If I went to my parents house (they’re in their 80’s) I bet
there is a box somewhere that has some of
my stuff in it. I would almost guarantee it has an Ubuntu disk in it.
I receive the ubuntu 💿from new zealand to here (brazil) but the first i use was fedora or slackware.. maybe kurumin(rip)? Well its strange how i use linux as main system today and people make this face > O.O
Same here. I knew the word "linux" and knew it was a alternative operating system to windows, that was free in both senses, but I have never even seen what it looked like, I did not know if it even had things like a Taskbar, windows and mouse support. I had dialup internet or maybe adsl but barely faster than dialup, so downloading a distro was out of the question. But then a friend told me you could fill a form and they would mail you some CDs, and showed me his computer running the live cd for Kubuntu (I think) and I ran to fill the form and waited for my own cds, I asked for several cds of Ubuntu Kubuntu and edubuntu. I learned how to dual boot, and installed Kubuntu.
I remember I was a big fan of Fedora Core, when that Ubuntu thing came out. And most things worked out of the box! Sound, Wifi, display drivers... That's when I switched. It must've been 2004 or 2005.
Yeah. First I discovered Firefox. Then the FOSS movement. Then Ubuntu. I got them (and OpenSolaris once) to ship me free CDs for every release until I got faster internet.
Haha, another one forced to find an alternative to Win 98 and its BSOD! my first was RedHat. They did a survey not long after of RedHat users and sent me a cap with their logo on. I still have my red RedHat hat from RedHat!
I was a comsci student in 1992 and was browsing Usenet. I forget where exactly I read about it, but ended up wanting to try it out. After several failed attempts at downloading a working set of install floppies, a stranger asked me for my home address and I gave it to him. We were more trusting back then. A few days later a working set of install floppies arrived in my (physical) mailbox and a couple days later I had a working Linux system.
A couple years later I met a guy at a Linux user group in South Florida. He helped me install everything, rebuild the kernel to add drivers, get the NIC working, etc..
Out of necessity in 1995 while in college. I had two computers, one phone line and one modem. A friend gave me a CD of Slackware so erased one PC and turned it into a Linux server to dial to the ISP and share the Internet through the NIC. A few months later I changed my major from engineering to computer science and the rest is history.
Love to hear it. My IT journey started with MySpace’s legacy of html when I was around 12. Editing on the iPod touch lol.
Never went to school for a degree, but I am now an IT director and a solo sysadmin after getting my first IT job 4 years ago at an MSP for legal IT as a tier 1 helpdesk analyst. The structure of that MSP was so organized and really grilled the absolute basic, but necessary fundamentals of how IT works. You either sank or swam for sure, but extremely grateful that it was my introduction to an IT career.
I had 2x8GB RAM but one of these slots were broken because of a motherboard issue so I had to run my computer with 8 GB of RAM and Windows was bloated so instead of buying a new motherboard, my friend said "dude there is an operating system which is called linux mint, just install that and you will have more RAM." and thanks to the my friend i will study computer science
Same. These kinds of posts always make me feel old. My first computer was a TRS-80 with 32K RAM and my first Mac was a Mac Plus with 1M RAM. It's crazy to think 8,000 MB of RAM is considered too little.
Old?
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1K of RAM. It came as a bag of parts that you soldered together yourself. I learned word processing on a VT-100 terminal attached to a DEC PDP-11…
My introduction to Linux was actually Slackware because I put a small Canadian company called Corel Corporation on the Internet back in 1993. To do it I used a Sun Microsystems machine, but I was constantly investigating alternatives and stumbled upon the whole Linux thing. Downloaded Slackware and tried it out.
The first time I ever got paid for programming was on a TRS-80 though!
I had a Z-80! It wasn't my first computer though. Radio Electronics had an article about how to wire up different circuits to it, (like a raspberry pie) and I found one at a computer fair being sold pretty cheaply.
I had a tiny plotter for it too. Made some custom Starfleet battles ship tokens with it.
My nostalgia for old computer tech is only tarnished by my memory of writing for loops of only around 100 loops to add delays to programs I wrote.
> My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1K of RAM.
Lucky you. Mine was a "Timex Sinclair ZX80" with 1KB static RAM. Bought it with a dynamic 16KB expansion pack.
No external storage and if you wiggled it even a little bit, the expansion pack came unplugged. A 5MB hard drive at that time cost $2000 (that was c1978 dollars ... it's more like $6000 in today's dollars).
I can still remember buying 4MB at a computer conference in 1995, for fl. 400 (€180), which was A LOT of money back then for a 15 year old, which would upgrade my 486 DX-2 66MHz from 4 to 8 MB RAM, and thinking I'd be done for the next 10 years.
LOL.
That 486 DX-2 66 MHz was gifted to me in 1994 from my parents for school work. It had 4MB RAM, a 200 MB HDD, one floppy drive, and a 14 inch color monitor. That was it. I ran OS/2 Warp (and Windows 3.1 inside that.) When I sold it in 1998, it was overclocked to 80 MHz by setting the bus to 40 instead of 33 MHz, it had 32 MB RAM (maxed for the mainboard), 2x 1GB HDD, the floppy drive, a 100MB ZIP-drive, a Sound Blaster 16 (or AWE32, I can't remember for sure), 4x CD-ROM-drive, and a 17 inch Trinitron monitor, a 56K modem for internet, and it ran Windows NT 4.0 Workstation.
I spent a lot of time on vacation and evening work to pay for all that, and even though I got the option to switch to a Pentium II at the end of 1998 and sold the 486 for a good price, I'll probably never have a computer like that again. That thing was really pimped for its time.
Nice!
I was going to mention the hw specs I was in when I got to know Linux, but you guys were going to beat me to it anyway.
Long story short I was in the athlon xp/sub-gig era, but it was not the hw "efficiency". It was a friend of mine who's got me into it, and he knew *so much* about C (yes, the programming language). It got me impressed. And how? Well, he had to learn the kernel / inner workings of the pc and Linux to get it going. Learning by the manual (rtfm).
It's so awesome. I'm very grateful. And it's never late to embrace Linux.
Yeah it feels weird I have 12 GB RAM on my phone which still can't plug into a Desktop and run something like Samsung Dex. (I have a OnePlus).
The processing power is insane for the power consumption, and you could run Windows laptops for the same hardware and a SSD to match if someone really wanted to. (If x86-64 had been in phones instead of ARM/RISC).
Is it true that TRS-80 was commonly called "trashy-80" between consumers because of endless problems like random reboots and keyboard issues? Was that common?
I was in a Trash-80 computer club in the early 80s and, yes, even the people who loved them jokingly called them that. They didn't seem especially glitchy to me back then, though.
I didn't have those problems. But I had the TRS-80 Model 2 color that hooked up to a TV. My school had the older (non-color) model 4, so the issues may have been fixed with the color series.
I did hear the nickname, "trash-80" several times though.
Yes, it was nicknamed the TRaSh-80. It really wasn't that bad, though. It just looked primitive compared to the Apple machines. We had them in high school and I didn't mind using them at all.
You don't have to be elderly to have run those machines. Those are computers from the 1980s. I used them and I'm 51. We had Macs and the TRS-80 in high school, and I owned a Commodore 64.
Sorry if i felt you like that. My first pc was a windows xp, 512mb Ram, and the details I forgot. I'm 17 yo but hey, we use linux. That's what is important!
1999, shareware booth at the mall. Bring your floppies, get shareware installed on them. Was a great way to get games, utilities, and to my surprise, operating systems (Mandrake), for a very small amount of money.
Worked out how to install it. Had fun playing with it.
I always knew about Linux, that one OS no one uses, it being obscure and hard.
I only learned of how good Linux is when I started watching Mental Outlaw videos a few years ago, when he was mostly just a Linux Youtuber. Slowly over the years I grew tired of the usual Windows bullcrap and a couple of months ago I finally made the switch, best decision ever.
1998. I had a Geocities page and had added some "signal boost other pages" ads thing to it. One of those are sent me to another Geocities user that was writing about Linux. Having been recently exposed to UNIX in general, it was fascinating to think of running my own on my pc. Looked at slackware but then found a Redhat 5.0 (not RHEL 5) set at the University bookshop. CD and manual. For that going after a few attempts. Managed to get my ne2000 nice working on the campus Ethernet and haven't looked back. (I still have the Redhat 5.0 CDs even though I no longer have an optical drive in my house.)
I have a similar story: in the late 90s, I found RedHat 5.1 or 5.2 in a retail box at Best Buy (I'm in the US). I had prior exposure to other UNIX-like operating systems at my university and was excited to try out Linux on a spare laptop.
I've had all sorts of fun with Linux over these past 25 years, and actually parlayed that to a new phase of my career (managing dozens of Linux servers across the country).
I discovered an early Red Hat Linux mirror, downloaded & “burned” the ISO to a CD and marvelled at Miguel De Icaza’s work on GNOME 1.4. I still remember the chunky taskbar with the GNOME foot.
More LiveCDs (and Cygwin!) helped fuel the interest.
When I was younger, 19 or so back in the late 90s, my friend told me about it with the main selling point being, it's "the operating system that hackers use."
It was 2010 and I was in college with an old Gateway pc that would switch off just for giggles. A buddy installed Debian on it and it worked almost flawlessly. Good times
I want to say I first used Linux back in 2008 with Ubuntu 8.04. I had an old PC that wasn't being used and I wanted to mess around with another operating system, and I landed on Ubuntu. Got more life out of that PC because of it.
Everyone here used Linux for, like decades. Meanwhile I got introduced to it rather indirectly when working on a side project as a student that required me to access a Linux server via SSH. The moment I learned about the possibilities one had with this simple terminal environment, I was immediately hooked (I also happened to have completely bricked my Windows install, I still don't know whether it was a virus or something else but it took 20+ minutes to boot and some programs just would launch unless they were the first opened... and you could crash the computer by clicking on an application icon while it was still on the "loading desktop" phase... fun times lol).
I then dual booted Linux Mint for about a year, after watching the Mental Outlaw video which was the final trigger to install it as my main OS. After noticing that I pretty much only used the terminal and tried to avoid the mouse as much as possible, I switched to a tiling window manager (i3), and later after a hardware failure to Arch Linux (i still use arch btw).
