not as a programmer, but perhaps as a QA tester or the like.

Bought a book/CD combo from Borders for SUSE Linux when I was in middle school around 2003. Installed it but then went back to windows when I realized networking didn't work.