I’ll go first, I took my mom’s college textbooks which came with discs for a couple distros and failed to install RHEL before managing to get Fedora Core 4 working. The first desktop environment I used was KDE and despite trying out a few others over the years I always come back to plasma. Due to being like 12, I wanted to run my games on it, and man wine was not nearly as easy to use (or as good) as it is nowadays. So I switched back to windows until around 2015 or so when I spent the next few years trying to replace windows as much as I could. Once valve released proton, I switched fully and have t looked back, unless my still there windows partition tries to take over my computer when I restart it at least.
IIRC Kubuntu/Ubuntu and DSL in 2003-5ish, and IIRC programs were compiled on the local machine back then.
I mostly sticked with Windows cause most of the 3D packages are on Windows (I’m a 3D generalist). Was exposed to centos variants while working in the industry.
After covid, I had a lot of time to get back onto GNU Linux.
Man I forgot about DSL, I used to carry around a USB with DSL on it I’d throw onto school computers in high school lol.
I was about 16 and made a Slax CD to get around my schools locked down WinNT/XP installs. After school I ran Ubuntu on an '06 Acer laptop for a while but later switched to W7 for gaming. When W10 launched with ads in the start menu I moved to Debian and have been totally happy since then.
Slax and puppy on a 128mb usb that i would take with me to school to test
Around 2004, maybe 2005, I had to recover some files from an old laptop and landed on a live CD of Knoppix for the job. Dabbled in Linux a bit after, but not seriously, for the better part of the decade after - mostly distro hopping and having fun, especially with old hardware, back when Ubuntu was in better standing with the community.
Ended up using it more seriously in the last ~5 years. Hopped around Mint, Manjaro (actually lasted 2 years before I borked it), and OpenSUSE before finally landing on Fedora, which has been my daily for maybe 2 years now. With the Red Hat stuff, depending on how that pans out, I’m debating on just going to vanilla Debian at this point. But I’ve always had a soft spot for Mint, so we’ll just have to see.
As for Windows, I still have my main tower with Win 10 (no Linux) that I’ve upgraded throughout the years from Win 7. But Win 11 isn’t having it, so once Win 10 hits EOL, it’ll get Linux as well (assuming it doesn’t kick the bucket first).
Knoppix was my gateway as well. I’d checked out Linux before, but I used Knoppix to help out regularly for a while, which led to dual booting my laptop with Ubuntu 6.06, ending with Linux being my main OS.
The first thing I tried wax knoppix but the disk my mom burned for me didn’t work, I didn’t wind up actually getting to use knoppix until high school and then I found DSL was better for my needs at the time.
Ubuntu in the early 2000s. My dad bought a little netbook that had it pre-installed. I was hooked, I was using Windows XP up to that point and it was something entirely different. My dad was kind of a techie at the time but none of us had any experience with Linux up to that point, still, we got the hang of it rather quickly and Linux had a lot more not so obvious problems at that time.
That’s why I’m saying a long time now, Linux is good enough as it is. It has been good enough for a long time. If you give it to people it works. But you have to give it to them. Normal people don’t install their OS’, as far as they are concerned it’s a part of the machine itself. Linux will only take off if it gets pre-loaded on systems as Windows and Mac was/is to this day. I Canonical wouldn’t have partnered with some laptop OEMs back in the day and I wouldn’t have gotten linux in my hand it maybe would have took years before I got to know linux and I don’t know if I would have installed it on my own.
Ubuntu in the early 2010s. Installing flash player to get YouTube working.
It took me more than 10 years, but I am finally windows free. Linux came a long way in such a short time man.It really did. Even 5 years ago it was much less easily usable.
Back in college my CS 201 class was on C programing and needed to use the Linux machines in the lab for the class. They were running CentOS. That was my first time using Linux. After that I starting playing around with different distros (Ubuntu and Debian mostly). Then I took a “system administration” class that was really “Linux 101” that was taught by the departments sys-admin who is a Linux Evangelist and they showed me the light. Havent owned a windows or Mac machine since (about 20 years ago now)
Similar story here, my first encounter was my previous semester of Uni, a Systems Administration and Maintenance class, where we used Rocky Linux. Queue two semesters later, and I’m in love with it, hell I’m even typing this on my Thinkpad’s Ubuntu (ofc I had to get a thinkpad lmao), biding my time until I switch to Arch, since several of my highschool classmates use it, and in general I like the concept behind it.
I was 13 or 14. Must have been 1995 or 96. Learned about it from friends on IRC (any old dalnet nerds out there?)
Ruined my mom’s computer multiple times leaning how to partition HDDs 😆
I only recently went back to windows bc I was doing some .net projects and found WSFL was more than adequate for my other projects. Still kind of feel dirty using windows shudder
Sounds pretty close to me! spider.dal.net was my go-to server.
I installed Red Hat 5 circa 98-99 when we got a new computer - so I didn’t have to worry about destroying the existing Windows installation!
I used dalnet around 2000 or so. Hung out in #speaker’s_corner quite a bit.