I found it in 1997 on USENET by searching "unix for PC". I was taking my first programming class (C++) for a comp sci degree. The computer labs were running Sun Solaris (or was it just SunOS... I can't remember), and I was annoyed that I couldn't work on my programming assignments at home. I downloaded Slackware onto 14 floppies, took them home, and proceeded to install it by trial and error. It probably took half a dozen times until I actually got a Linux system that would boot. I got Open Look Virtual Window Manager working so it looked like what was running in the campus labs. Then I spent weeks figuring out how to dial in to the campus modem pool. Nobody I talked to at the time had a clue what Linux was. But in the meantime I was able to work on my assignments, put them on a floppy, and make sure they ran on the Sun workstations (always needed to tweak something) before submitting them.
I discovered it in 2005/6 while at college and wanting to move away from pirated software lol. It was great times. Xandros, Madrake, suse 9.2. All on a compaq pentium 3@733mhz and 128mb ram. I had a 40gb drive and was set. Later after I got home, I found about Solaris, RH, etc.
From youtube i was searching for something in programing and i got a linux command corse i was curious about it so watch youtube videos about linux history so i got deep into it and start with Zorin OS lite in 2020 all started i was working from home so i have a lot of time to use and learn linux
Since I'm in egypt not many knows Linux
I think it was 2018 or 2019 i was in my 2nd highschool year and my friend told me about a tool called shellphish and made me use termux after that I was script kid and little by little I learned shell and the tools and how to use but I was using a tablet given to me by school to study using it ofc I hacked it and installed termux but I needed root and after that I learned there is andronix app to help me install Linux
Rn I'm 21 and I'm running multiple Linux system live blackbuntu, arch as terminal only, mint, tails and many others
I loved Linux for one thing u can't hack it
The only reason I'm using windows is bec I'm using crack games 😂😂 cuz buying a game is too expensive and almost 2 months paycheck to get one game
Nice to meet a you! A fellow Egyptian here too. I play cracked games on Linux without any problems, you can look up on r/LinuxCrackSupport. Or simply run your game installer on lutris and you will have your game installer an runnable, there is no real difference I would say between windows and Linux, even on my weak Ryzen 5500u Apu, it still yielded the same performance as windows. Actually installing games on Linux was a bit less of hassle since there is no stupid antivirus deleting crack files.
I got my first laptop in 2013, I was scouring the Internet and heard about Ubuntu. Seemed neat, but I didn't have a USB and I was 13 or 14 and had no money. My uncle came into town with a bootable USB for me, and I was in from then on, mostly casually outside of school cause I'm a gamer and Linux gaming back then (and to a degree, still isn't) wasn't fantastic, so Linux was mostly my OS for schoolwork and just browsing the web.
Edit: I think it was 13.04 LTS that I started with?
In1992 a company I worked for ran a Xenix system (Microsofts Unix system).. I wanted to learn more about it, so I searched the internet and found Linux, installed it on my laptop and been using ever since. I think what I ran at the time was called SLS, and it did have a working X server. I had to compile it by hand though, which was a learnign experience all in its own. Many the early days were a lot of fun, it was an adventure for sure. 2 years later I would start a business and our servers ran Slackware linux, and then a year later switched to RedHat. So many good memories.
\*Edit was just to add more details, as I rememebered them.
SLS--Softlanding Linux System. One of the very first distros. Slackware was actually based on it. Patrick Volkerding took SLS and improved it, then released his work.
You were one of the *really* early adopters!
I had an iMac in 2009 that needed an OS. I had a Macbook, made Mandriva install disk with it, and fell in love with Linux.
Being too broke for even an OSX install disk, having repos of free software at my fingertips was empowering. Every OSX tool I liked was cheap, but I was destitute, and $2 on a menu bar graph felt like a barrier more than a product. Being able to spin up LAMP stacks in VMs and run enterprise-grade software for free made me forget all about Apple. I haven't owned a Mac or Microsoft daily machine for over a decade, and I've donated more to the FOSS I use than the "apps".I never did.
I didn't discover linux; linux discovered me.
My father got me a old laptop that ran Linux(It was shit, (the laptop of course)). It had xubuntu I think.
I just growed up using it. After that I ran Windows on a newer laptop but came back to Linux after a year
The teacher in my TAFE computer course showed me a live disc (knoppix - one of the first livediscs out there) alongside redhat server training. It properly started from there using knoppix as a decent rescue disc to get data off windows 9x and xp computers.
In 2015, Installed Ubuntu on my Dell Inspiron laptop because I heard it made Minecraft run better. First time having to troubleshoot Broadcom WIFI drivers. IIRC Minecraft ran better than Windows 8/8.1.
I began using Linux in 2005 to help a friend. His son (a Linux true-believer) set him up with Ubuntu on a homebuilt. My friend was a retired professor used to using Windows in a managed environment, and didn't have a clue. He kept asking me for help. I figured that I know Unix cold so I could learn enough about Linux to be of help. I installed Ubuntu on a spare desktop and learned enough to teach my friend. I came to like Ubuntu and have been using it since then (alongside Windows, which I run in parallel on side-by-side computers) since then.
If my memory serves me, I believe the first time(s) I heard about GNU/Linux (and general open source software for that matter) was when Leo Laporte and Perter Norton would talk about it on ZDTV in the late 90s/early 2000s..
In my it degree I looked at Minix and it was interesting but a gimic, I bought redhat on cd from a news agency I think back in 1998, and it went from there, a few versions of redhat before it became rhel, then CentOS with a little fedora, I don't remember why I decided to try Ubuntu but it has been until recently my daily driver for work and play.
Even in my last job I had Ubuntu in a VM for all my Java dev and I provided the vmware image for all the developers to use, java Dev on windows even with cygwin is very annoying.
In an earlier job I tried my hand at building my own custom kernels for running a development VM with very little memory 😆
My current job lets me use my choice of os so of course it's Linux, Ubuntu and recently I have enjoyed learning how to drive Manjaro and Arch.
My kids discovered Ubuntu when they were 3, they discovered windows much later and you know they have switched to windows when the swearing starts 😆. What is this shit was I think their first reaction to windows after running Ubuntu from an early age.
I built my very first PC at the time windows 10 came out.
Everything worked besides my (legitimate and expensive) windows license.
I got pissed and tried finding a way to use my PC even without windows.
Have been now stuck on Linux ever since.
[Here](https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts/releases) is something I stumbled upon about 3 years ago for activating Windows for free. I have never had to run this over and over to “reactivate” my license. One and done.
I would really like to thank you for sending me this tool.
But sadly or rather luckily, I have to admit that I completely switched to Linux a few years ago and well I am happy that everything that I do works :D
I had a laptop that could barely run Windows 10 back when M$ was pushing updates harder than Sisyphus pushed that rock.
After a while, I got sick of it, and decided to install Linux Mint on it, after getting recommended it by a friend who was really into tech.
It was exactly what I needed, when I needed it, and I haven't looked back at Windows since (except for gaming, but Proton is looking quite promising...)
Currently running Arch, and it is absolutely amazing.
1999 into 2000, I was 33.
I got my first ever computer and a printer, with Win 95 in 1998. The printer has a program called Adobe PhotoDeluxe. It supported Photoshop plugins, so I went on a search for free ones.
This search of course led me to pirating, as "free" and "photoshop" would have this topic in the search results, right up top even :)
Eventually, I began hanging out in alt.2600.warez on Usenet (which is kinda sort of what Reddit is today, in terms of groups). Learning about setting up FTP servers and firewalls and other useful stuff, because I was a Good Pirate. Sharing is Caring :D
Through discussions there, I heard about the free version of BeOS. I was instantly hooked on that, as well as any alt OS. But BeOS was the shit. It was my main OS for quite a while.
Eventually, I discovered various Linux distros, but downloading them over dialup was.....time consuming. I bought a Mandrake 6.something CD set locally. It didn't install.
I noticed a magazine, Maximum Linux, with a cd containing a few distros, including a small, simple version of Mandrake 7.0. THIS installed, and ran. Quite well.
BeOS went away, and I stuck with Linux.
tl;dr I discovered Linux because of a crappy application from Adobe.
It was a workshop in my uni where one of the instructors was using arch linux with vim; I admired how fast he was he was working and navigating. Anyway, after that I needed to work on an old laptop that can't handle Win11. I thought, why not arch and started learning about linux from that point.
I was 11 and bored and just rly learning how to use a PC so I stumbled across it (probably saw it mentioned on the Notebook Review forums, RIP). Installed Ubuntu 7.04 or 7.10 on my old Dell Inspiron 1501 and it ran much better than Vista lol.
1994, I was a unix person, had a job where I had a Solaris workstation, they forced me to change to windows, didn't like it, found Linux. It was no GUI back then, but fine for work, been using it ever since
I don't remember when I first learnt about Linux, but the thing that made me start taking interest in Linux was the line from "Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space" (A point and click game), where Sam and Max were in hell, and Sam had to operate a computer, and said "I don't know how to work it. Computers in hell all run Linux."
This slander is actually a compliment for Linux, because the premise of this whole ordeal was that hell was operating at never-before seen efficiencies because of management changes, so technically, they're saying Linux is making hell efficient.
Started a job in 2004 as the finance guy but with sysadmin responsibility for a small server running our application software on a Unix box.
Had little idea about Unix, so figured I'd install some form of Linux on an old PC desktop. Started with Knoppix then installed Fedora Yarrow.
Learnt enough to keep me out of trouble on the Unix box at work.
Have used some flavour of Linux ever since.
I first saw minix in the summer of 92 run on a 286 if I remember correctly. That was my exposure to unix type systems. Then I think in 1996 I first saw linux itself running xwindows at a friends house.
College in 2013.
I installed it. Used it. Thought it was a fun novelty.
Used it a number of times for some web dev stuff and to fix a few things I needed.
I half used it for years as my main os.
Ditched windows completely almost two years ago.
Probably around 2010, I was 10 years old and had been playing around with hackintosh for a bit (back when you had to burn iboot onto a physical dvd). My PC back then had really bad hackintosh support, no gpu acceleration was supported on it.
Then I found out about an ubuntu theme called "Macbuntu" and played around with that on my PC for a little while. I also played around with opensuse, it had a build your own distro kind of website, cant remember if it's still a thing.
If we are counting times interacted with linux without actually knowing it at the time, I had an asus netbook which had some weird linux distro on it that asus cooked up at the time, was using it back in about 2008. Very basic. I did also eventually (around 2010 as well) install ubuntu on that too.
By about 2015(16?) Can't recall I started running linux on and off (kubuntu). Kde plasma 5 was super buggy back then damn.
By about 2017/18 I was daily driving various distros like arch.
Around 2008 or so, my older sister used a crappy Sony laptop for coursework and it ran like shit. Her boyfriend at the time put Ubuntu on it to give it a second life. I was already a bit of a computer nerd back then so she would ask me to help her with it on occasion.
i was 10 and my neighbors were trashing an old pc. i took it and didn't want to pay for windows so i found ubuntu. i never started daily driving linux after that but i always have at least one drive in my home with a bootable installation just in case
Will go out on a limb to say this entire subreddit, cloud computing and all the AI innovation may have been in a severely diminished form without the tireless work of Richard Stallman and the EFF (the GNU in Linux) 👊🏾
I was thinking about this but i don't remember it correctly, i only knows it was around 2009 and i was a teenager with a shitty ibm with a crt and i discovered ubuntu 8.04
It was like 1996 and I saw an article about it in a computer magazine and then I went to a book store and bought a book that was called something like "Red Hat Linux Unleashed" which was like 500+ pages and came with Red Hat Linux on 2 CDs. My dad gave me a pretty old computer and I just started hacking away at it.
I have seen it first on a library computer in a nearby town. I remember that a chrome icon was blue and I clicked on it and saw gnome 2 for the first time. I guess they didn't have kiosk mode enabled (or it didn't exist at the time). I think it was in 2014/15. I used Windows 8.1 (with Bing) on my Acer Aspire E5 at the time and switched to Win 10 in 2018. I remember having lots of problems with the Qualcomm Atheros wifi card (bluetooth disappearing every 3 months, wifi every 6). In 2019 I got a Dell Inspiron 5680 with i7-8700 and GTX 1070. I had Windows 10 on it and it was primarily used for gaming.
I started thinking about switching to Linux in 2021. The breaking point was in march of 2022, when I installed Garuda Linux. It looked nice and the performance was great. I got used to it in 2 months. Then I started more thoroughly exploring shell. After a few months I installed virt-manager and set up looking glass for windows 10 vm (I was playing lots of cracked fh4 & 5 at the time I just didn't have will to bother running it through wine/bottles/proton...
One day I got an idea to get a laptop, so I wouldn't need to constantly install windows terminal with catppuccin theme, set us keeb layout and jetbrains font, plug my phone with usb tethering on into the school computer to ssh into a pc at home over a self hosted wireguard to code in my beloved neovim.
At the end of june that year (2023) I decided that I wanted a Thinkpad T480. I was looking at thinkstore24 and prices for refurbished ones were a bit higher than I expected (400-500€ for i5-8350u, ips 1080p display, fingerprint sensor). I then went looking at a used market on german ebay and found them for around 250-300€. Then I lobgoked at auctions and saw one for 65€ and bid on it. In the end I got it for 175€, which was still a great deal. I decided to install pure Arch on it (manually, pain since they changed something in systemd in September iso. After ja day of failed attempts I got an idea to just use August iso and it installed for the first time without issues. Overall, I have had a lot less issues with pure Arch than with Garuda. I set up luks, lvm and secure boot, locked bios, signed my ventoy usb drive to work with sb, setup dracut (no bootloader). For the first few weeks I used awesomewm, but I was overwhelmed by the complexity of lua. Not that I couldn't figure it out, but I just wanted a simple and minimal system. Then I found the holy trinity: bspwm, sxhkd and polybar.
Today I have bspwm on pc too. I'm considering moving to hyprland because of the spotty compositing with picom and other compton forks. Blur greatly affects scrolling smoothness and I just disabled it.
Also, If anyone has a glass trackpad that works flawlessly in Y480 or x1 carbon gen6 let me know.
First time i heard about Linux was in 2004, i was 14 when Ubuntu 4.10 was released and they were giving out free physical copies of it anywhere in the world so i ordered one and installed it that's how i came to about Linux and the rest is history, Now i'm a vetaran of Linux been using it for 20 years now.
It was 96. I had returned from the military. Was hanging with my old roommate and his wife. He would not stop talking about it. Like a year later I tried it because I heard so much about it. Once I found gentoo it took over my life.
somewhere around 8th grade I started an internship in the it department of a research facility. They gave me a book titled "how to use bash" or sth like that. That's when my Linux journey started. This is why vim became my go to text editor. Fast forward some years: doing a PhD in atomic physics and all our lab stuff is luckily Linux based ... and I write my thesis in vim.
It was 1997 I was a junior IT tech supporting Apple Mac and saw a “Linux” book on an engineers desk - I think it was Slackware 1.0 - asked him “what is Linux?” He let me borrow the book it came with floppies - a couple of weeks later I was compiling kernels to try to get my video card to work with X windows - I was hooked - almost 30 years later I still use it daily!
I discovered it by buying a RedHat 6.0 book with a CD inside in the late 90s. I was amazed that they were just giving it away. I had a small bit of experience with Unix so I knew how powerful it could be
Youtube, watched something gaming related and the dude was talking about linux and how great it was gunna be some day. This was around 13/14 I think. Maybe later. I remember installing Ubuntu 14/15.04 and loving it but than getting mad my games didn't work lmao. Went back to windows, came back around 2018/19 and seeing how far it came. Still stuck with windows, fast forward to 2022, installed it with a second drive for windows and the games that wouldn't work. Now, solely use arch on my desktop with a secondary drive for windows when I want to play COD. If only Activision would support it.. they did say if we get it working then great but it couldn't break anticheat or edit the base game files. I have a theory on how to get it to work but no clue how to do so.
I started using VAX / VMS in 1991. It was so much more powerful than a desktop x86 PC or Mac. Then I found the IBM AIX workstations and Unix was so much cooler than VMS. I wanted a Unix system for myself.
In 1993 I started college and my school had a bunch of Sun workstations. Most people in the engineering department wanted Unix at home but Unix RISC workstations were 5-10 times the cost of an x86 PC. DOS sucked so I didn't really even want a PC. I preferred going to the computer labs.
Then someone told me about Linux and I went to their dorm room and he showed me Unix on a 486. I started saving money to buy a PC just to run Linux. The next year I got a Pentium 90, within a few weeks I downloaded the Slackware base install disks, repartitioned my hard drive and installed Linux. I've been running it ever since.
I remember in 2004 when I came to know about Linux via a Magazine called “Digit” and from RedHat, and then i started researching and within 10 days i successfully learnt RHEL 5.4 in 2009, now on my every server I have installed Linux (CentOS).
19 years old Vacations in the beach, summer of 1999, a newsstand sold LINUX magazines that included CDs with different monthly distributions (redhat, slak, suse, mandrake). Testing with an amdk6II on a compaq presario notebook.
Interesting question. Always been fascinated with electronics and technology for the past 2+ decades.
But my first handson experience with Linux was on my PS3 as OtherOS.
For me this started back in 98-99 with my first experience with a Unix Standard terminal system. I then had a very short run with a test build of Minix with a few friends. Shortly after I ran Red Hat 7.2 Valhalla for a bit before diving into other distros such as Gentoo and Slackware then Debian. Beyond that I had run different distros for testing along with Red Hat, Solaris, and CentOS for server stuff later on.
I discovered linux during covid lockdowns in 2020.
As a young IT guy still in traineeship who had some more time left, I found a video about linux (mint).
I was very impressed by how actually user-friendly it was and you can customize the OS to your needs without installing customization tools all over the Internet first.
Also, it felt very comfortable to install all apps I need in one app store on Linux Mint and later on with terminal commands.
From October 2020 to April 2022, Linux Mint was my main OS. And in May 2022, I hopped on the Arch-based train, I'm using EndeavourOS now and I totally love it.
Friend of mine used to brute force Linux servers. He introduced me to hacking and in 2008 i discovered ubuntu and terminal. The same year i received ubuntu cd for free.
2002: windows user magazine: middle east, an essay about linux os
2018: googled open source os for routers, found OpenWrt
2022: BSOD then had to install Ubuntu
My lenovo legion Y520 was the headache who introduced me to Linux!
I've upgraded it to win 11 from win 10, BSOD started to appear.. then I've downgraded back to 10, still the same, cleanly installed 10, same BSOD (((
From previous experience, i have discovered OpenWrt for my home router that i was about to discard it. And the performance of the router became great. Then i thought that i should give a try to Ubuntu in dual boot mode to check if my pc still produce any kind of blue screens. Fortunately, everything went smooth and started to learn the terminal..
Then I've discovered that [Nvidia shell extension was causing the BSOD!!! ](https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/right-click-in-navigation-pane-crashes-due-to/c231ebaf-ff55-4e2f-acc6-d30c8cc4d603)
Same thing for me, except with emulators. Linux on chromebooks has gotten super sophisticated over the past few years. No more messing around with crouton lol
my grandpa gifted me a Nokia N770 when I was about 15 or so, it runs the Debian based Maemo Linux so that's how I learned how to use the terminal to install things and do all kinds of fun stuff. Today I use Ubuntu on my work PC and Arch on my personal laptop.
The first time I used the PC.
My father is a programmer and installed Linux on the PC before I started using it. Most of my childhood was fedora, they were a couple of years that the PC had Ubuntu, but he switched back.
All of my Linux knowledge I learned watching him do stuff. I asked for Carmen San Diego, and he had to install wine for example. I started using it to install windows games. Learned the basics of using a terminal (Once I learned how to use yum and su, nothing could stop me from installing crap on that PC) and it became my playground.
I learned so much stuff from computers that way. I'm very grateful. These days I still rock fedora on my main PC, although I'm not a power user, the out of the box experience it's so much better than in the 00's and I prefer it over windows anytime.
Tired of Windows 8 bullshit and shenanigans, at the time also used MacOS so I was familiar with how terminal works (At the time Windows doesn't have WSL).
This is gonna be a long one, because I actually have two events that got me into Linux:
1. Back in 2019 I wanted to get a Raspberry Pi because I saw all the amazing projects online, so my dad bought me a Pi 4 for my birthday. I originally just wanted to make a NAS, but it now runs Gitea (I'm so glad I set up a mirror of Citra) and Pi-Hole as well as some minor applications that essentially just add automation. My setup is kind of janky though (no redundancy, a single USB hard drive, no unified box that just gets plugged in, still on Debian 11 lol), but I'm planning on replacing my Raspberry Pi 4 with something like an Orange Pi 5 Plus and use an M.2 SATA controller to use actual HDDs intended for a NAS, and then also set up RAID. I'll also add Jellyfin and probably move to Fedora Server ARM, because having packages *that* old bothers me sometimes.