Installed an early version of Slackware on a 386 in the 90’s. Went through a couple it jobs so I ran windows for a bit until 2002. I had bought a nice laptop and it came with windows xp. Xp was so bad after windows 2000 that I had to find something else. Played with redhat and a couple other dostros then went back to Slackware and have been on it ever since.
It’s funny you mention xp being so bad, I’ve always remembered it as the one people loved. But I was using MacOs 9 in the school computer lab while xp was getting reamed for its ui and early security issues so.
I started running Windows 2000 in 1999 with a Technet Beta. It was fast, stable, reliable. Bought the new laptop with XP and it would hang from resume often. Then plugging in USB devices would stop being recognized and I had to clear duplicate entries out of the registry. Then my work desktop couldn’t open a second Vmware guest without swapping where it could run four guests under windows 2000. I burned one of my MS support calls asking them why it wasn’t reading the swappiness reg key only to be told they drop support for that so XP would have plenty of free ram but start swapping as soon as I tried opening the second vmware guest. I had to stick in another hdd and dedicate it to swap to get a second vmware guest just to run. But then there was the huge security hole thinly disguised as a web browser called internet explorer. Despite me running as a non-admin, file and registry permissions locked down, unnecessary services disabled, all the typical desktop security stuff just a simple mis-typing www.gogle.com into IE would result in popups and a malware infection. The second time I got infected bad enough to require a reinstall I setup a dual boot of redhat and eventually just quit using windows. Supposedly they fixed some of those issues with later service packs for XP but windows 2000 beta was faster, more secure and more stable than XP. It was just a big turd.
Tried installing debian in 2002 but had no idea what I was doing editing xorg configs so didn’t succeed. Succeeded in running knoppix soon after, but didn’t really know what to do with it because I mainly used a computer for gaming in those days.
Ran ubuntu in 2007 for a while but I needed to do too many things in a VM so I skulked back to windows.
Used linux for random bits and pieces over the years but was always too tied to art software and games. Proton fixed the games side of things in 2018 so I decided to go all in reworking my art workflow to be linux focused because I wanted not to worry about needing a windows license for all my machines, buying expensive software, etc. etc. (And I wanted to get into creative programming more.)
Running linux has made automation and programming a much more seamless part of the way I use computers and I am endlessly grateful for this. General computing is fun again and I now have a heap of skills I always wanted.
After reading this question, I got strangely excited the thinking I had a relatively older and/or unique experience. Nope, most all you guys are as old as me. Late 90’s, early 2000…got a red hat CD in some literature…installed it. Now only use Windows if I need to for work which I haven’t needed to for over a decade.
I’m starting to think all the older folks are the ones who left reddit lol. Between stuff like this and the old memes, I’m definitely on the younger side of people here lol.
You can’t get nostalgic if you aren’t at least a boomer.
I tried linux and went back to windows to many times to count, mostly in the halcyon days of late dialup/early “Broadband” (back when broadband was a whopping single meg down), always for the same reason… Had a problem I couldnt find a solution for, and the few times I reached out to linux focused IRCs and stuff, well, so say that my head was bit off would be putting it lightly, which always ultimately lead to me reinstalling windows95/98/xp
Thankfully, there was a perfect storm of Valve dumping dumptrucks of money into linux, creating proton, and Windows 7 reaching EoL that I finally said fuck it and switched for good around… late 2018ish I think? I still kept Windows 7 for dualbooting for games that didnt work via proton, but eventually I was booting into windows less and less as more games just worked on linux with proton until… about 6 months ago, I realized I hadnt logged into my Windows 7 drive in over a year, and finally wiped it.
I think my first experience was around 1993 or 1994. I downloaded the 3.5" disks at the university and then uploaded onto my 386. No GUI, all command prompt. :).
Right around that time, too, I found some network cards and co-axial cables and 3-4 of us in the house put the cards in our computers and could see each other’s computer. Couldn’t do much else though. Hahahaha.
You could definitely play Doom!
Used ophcrack back when I was a teen so i could learn my parent’s windows password and fuck around when they were asleep. Then I figured just using live cds was cleaner (no browsing history to delete). Then once they upgraded, I was given the old pc to nuke and pave as I saw fit. It was a lot of fun outsmarting my parents in the wee hours of the night, not that they were terribly tech savvy.
so linus made his first linux post when i was in highschool. (freshman). i didnt know of it but thats what wikipedia says. windows 95 came out when i was in college and by my junior year i knew about linux. in our networking class most everything was unix, one sun machine and the instructor got linux on one or two. students would rush to get the linux machines. it was seen as a better unix. at that point it wasnt seen as a desktop alternative just a better server experience. right before windows xp came out, i built a new computer for xp and used a disc from a magazine with redhat. installed it on their ma hi e and it didnt work because the hardware was to new. i soon got XP and learned about boot loaders.had to call microsoft since xp wouldnt install. tbe guy just recently i stalled linux on a few machines and helped me out.
didnt try linux again till broadband and the web was more of a thing.