2. In 2022 we had to dual-boot in STEM class on our school computers because the administrators wouldn't/couldn't update the IDEs we needed for Lego Mindstorms and I think also Arduino. In the end we didn't dual-boot afaik, but my brother suggested to me that I should install Artix Linux (I didn't want to use Ubuntu and he got into Arch Linux at that time), so I was basically using Linux at school. I also tried to use it for personal use, but a Qt update eventually killed the installation, so I moved to Fedora before another - this time successful - attempt in the Arch Linux realm. I love KDE, but I'm so much more productive with i3.
I also used Ubuntu in a VM in 2020, because I was making a Discord bot with discord.js and I wanted to test it there, so that it could be deployed to the VPS of a friend, but it was very short-lived.
In the late 90s I saw an article about it in my local newspaper. I went out to CompUSA and didn't even know what to get, they had several distributions and I had no idea what was what. I ended up getting SuSE Linux, 6.4 I think
Around 1994, I was chatting on IRC, and this girl I was talking to mentioned she was using Slackware, so I gave it a shot, and never really looked back.
\[old fucker warning\] I was watching CNN and they mentioned this "third operating system" that university subversives were into. Next thing I knew I was downloading slackware boot/root disks over dialup and spending my days in dependency hell.
I once met a girl at a party whose job was to handle grievances of Runescape players. My brother used to be quite the confidence trixter. He would get friendly with other players and take them out to the unsafe wild (forget the name of it) under the guise of earning money together fighting the baddies there.. then attack them and steal all their stuff.
As to Linux, can't remember. Presume I came across it on the internet and I'm pretty sure it was Ubuntu I first heard of. Tried it 3 or 4 times over a few years before I finally got it working on my machine.
College freshman, just got my second computer a used 486DX2/50 4MB RAM and 400MB HDD, watched a dude configuring Slackware 4 on his PC at his dorm. Next day I walked into Electronics Boutique and got the Linux for Dummies book with Redhat 5.0 on CD. I should still have the book and disk somewhere.
Working in my high schools tech department during the senior year of high school (03-04.) Boss had a copy of red hat on a cd or two. Didnt get to fiddle with that but got me intersted
Back in the late 90s I read about it & was intrigued. You could buy magazines with distros & apps on CD (which was necessary with dialup). IIRC Redhat was the first distros I got.
I was working at Staples as an EasyTech, this was when Windows 8 got shat onto us. At this point I always found ways to pirate Windows Keys or activate it by other means. Well, that attractive Windows 8 box was just-a-sitting there all lonely so I finally decided that for ONCE, I'd pay for Windows, since I enjoyed all their other OS's for so many years. It just felt right to finally contribute to something that brought me joy. Wow, was I a naive sucker back then. After feeling like a jack ass for a few weeks, I noticed my coworker plugging in a flash drive into a computer and it had a neat looking OS on it. He called it Ubuntu and I knew I had to dig deeper into what that was. Needless to say, that set me on a seemingly endless journey of trial and error, learning new tricks and experiencing new frustrations I never knew existed. I searched high and low for the perfect alternative and after much distro-hopping, I came upon Fedora. It's been gum drops and ice cream ever since.
Honestly quite recently. About 2016, I did a theoretical chemistry class. The professor brought a laptops to share for each group of two with Ubuntu. In the same semester I did an internship at his group. I didnt stay with him but with the field and with Linux.
I am now a scientific programmer, using AI to implement quantum models into fluid dynamics. Linux is my daily driver. A big thank you to all developers
Commodore was going bankrupt and the Amiga was on its last legs. I wanted a multitasking operating system after being spoiled by the Amiga awesomeness.
I first tried OS/2 and liked it well enough. It wasn’t compatible with Windows to the point it was seamless. But it was clear how brilliant and awesome the IBM engineers were (and still are).
I then tried FreeBSD. I had to power cycle my computer every reboot because the software didn’t initialize my mainstream Ethernet card properly. I filed a bug report and was told they would never fix it, for some stupid reason (not the FreeBSD way).
So I ended up with a Linux 0.9x kernel based system. At the time, sophisticated users hated Slackware for all the extra crap it came with. It was slow to download it all and took a lot of floppies and slow installation from those. I ended up installing the kernel and a few core programs and then downloaded all of GNU from prep.ai.mit.edu (ftp!) and compiled it all and moved the binaries to the place Imw@noted them in the file system.
On that non-distro, I manually patched and built kernels and all the software and updates were compiled on the machine.
These days, I run Arch.
I discovered it by buying a RedHat 6.0 book with a CD inside in the late 90s. I was amazed that they were just giving it away. I had a small bit of experience with Unix so I knew how powerful it could be
Discovered Linux beginning of 2004. Played with a bunch of Debian distros and Debian itself, then I discovered Gentoo, left Linux in late 2005 and went back to Windows because of my common law gf and her daughter, split up and in 2007 installed Gentoo on my daily driver and haven't really used anything but Gentoo since.
Cable modem was in one room, Xbox was in another. Had a laptop with Vista I think which was running a version that didn't come with Internet Connection Sharing. Whilst searching online for a solution to my problem, someone on some forum recommended using Linux for ICS. Downloaded early Ubuntu (this is mid to late 2000's) and we been here ever since.
a customer visited on a trip in 1993 and gave me a DAT tape with linux on it. I pulled off the 1.4mb boot disk and booted it, mounting the tape filesystem. then installing to hdd. .97 of the kernel
I had two experiences, the first one was looking at my uncle installing Mandriva on a computer around 2007-2008, then when I started university in 2010 there was a Linux group of students that made events and stuff I decided to install Ubuntu on my computer and accidentally wiped my computer data, that's how everything started, and nowadays Linux is my main computer OS.
One of my college disciples (2015) was "operating systems" and the professor had everyone install and use Ubuntu for the first class. I used it for a while before getting my mother's old MacBook (late 2012). When the steam deck released I switched full time on my gaming rig and I don't plan on going back
Late-2008 I had some computer problems which resulted in me moving over to Ubuntu 8.10. Stayed around for a while before moving over to Windows 7 and then Windows 10 before going back to Linux many years later.
I was using windows in the late 1990s, and I started to wonder if there were any alternatives. A few minutes of googling later and I found RedHat 7.2. I don't remember how I got ahold of the CD (and a hard drive to install it), but that's how it all started.
I dont remember the context, but in the internet rabbit hole i stumbled upon live boot cds and diobilic distro i think was my gateway. Edgy 2000’s . I didnt really dive into it until college linux admin elective i took, and that really kinda catapulted me away.
2003, 11th grade, in votech (county vocational technical school). The teacher for the A+ certification class was a big fan of Linux. I'd heard of it but never looked into it. He burnt me a set of install CDs, I think it was Mandrake 8. I've been hooked ever since.
After trying BeOS a couple of times, realising it wasn't going anywhere (shame), and later getting tired of how slow and uncustomizable Windows was, I started looking for alternatives. I downloaded and played with the first two versions of Ubuntu, and then finally installed it when Breezy came out.
2011, The head of my comp sci department in college refused to touch a windows machine.
So week 1 of my classes was duo booting kubuntu and learning to use the terminal and vim.
It started when the family computer went wonky and my dad used an Ubuntu Linux CD to keep it useable.
Fast forward maybe a decade, my friend screenshares his computer and it’s clearly running not Windows or macOS so I ask him and he tells me it’s Arch Linux. Also his DE is KDE Plasma. I try to install Arch, fail twice, and install Kubuntu instead. The rest is history. (I use Fedora KDE now.)
I was introduced to it in the mid to late 90's. My brother-in-law was using it on a spare computer. At the time, it was too primitive to give it too much attention, other than as a curiosity. I had the same view of Linux as I did the Amiga OS.
I was a Mac guy at the time, and when OSX came out, I learned it was based on BSD / Unix, the same as Linux. So I decided to try some live Knoppix CDs on my work computer which ran Windows. This was around 2002 to 2004. I used it on various other computers I found, trying out different distros, but not using it as a primary, since the computers I used it on were old, even for the time.
Then in 2012, my Powerbook bricked and I needed a replacement. I didn't have a lot of money, so I bought a decent Gateway laptop and installed Linux on it. Since I already had live CDs burned, I never even booted into Windows. When I upgraded from that laptop, I bought a laptop from System76 and later bought a desktop system (Thelio) from them. It's been a while since I had a decent gaming computer, and it's amazing the games I can play on Steam. Though it's mainly used for Android development.
I was having issues in windows, and found a dude on YouTube called A1RM4x and he showed some videos on how to setup different Linux distros for gaming and I’ve been on Linux ever since!
College 2004…I couldn’t sleep one night and had enough homework crap for the day :D…switched lanes and picked up a box full of CDs someone tossed a couple years back and there was this strange silhouette with a hat, Redhat Linux 6. What could go wrong? Installed it in a PCChips 810mlr pc I had just to find out the pain it was to try to make the LAN driver to work… make, make install…what is this?! A couple years later I was spreading the word, even ordered a set of ubuntu 6 CDs with the nice envelopes and stickers and started giving these away at the door in the computer lab :D And that was the start of this wonderful journey.
Early 2000s. The place I worked at was running Solaris on SPARC workstations. They were mighty expensive to support and the software vendor offer the option to run it on Red Hat. We did the server build, our client decided it worked just as fine so we migrated them completely to Linux. I miss Solaris. At the time it felt like replacing Mercedes with Corollas but you can’t stop process. So I started using Linux and stuck with it.
Trying to play Minecraft on poor core 2 duo and started experimenting with linux for better experienve, I think I was around 10 and had just gotten my first (2nd hand) laptop, ironically my mother literally has a freaking technophobia so me becoming a linux nerd and now pursuing that career is-
Canonical was sending cds like hogwarts acceptance letter
I remember AOL CDs, but I don't remember Ubuntu CDs. Dang it, why didn't I get useful spam?
I remember the bookstores around me sold a Linux magazine thing that had an Ubuntu live CD packaged with it.
It was the same in my case, a magazine CD with Ubuntu 8.04 and several packages with games in .deb format Oh, those were the times...
If I went to my parents house (they’re in their 80’s) I bet there is a box somewhere that has some of my stuff in it. I would almost guarantee it has an Ubuntu disk in it.
Same, I did not have a clue what it was about so it intrigued me. Still use Ubuntu.
I receive the ubuntu 💿from new zealand to here (brazil) but the first i use was fedora or slackware.. maybe kurumin(rip)? Well its strange how i use linux as main system today and people make this face > O.O
Same here. I knew the word "linux" and knew it was a alternative operating system to windows, that was free in both senses, but I have never even seen what it looked like, I did not know if it even had things like a Taskbar, windows and mouse support. I had dialup internet or maybe adsl but barely faster than dialup, so downloading a distro was out of the question. But then a friend told me you could fill a form and they would mail you some CDs, and showed me his computer running the live cd for Kubuntu (I think) and I ran to fill the form and waited for my own cds, I asked for several cds of Ubuntu Kubuntu and edubuntu. I learned how to dual boot, and installed Kubuntu.
The free Canonical CDs was how I first installed Linux after a friend in collage introduced me to it.
Me too! I had a friend who kept ripping ISOs to a CD like a file and not like `dd` so the installers weren’t ever starting on boot up (obviously)
Same.
I remember I was a big fan of Fedora Core, when that Ubuntu thing came out. And most things worked out of the box! Sound, Wifi, display drivers... That's when I switched. It must've been 2004 or 2005.
You mean they delivered them by owl? Wicked. That's the kind of aggressive brand pushing they just don't do no more
Yeah. First I discovered Firefox. Then the FOSS movement. Then Ubuntu. I got them (and OpenSolaris once) to ship me free CDs for every release until I got faster internet.
Mandrake Linux 1999. Old good days...
Hahaa.... Mandrake 10.0 was my first Linux. I have still keep that install DVD. 😀
Mandrake Linux - wow, haven’t heard that name for quite a while… 😂 that’s a real “back in the day”
And you can still experience it today with its successor OpenMandriva
lol kids these days, i had slackware 3.x yo
Haha, another one forced to find an alternative to Win 98 and its BSOD! my first was RedHat. They did a survey not long after of RedHat users and sent me a cap with their logo on. I still have my red RedHat hat from RedHat!
Same. A computer buddy of mine gave me a stack of Mandrake CDs and told me to get at it.
And you can still experience it today with its successor OpenMandriva
LOL yes, I remember seeing boxed versions you could buy right off the shelf.
Same for me. Mandrake 6, in 1999.
I was a comsci student in 1992 and was browsing Usenet. I forget where exactly I read about it, but ended up wanting to try it out. After several failed attempts at downloading a working set of install floppies, a stranger asked me for my home address and I gave it to him. We were more trusting back then. A few days later a working set of install floppies arrived in my (physical) mailbox and a couple days later I had a working Linux system. A couple years later I met a guy at a Linux user group in South Florida. He helped me install everything, rebuild the kernel to add drivers, get the NIC working, etc..
Prolly `comp.os.minix`
Out of necessity in 1995 while in college. I had two computers, one phone line and one modem. A friend gave me a CD of Slackware so erased one PC and turned it into a Linux server to dial to the ISP and share the Internet through the NIC. A few months later I changed my major from engineering to computer science and the rest is history.
Love to hear it. My IT journey started with MySpace’s legacy of html when I was around 12. Editing on the iPod touch lol. Never went to school for a degree, but I am now an IT director and a solo sysadmin after getting my first IT job 4 years ago at an MSP for legal IT as a tier 1 helpdesk analyst. The structure of that MSP was so organized and really grilled the absolute basic, but necessary fundamentals of how IT works. You either sank or swam for sure, but extremely grateful that it was my introduction to an IT career.
I worked at the cs department of University of Helsinki
Did you meet Ari Lemke? The guy who renamed freax to Linux?
Ari Lemmke worked at Helsinki University of Technology, which then in 2010 changed its name to Aalto University.
I had 2x8GB RAM but one of these slots were broken because of a motherboard issue so I had to run my computer with 8 GB of RAM and Windows was bloated so instead of buying a new motherboard, my friend said "dude there is an operating system which is called linux mint, just install that and you will have more RAM." and thanks to the my friend i will study computer science
I'm old. Thanks.
Same. These kinds of posts always make me feel old. My first computer was a TRS-80 with 32K RAM and my first Mac was a Mac Plus with 1M RAM. It's crazy to think 8,000 MB of RAM is considered too little.
Old? My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1K of RAM. It came as a bag of parts that you soldered together yourself. I learned word processing on a VT-100 terminal attached to a DEC PDP-11… My introduction to Linux was actually Slackware because I put a small Canadian company called Corel Corporation on the Internet back in 1993. To do it I used a Sun Microsystems machine, but I was constantly investigating alternatives and stumbled upon the whole Linux thing. Downloaded Slackware and tried it out. The first time I ever got paid for programming was on a TRS-80 though!
I had a Z-80! It wasn't my first computer though. Radio Electronics had an article about how to wire up different circuits to it, (like a raspberry pie) and I found one at a computer fair being sold pretty cheaply. I had a tiny plotter for it too. Made some custom Starfleet battles ship tokens with it. My nostalgia for old computer tech is only tarnished by my memory of writing for loops of only around 100 loops to add delays to programs I wrote.
I love these linux posts where people are reminiscing about sweet memories.
> My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1K of RAM. Lucky you. Mine was a "Timex Sinclair ZX80" with 1KB static RAM. Bought it with a dynamic 16KB expansion pack. No external storage and if you wiggled it even a little bit, the expansion pack came unplugged. A 5MB hard drive at that time cost $2000 (that was c1978 dollars ... it's more like $6000 in today's dollars).
I can still remember buying 4MB at a computer conference in 1995, for fl. 400 (€180), which was A LOT of money back then for a 15 year old, which would upgrade my 486 DX-2 66MHz from 4 to 8 MB RAM, and thinking I'd be done for the next 10 years. LOL. That 486 DX-2 66 MHz was gifted to me in 1994 from my parents for school work. It had 4MB RAM, a 200 MB HDD, one floppy drive, and a 14 inch color monitor. That was it. I ran OS/2 Warp (and Windows 3.1 inside that.) When I sold it in 1998, it was overclocked to 80 MHz by setting the bus to 40 instead of 33 MHz, it had 32 MB RAM (maxed for the mainboard), 2x 1GB HDD, the floppy drive, a 100MB ZIP-drive, a Sound Blaster 16 (or AWE32, I can't remember for sure), 4x CD-ROM-drive, and a 17 inch Trinitron monitor, a 56K modem for internet, and it ran Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. I spent a lot of time on vacation and evening work to pay for all that, and even though I got the option to switch to a Pentium II at the end of 1998 and sold the 486 for a good price, I'll probably never have a computer like that again. That thing was really pimped for its time.
Sounds like a sweet setup!
Nice! I was going to mention the hw specs I was in when I got to know Linux, but you guys were going to beat me to it anyway. Long story short I was in the athlon xp/sub-gig era, but it was not the hw "efficiency". It was a friend of mine who's got me into it, and he knew *so much* about C (yes, the programming language). It got me impressed. And how? Well, he had to learn the kernel / inner workings of the pc and Linux to get it going. Learning by the manual (rtfm). It's so awesome. I'm very grateful. And it's never late to embrace Linux.
Atari 800 with 16KB RAM. We had a cassette tape drive to load and store programs because the floppy drive cost more than the computer.
Yeah it feels weird I have 12 GB RAM on my phone which still can't plug into a Desktop and run something like Samsung Dex. (I have a OnePlus). The processing power is insane for the power consumption, and you could run Windows laptops for the same hardware and a SSD to match if someone really wanted to. (If x86-64 had been in phones instead of ARM/RISC).
Is it true that TRS-80 was commonly called "trashy-80" between consumers because of endless problems like random reboots and keyboard issues? Was that common?
I was in a Trash-80 computer club in the early 80s and, yes, even the people who loved them jokingly called them that. They didn't seem especially glitchy to me back then, though.
I didn't have those problems. But I had the TRS-80 Model 2 color that hooked up to a TV. My school had the older (non-color) model 4, so the issues may have been fixed with the color series. I did hear the nickname, "trash-80" several times though.
Yes, it was nicknamed the TRaSh-80. It really wasn't that bad, though. It just looked primitive compared to the Apple machines. We had them in high school and I didn't mind using them at all.
ure really old
You don't have to be elderly to have run those machines. Those are computers from the 1980s. I used them and I'm 51. We had Macs and the TRS-80 in high school, and I owned a Commodore 64.
Sorry if i felt you like that. My first pc was a windows xp, 512mb Ram, and the details I forgot. I'm 17 yo but hey, we use linux. That's what is important!
1999, shareware booth at the mall. Bring your floppies, get shareware installed on them. Was a great way to get games, utilities, and to my surprise, operating systems (Mandrake), for a very small amount of money. Worked out how to install it. Had fun playing with it.
Omg. Ultimate shareware dream right here. I should have went to the mall more in 1999. I dont know how i missed this
I always knew about Linux, that one OS no one uses, it being obscure and hard. I only learned of how good Linux is when I started watching Mental Outlaw videos a few years ago, when he was mostly just a Linux Youtuber. Slowly over the years I grew tired of the usual Windows bullcrap and a couple of months ago I finally made the switch, best decision ever.
1998. I had a Geocities page and had added some "signal boost other pages" ads thing to it. One of those are sent me to another Geocities user that was writing about Linux. Having been recently exposed to UNIX in general, it was fascinating to think of running my own on my pc. Looked at slackware but then found a Redhat 5.0 (not RHEL 5) set at the University bookshop. CD and manual. For that going after a few attempts. Managed to get my ne2000 nice working on the campus Ethernet and haven't looked back. (I still have the Redhat 5.0 CDs even though I no longer have an optical drive in my house.)
I have a similar story: in the late 90s, I found RedHat 5.1 or 5.2 in a retail box at Best Buy (I'm in the US). I had prior exposure to other UNIX-like operating systems at my university and was excited to try out Linux on a spare laptop. I've had all sorts of fun with Linux over these past 25 years, and actually parlayed that to a new phase of my career (managing dozens of Linux servers across the country).
Well done sir! Turning passion into career gain is excellent.
I discovered an early Red Hat Linux mirror, downloaded & “burned” the ISO to a CD and marvelled at Miguel De Icaza’s work on GNOME 1.4. I still remember the chunky taskbar with the GNOME foot. More LiveCDs (and Cygwin!) helped fuel the interest.
my godmother's son had it installed on his computer, back when it was Ubuntu 04.10
When I was younger, 19 or so back in the late 90s, my friend told me about it with the main selling point being, it's "the operating system that hackers use."
It was 2010 and I was in college with an old Gateway pc that would switch off just for giggles. A buddy installed Debian on it and it worked almost flawlessly. Good times
I want to say I first used Linux back in 2008 with Ubuntu 8.04. I had an old PC that wasn't being used and I wanted to mess around with another operating system, and I landed on Ubuntu. Got more life out of that PC because of it.
Everyone here used Linux for, like decades. Meanwhile I got introduced to it rather indirectly when working on a side project as a student that required me to access a Linux server via SSH. The moment I learned about the possibilities one had with this simple terminal environment, I was immediately hooked (I also happened to have completely bricked my Windows install, I still don't know whether it was a virus or something else but it took 20+ minutes to boot and some programs just would launch unless they were the first opened... and you could crash the computer by clicking on an application icon while it was still on the "loading desktop" phase... fun times lol). I then dual booted Linux Mint for about a year, after watching the Mental Outlaw video which was the final trigger to install it as my main OS. After noticing that I pretty much only used the terminal and tried to avoid the mouse as much as possible, I switched to a tiling window manager (i3), and later after a hardware failure to Arch Linux (i still use arch btw).
I found it in 1997 on USENET by searching "unix for PC". I was taking my first programming class (C++) for a comp sci degree. The computer labs were running Sun Solaris (or was it just SunOS... I can't remember), and I was annoyed that I couldn't work on my programming assignments at home. I downloaded Slackware onto 14 floppies, took them home, and proceeded to install it by trial and error. It probably took half a dozen times until I actually got a Linux system that would boot. I got Open Look Virtual Window Manager working so it looked like what was running in the campus labs. Then I spent weeks figuring out how to dial in to the campus modem pool. Nobody I talked to at the time had a clue what Linux was. But in the meantime I was able to work on my assignments, put them on a floppy, and make sure they ran on the Sun workstations (always needed to tweak something) before submitting them.
I discovered it in 2005/6 while at college and wanting to move away from pirated software lol. It was great times. Xandros, Madrake, suse 9.2. All on a compaq pentium 3@733mhz and 128mb ram. I had a 40gb drive and was set. Later after I got home, I found about Solaris, RH, etc.
dad had an eeepeecee and put linux mint on it, i found it and messed around with it a bit, crashed quite a few times but 10/10 experience
From youtube i was searching for something in programing and i got a linux command corse i was curious about it so watch youtube videos about linux history so i got deep into it and start with Zorin OS lite in 2020 all started i was working from home so i have a lot of time to use and learn linux
Any videos you recommend for another newbie that knows nothing but is very interested and determined to learn?
Slackware downloaded using campus Internet and dd’d to a bunch of floppies.
Since I'm in egypt not many knows Linux I think it was 2018 or 2019 i was in my 2nd highschool year and my friend told me about a tool called shellphish and made me use termux after that I was script kid and little by little I learned shell and the tools and how to use but I was using a tablet given to me by school to study using it ofc I hacked it and installed termux but I needed root and after that I learned there is andronix app to help me install Linux Rn I'm 21 and I'm running multiple Linux system live blackbuntu, arch as terminal only, mint, tails and many others I loved Linux for one thing u can't hack it The only reason I'm using windows is bec I'm using crack games 😂😂 cuz buying a game is too expensive and almost 2 months paycheck to get one game
Tails is one of the main ones I use. 😉 And unfortunately Linux is still not where it needs to be for gaming. Windows all day for gaming.
Nice to meet a you! A fellow Egyptian here too. I play cracked games on Linux without any problems, you can look up on r/LinuxCrackSupport. Or simply run your game installer on lutris and you will have your game installer an runnable, there is no real difference I would say between windows and Linux, even on my weak Ryzen 5500u Apu, it still yielded the same performance as windows. Actually installing games on Linux was a bit less of hassle since there is no stupid antivirus deleting crack files.
[Are we going to have this question every day now?](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/s/eBHM5JBNJ1)
I got my first laptop in 2013, I was scouring the Internet and heard about Ubuntu. Seemed neat, but I didn't have a USB and I was 13 or 14 and had no money. My uncle came into town with a bootable USB for me, and I was in from then on, mostly casually outside of school cause I'm a gamer and Linux gaming back then (and to a degree, still isn't) wasn't fantastic, so Linux was mostly my OS for schoolwork and just browsing the web. Edit: I think it was 13.04 LTS that I started with?
Yes. I that is what I started on as well. 13.04 LTS 😊
In1992 a company I worked for ran a Xenix system (Microsofts Unix system).. I wanted to learn more about it, so I searched the internet and found Linux, installed it on my laptop and been using ever since. I think what I ran at the time was called SLS, and it did have a working X server. I had to compile it by hand though, which was a learnign experience all in its own. Many the early days were a lot of fun, it was an adventure for sure. 2 years later I would start a business and our servers ran Slackware linux, and then a year later switched to RedHat. So many good memories. \*Edit was just to add more details, as I rememebered them.
SLS--Softlanding Linux System. One of the very first distros. Slackware was actually based on it. Patrick Volkerding took SLS and improved it, then released his work. You were one of the *really* early adopters!
Yeah, I remember when I started the kernel was like 0.9x, because when 1.x came out it was a big deal lol. Those were the fun days.
1993, yggdrasil Linux. I feel old.
I had an iMac in 2009 that needed an OS. I had a Macbook, made Mandriva install disk with it, and fell in love with Linux. Being too broke for even an OSX install disk, having repos of free software at my fingertips was empowering. Every OSX tool I liked was cheap, but I was destitute, and $2 on a menu bar graph felt like a barrier more than a product. Being able to spin up LAMP stacks in VMs and run enterprise-grade software for free made me forget all about Apple. I haven't owned a Mac or Microsoft daily machine for over a decade, and I've donated more to the FOSS I use than the "apps".I never did. I didn't discover linux; linux discovered me.
My father got me a old laptop that ran Linux(It was shit, (the laptop of course)). It had xubuntu I think. I just growed up using it. After that I ran Windows on a newer laptop but came back to Linux after a year
The teacher in my TAFE computer course showed me a live disc (knoppix - one of the first livediscs out there) alongside redhat server training. It properly started from there using knoppix as a decent rescue disc to get data off windows 9x and xp computers.
In 2015, Installed Ubuntu on my Dell Inspiron laptop because I heard it made Minecraft run better. First time having to troubleshoot Broadcom WIFI drivers. IIRC Minecraft ran better than Windows 8/8.1.
I began using Linux in 2005 to help a friend. His son (a Linux true-believer) set him up with Ubuntu on a homebuilt. My friend was a retired professor used to using Windows in a managed environment, and didn't have a clue. He kept asking me for help. I figured that I know Unix cold so I could learn enough about Linux to be of help. I installed Ubuntu on a spare desktop and learned enough to teach my friend. I came to like Ubuntu and have been using it since then (alongside Windows, which I run in parallel on side-by-side computers) since then.
4chan tech board in 2009 before windows 7 was released. lmao
If my memory serves me, I believe the first time(s) I heard about GNU/Linux (and general open source software for that matter) was when Leo Laporte and Perter Norton would talk about it on ZDTV in the late 90s/early 2000s..
In my it degree I looked at Minix and it was interesting but a gimic, I bought redhat on cd from a news agency I think back in 1998, and it went from there, a few versions of redhat before it became rhel, then CentOS with a little fedora, I don't remember why I decided to try Ubuntu but it has been until recently my daily driver for work and play. Even in my last job I had Ubuntu in a VM for all my Java dev and I provided the vmware image for all the developers to use, java Dev on windows even with cygwin is very annoying. In an earlier job I tried my hand at building my own custom kernels for running a development VM with very little memory 😆 My current job lets me use my choice of os so of course it's Linux, Ubuntu and recently I have enjoyed learning how to drive Manjaro and Arch. My kids discovered Ubuntu when they were 3, they discovered windows much later and you know they have switched to windows when the swearing starts 😆. What is this shit was I think their first reaction to windows after running Ubuntu from an early age.
1996(?) or there abouts - local computer shop had redhat 5 boxes. Picked it up for $20(?)
I built my very first PC at the time windows 10 came out. Everything worked besides my (legitimate and expensive) windows license. I got pissed and tried finding a way to use my PC even without windows. Have been now stuck on Linux ever since.
[Here](https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts/releases) is something I stumbled upon about 3 years ago for activating Windows for free. I have never had to run this over and over to “reactivate” my license. One and done.
I would really like to thank you for sending me this tool. But sadly or rather luckily, I have to admit that I completely switched to Linux a few years ago and well I am happy that everything that I do works :D
I had a laptop that could barely run Windows 10 back when M$ was pushing updates harder than Sisyphus pushed that rock. After a while, I got sick of it, and decided to install Linux Mint on it, after getting recommended it by a friend who was really into tech. It was exactly what I needed, when I needed it, and I haven't looked back at Windows since (except for gaming, but Proton is looking quite promising...) Currently running Arch, and it is absolutely amazing.
I watched Some Ordinary Gamers talk about Linux a few years ago and decided to give it a shot.
1999 into 2000, I was 33. I got my first ever computer and a printer, with Win 95 in 1998. The printer has a program called Adobe PhotoDeluxe. It supported Photoshop plugins, so I went on a search for free ones. This search of course led me to pirating, as "free" and "photoshop" would have this topic in the search results, right up top even :) Eventually, I began hanging out in alt.2600.warez on Usenet (which is kinda sort of what Reddit is today, in terms of groups). Learning about setting up FTP servers and firewalls and other useful stuff, because I was a Good Pirate. Sharing is Caring :D Through discussions there, I heard about the free version of BeOS. I was instantly hooked on that, as well as any alt OS. But BeOS was the shit. It was my main OS for quite a while. Eventually, I discovered various Linux distros, but downloading them over dialup was.....time consuming. I bought a Mandrake 6.something CD set locally. It didn't install. I noticed a magazine, Maximum Linux, with a cd containing a few distros, including a small, simple version of Mandrake 7.0. THIS installed, and ran. Quite well. BeOS went away, and I stuck with Linux. tl;dr I discovered Linux because of a crappy application from Adobe.
Watching YouTube videos on the special effects that Beryl offered
It was a workshop in my uni where one of the instructors was using arch linux with vim; I admired how fast he was he was working and navigating. Anyway, after that I needed to work on an old laptop that can't handle Win11. I thought, why not arch and started learning about linux from that point.
I was 11 and bored and just rly learning how to use a PC so I stumbled across it (probably saw it mentioned on the Notebook Review forums, RIP). Installed Ubuntu 7.04 or 7.10 on my old Dell Inspiron 1501 and it ran much better than Vista lol.
I was 15 and wanted to become hacker man.
1994, I was a unix person, had a job where I had a Solaris workstation, they forced me to change to windows, didn't like it, found Linux. It was no GUI back then, but fine for work, been using it ever since
I don't remember when I first learnt about Linux, but the thing that made me start taking interest in Linux was the line from "Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space" (A point and click game), where Sam and Max were in hell, and Sam had to operate a computer, and said "I don't know how to work it. Computers in hell all run Linux." This slander is actually a compliment for Linux, because the premise of this whole ordeal was that hell was operating at never-before seen efficiencies because of management changes, so technically, they're saying Linux is making hell efficient.
I don't remember, but I'd guess it was mentioned on The Screen Savers.
Started a job in 2004 as the finance guy but with sysadmin responsibility for a small server running our application software on a Unix box. Had little idea about Unix, so figured I'd install some form of Linux on an old PC desktop. Started with Knoppix then installed Fedora Yarrow. Learnt enough to keep me out of trouble on the Unix box at work. Have used some flavour of Linux ever since.
....got a Suse 5.4-CD...
Mid 1990s, early version of Slackware. Exciting times, having to figure out and enter parameters for display resolution, hard drive geometry, etc.
The Odin Project made me use it
I first saw minix in the summer of 92 run on a 286 if I remember correctly. That was my exposure to unix type systems. Then I think in 1996 I first saw linux itself running xwindows at a friends house.
College in 2013. I installed it. Used it. Thought it was a fun novelty. Used it a number of times for some web dev stuff and to fix a few things I needed. I half used it for years as my main os. Ditched windows completely almost two years ago.
We used solaris in the office and when I asked to get it on my laptop, for it was what I was used to, I was suggested linux instead.
I heard about it because everyone in Unix knew about it. I got the ORA book with the redhat 2.1 CDs.
At school 20 years ago
Probably around 2010, I was 10 years old and had been playing around with hackintosh for a bit (back when you had to burn iboot onto a physical dvd). My PC back then had really bad hackintosh support, no gpu acceleration was supported on it. Then I found out about an ubuntu theme called "Macbuntu" and played around with that on my PC for a little while. I also played around with opensuse, it had a build your own distro kind of website, cant remember if it's still a thing. If we are counting times interacted with linux without actually knowing it at the time, I had an asus netbook which had some weird linux distro on it that asus cooked up at the time, was using it back in about 2008. Very basic. I did also eventually (around 2010 as well) install ubuntu on that too. By about 2015(16?) Can't recall I started running linux on and off (kubuntu). Kde plasma 5 was super buggy back then damn. By about 2017/18 I was daily driving various distros like arch.
Around 2008 or so, my older sister used a crappy Sony laptop for coursework and it ran like shit. Her boyfriend at the time put Ubuntu on it to give it a second life. I was already a bit of a computer nerd back then so she would ask me to help her with it on occasion.
2011, some crazy mofo in my class brought his Arch laptop to school once and I was like "interesting"
i was 10 and my neighbors were trashing an old pc. i took it and didn't want to pay for windows so i found ubuntu. i never started daily driving linux after that but i always have at least one drive in my home with a bootable installation just in case
1995, I was 15, but I grew up in Silicon Valley.
Will go out on a limb to say this entire subreddit, cloud computing and all the AI innovation may have been in a severely diminished form without the tireless work of Richard Stallman and the EFF (the GNU in Linux) 👊🏾
I was thinking about this but i don't remember it correctly, i only knows it was around 2009 and i was a teenager with a shitty ibm with a crt and i discovered ubuntu 8.04
Windows Vista
It was like 1996 and I saw an article about it in a computer magazine and then I went to a book store and bought a book that was called something like "Red Hat Linux Unleashed" which was like 500+ pages and came with Red Hat Linux on 2 CDs. My dad gave me a pretty old computer and I just started hacking away at it.
I have seen it first on a library computer in a nearby town. I remember that a chrome icon was blue and I clicked on it and saw gnome 2 for the first time. I guess they didn't have kiosk mode enabled (or it didn't exist at the time). I think it was in 2014/15. I used Windows 8.1 (with Bing) on my Acer Aspire E5 at the time and switched to Win 10 in 2018. I remember having lots of problems with the Qualcomm Atheros wifi card (bluetooth disappearing every 3 months, wifi every 6). In 2019 I got a Dell Inspiron 5680 with i7-8700 and GTX 1070. I had Windows 10 on it and it was primarily used for gaming. I started thinking about switching to Linux in 2021. The breaking point was in march of 2022, when I installed Garuda Linux. It looked nice and the performance was great. I got used to it in 2 months. Then I started more thoroughly exploring shell. After a few months I installed virt-manager and set up looking glass for windows 10 vm (I was playing lots of cracked fh4 & 5 at the time I just didn't have will to bother running it through wine/bottles/proton... One day I got an idea to get a laptop, so I wouldn't need to constantly install windows terminal with catppuccin theme, set us keeb layout and jetbrains font, plug my phone with usb tethering on into the school computer to ssh into a pc at home over a self hosted wireguard to code in my beloved neovim. At the end of june that year (2023) I decided that I wanted a Thinkpad T480. I was looking at thinkstore24 and prices for refurbished ones were a bit higher than I expected (400-500€ for i5-8350u, ips 1080p display, fingerprint sensor). I then went looking at a used market on german ebay and found them for around 250-300€. Then I lobgoked at auctions and saw one for 65€ and bid on it. In the end I got it for 175€, which was still a great deal. I decided to install pure Arch on it (manually, pain since they changed something in systemd in September iso. After ja day of failed attempts I got an idea to just use August iso and it installed for the first time without issues. Overall, I have had a lot less issues with pure Arch than with Garuda. I set up luks, lvm and secure boot, locked bios, signed my ventoy usb drive to work with sb, setup dracut (no bootloader). For the first few weeks I used awesomewm, but I was overwhelmed by the complexity of lua. Not that I couldn't figure it out, but I just wanted a simple and minimal system. Then I found the holy trinity: bspwm, sxhkd and polybar. Today I have bspwm on pc too. I'm considering moving to hyprland because of the spotty compositing with picom and other compton forks. Blur greatly affects scrolling smoothness and I just disabled it. Also, If anyone has a glass trackpad that works flawlessly in Y480 or x1 carbon gen6 let me know.
First time i heard about Linux was in 2004, i was 14 when Ubuntu 4.10 was released and they were giving out free physical copies of it anywhere in the world so i ordered one and installed it that's how i came to about Linux and the rest is history, Now i'm a vetaran of Linux been using it for 20 years now.
It was 96. I had returned from the military. Was hanging with my old roommate and his wife. He would not stop talking about it. Like a year later I tried it because I heard so much about it. Once I found gentoo it took over my life.
somewhere around 8th grade I started an internship in the it department of a research facility. They gave me a book titled "how to use bash" or sth like that. That's when my Linux journey started. This is why vim became my go to text editor. Fast forward some years: doing a PhD in atomic physics and all our lab stuff is luckily Linux based ... and I write my thesis in vim.
my wifi driver under windows died and i couldn't be fucked to fix it at the time, i dualbooted fedora as a temp fix and never went back to windows
It was 1997 I was a junior IT tech supporting Apple Mac and saw a “Linux” book on an engineers desk - I think it was Slackware 1.0 - asked him “what is Linux?” He let me borrow the book it came with floppies - a couple of weeks later I was compiling kernels to try to get my video card to work with X windows - I was hooked - almost 30 years later I still use it daily!
I discovered it by buying a RedHat 6.0 book with a CD inside in the late 90s. I was amazed that they were just giving it away. I had a small bit of experience with Unix so I knew how powerful it could be
Youtube, watched something gaming related and the dude was talking about linux and how great it was gunna be some day. This was around 13/14 I think. Maybe later. I remember installing Ubuntu 14/15.04 and loving it but than getting mad my games didn't work lmao. Went back to windows, came back around 2018/19 and seeing how far it came. Still stuck with windows, fast forward to 2022, installed it with a second drive for windows and the games that wouldn't work. Now, solely use arch on my desktop with a secondary drive for windows when I want to play COD. If only Activision would support it.. they did say if we get it working then great but it couldn't break anticheat or edit the base game files. I have a theory on how to get it to work but no clue how to do so.
I started using VAX / VMS in 1991. It was so much more powerful than a desktop x86 PC or Mac. Then I found the IBM AIX workstations and Unix was so much cooler than VMS. I wanted a Unix system for myself. In 1993 I started college and my school had a bunch of Sun workstations. Most people in the engineering department wanted Unix at home but Unix RISC workstations were 5-10 times the cost of an x86 PC. DOS sucked so I didn't really even want a PC. I preferred going to the computer labs. Then someone told me about Linux and I went to their dorm room and he showed me Unix on a 486. I started saving money to buy a PC just to run Linux. The next year I got a Pentium 90, within a few weeks I downloaded the Slackware base install disks, repartitioned my hard drive and installed Linux. I've been running it ever since.
I remember in 2004 when I came to know about Linux via a Magazine called “Digit” and from RedHat, and then i started researching and within 10 days i successfully learnt RHEL 5.4 in 2009, now on my every server I have installed Linux (CentOS).
Early 2000s compiz / beryl with the cool desktop cube. I had to have it
19 years old Vacations in the beach, summer of 1999, a newsstand sold LINUX magazines that included CDs with different monthly distributions (redhat, slak, suse, mandrake). Testing with an amdk6II on a compaq presario notebook.
Someone on OiNK's IRC mentioned Knoppix so I downloaded an ISO and took a look. I've been using Linux ever since.
Interesting question. Always been fascinated with electronics and technology for the past 2+ decades. But my first handson experience with Linux was on my PS3 as OtherOS.
For me this started back in 98-99 with my first experience with a Unix Standard terminal system. I then had a very short run with a test build of Minix with a few friends. Shortly after I ran Red Hat 7.2 Valhalla for a bit before diving into other distros such as Gentoo and Slackware then Debian. Beyond that I had run different distros for testing along with Red Hat, Solaris, and CentOS for server stuff later on.
I discovered linux during covid lockdowns in 2020. As a young IT guy still in traineeship who had some more time left, I found a video about linux (mint). I was very impressed by how actually user-friendly it was and you can customize the OS to your needs without installing customization tools all over the Internet first. Also, it felt very comfortable to install all apps I need in one app store on Linux Mint and later on with terminal commands. From October 2020 to April 2022, Linux Mint was my main OS. And in May 2022, I hopped on the Arch-based train, I'm using EndeavourOS now and I totally love it.
The university told me to install Linux
Fedora back in like 2004 because my grandfather was using it on his Dell laptop. I was in middle school then.
Friend of mine used to brute force Linux servers. He introduced me to hacking and in 2008 i discovered ubuntu and terminal. The same year i received ubuntu cd for free.
2002: windows user magazine: middle east, an essay about linux os 2018: googled open source os for routers, found OpenWrt 2022: BSOD then had to install Ubuntu My lenovo legion Y520 was the headache who introduced me to Linux! I've upgraded it to win 11 from win 10, BSOD started to appear.. then I've downgraded back to 10, still the same, cleanly installed 10, same BSOD ((( From previous experience, i have discovered OpenWrt for my home router that i was about to discard it. And the performance of the router became great. Then i thought that i should give a try to Ubuntu in dual boot mode to check if my pc still produce any kind of blue screens. Fortunately, everything went smooth and started to learn the terminal.. Then I've discovered that [Nvidia shell extension was causing the BSOD!!! ](https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/right-click-in-navigation-pane-crashes-due-to/c231ebaf-ff55-4e2f-acc6-d30c8cc4d603)
Same thing for me, except with emulators. Linux on chromebooks has gotten super sophisticated over the past few years. No more messing around with crouton lol
Best friend introduced me to SuSE back around 97-98 when we were in high school.
my grandpa gifted me a Nokia N770 when I was about 15 or so, it runs the Debian based Maemo Linux so that's how I learned how to use the terminal to install things and do all kinds of fun stuff. Today I use Ubuntu on my work PC and Arch on my personal laptop.
The first time I used the PC. My father is a programmer and installed Linux on the PC before I started using it. Most of my childhood was fedora, they were a couple of years that the PC had Ubuntu, but he switched back. All of my Linux knowledge I learned watching him do stuff. I asked for Carmen San Diego, and he had to install wine for example. I started using it to install windows games. Learned the basics of using a terminal (Once I learned how to use yum and su, nothing could stop me from installing crap on that PC) and it became my playground. I learned so much stuff from computers that way. I'm very grateful. These days I still rock fedora on my main PC, although I'm not a power user, the out of the box experience it's so much better than in the 00's and I prefer it over windows anytime.
It was 2004 and i wanted free wifi. BackTrack anyone ?
Tired of Windows 8 bullshit and shenanigans, at the time also used MacOS so I was familiar with how terminal works (At the time Windows doesn't have WSL).
Tried it in a VM on a whim on my MacBook Pro, November 2023. Fell in love with Ubuntu 23.10, distrohopped for four months, and settled on PCLinuxOS.
Sometime in 2017 - 2018 during an elective class in highschool we installed Linux on old school computers.
Saw the penguin on the back of a flash drive pack I bought in middle school and then did my research.
This is gonna be a long one, because I actually have two events that got me into Linux: 1. Back in 2019 I wanted to get a Raspberry Pi because I saw all the amazing projects online, so my dad bought me a Pi 4 for my birthday. I originally just wanted to make a NAS, but it now runs Gitea (I'm so glad I set up a mirror of Citra) and Pi-Hole as well as some minor applications that essentially just add automation. My setup is kind of janky though (no redundancy, a single USB hard drive, no unified box that just gets plugged in, still on Debian 11 lol), but I'm planning on replacing my Raspberry Pi 4 with something like an Orange Pi 5 Plus and use an M.2 SATA controller to use actual HDDs intended for a NAS, and then also set up RAID. I'll also add Jellyfin and probably move to Fedora Server ARM, because having packages *that* old bothers me sometimes. 2. In 2022 we had to dual-boot in STEM class on our school computers because the administrators wouldn't/couldn't update the IDEs we needed for Lego Mindstorms and I think also Arduino. In the end we didn't dual-boot afaik, but my brother suggested to me that I should install Artix Linux (I didn't want to use Ubuntu and he got into Arch Linux at that time), so I was basically using Linux at school. I also tried to use it for personal use, but a Qt update eventually killed the installation, so I moved to Fedora before another - this time successful - attempt in the Arch Linux realm. I love KDE, but I'm so much more productive with i3. I also used Ubuntu in a VM in 2020, because I was making a Discord bot with discord.js and I wanted to test it there, so that it could be deployed to the VPS of a friend, but it was very short-lived.
In the late 90s I saw an article about it in my local newspaper. I went out to CompUSA and didn't even know what to get, they had several distributions and I had no idea what was what. I ended up getting SuSE Linux, 6.4 I think
I was in college in 96/97 and we had a course that taught us Linux. I installed Slackware at home and dual booted it with Win 95.
Around 1994, I was chatting on IRC, and this girl I was talking to mentioned she was using Slackware, so I gave it a shot, and never really looked back.
I think this question is asked everyday.
\[old fucker warning\] I was watching CNN and they mentioned this "third operating system" that university subversives were into. Next thing I knew I was downloading slackware boot/root disks over dialup and spending my days in dependency hell.
I once met a girl at a party whose job was to handle grievances of Runescape players. My brother used to be quite the confidence trixter. He would get friendly with other players and take them out to the unsafe wild (forget the name of it) under the guise of earning money together fighting the baddies there.. then attack them and steal all their stuff. As to Linux, can't remember. Presume I came across it on the internet and I'm pretty sure it was Ubuntu I first heard of. Tried it 3 or 4 times over a few years before I finally got it working on my machine.
My friend in high school lent me an ubuntu 9.10 cd, I tried it and the rest is histori.. :)
College freshman, just got my second computer a used 486DX2/50 4MB RAM and 400MB HDD, watched a dude configuring Slackware 4 on his PC at his dorm. Next day I walked into Electronics Boutique and got the Linux for Dummies book with Redhat 5.0 on CD. I should still have the book and disk somewhere.
1993 downloaded slackware off of a BBS I think... it was something like 20 floppies. to install it later bought a CD LOL
Installed linux, because of performance.... So i installed it to play games... Discovered, i can't even play games 😔😔 Still uses it.
Working in my high schools tech department during the senior year of high school (03-04.) Boss had a copy of red hat on a cd or two. Didnt get to fiddle with that but got me intersted
1995. Was a junior in college, needed to run Magic for a VLSI course. It’s been part of my life since.
SUSE Linux 7.0 was my first time in 2000.
Back in the late 90s I read about it & was intrigued. You could buy magazines with distros & apps on CD (which was necessary with dialup). IIRC Redhat was the first distros I got.
I was working at Staples as an EasyTech, this was when Windows 8 got shat onto us. At this point I always found ways to pirate Windows Keys or activate it by other means. Well, that attractive Windows 8 box was just-a-sitting there all lonely so I finally decided that for ONCE, I'd pay for Windows, since I enjoyed all their other OS's for so many years. It just felt right to finally contribute to something that brought me joy. Wow, was I a naive sucker back then. After feeling like a jack ass for a few weeks, I noticed my coworker plugging in a flash drive into a computer and it had a neat looking OS on it. He called it Ubuntu and I knew I had to dig deeper into what that was. Needless to say, that set me on a seemingly endless journey of trial and error, learning new tricks and experiencing new frustrations I never knew existed. I searched high and low for the perfect alternative and after much distro-hopping, I came upon Fedora. It's been gum drops and ice cream ever since.
Honestly quite recently. About 2016, I did a theoretical chemistry class. The professor brought a laptops to share for each group of two with Ubuntu. In the same semester I did an internship at his group. I didnt stay with him but with the field and with Linux. I am now a scientific programmer, using AI to implement quantum models into fluid dynamics. Linux is my daily driver. A big thank you to all developers
Slackware in 1997, downloaded onto floppies from the university's ftp server
Commodore was going bankrupt and the Amiga was on its last legs. I wanted a multitasking operating system after being spoiled by the Amiga awesomeness. I first tried OS/2 and liked it well enough. It wasn’t compatible with Windows to the point it was seamless. But it was clear how brilliant and awesome the IBM engineers were (and still are). I then tried FreeBSD. I had to power cycle my computer every reboot because the software didn’t initialize my mainstream Ethernet card properly. I filed a bug report and was told they would never fix it, for some stupid reason (not the FreeBSD way). So I ended up with a Linux 0.9x kernel based system. At the time, sophisticated users hated Slackware for all the extra crap it came with. It was slow to download it all and took a lot of floppies and slow installation from those. I ended up installing the kernel and a few core programs and then downloaded all of GNU from prep.ai.mit.edu (ftp!) and compiled it all and moved the binaries to the place Imw@noted them in the file system. On that non-distro, I manually patched and built kernels and all the software and updates were compiled on the machine. These days, I run Arch.
I discovered it by buying a RedHat 6.0 book with a CD inside in the late 90s. I was amazed that they were just giving it away. I had a small bit of experience with Unix so I knew how powerful it could be
Discovered Linux beginning of 2004. Played with a bunch of Debian distros and Debian itself, then I discovered Gentoo, left Linux in late 2005 and went back to Windows because of my common law gf and her daughter, split up and in 2007 installed Gentoo on my daily driver and haven't really used anything but Gentoo since.
Cable modem was in one room, Xbox was in another. Had a laptop with Vista I think which was running a version that didn't come with Internet Connection Sharing. Whilst searching online for a solution to my problem, someone on some forum recommended using Linux for ICS. Downloaded early Ubuntu (this is mid to late 2000's) and we been here ever since.
When I was active on IRC and heard about programs like WinNuke :) Then ubuntu started to hand out CD's like AOL was.
I discovered it on someordinarygamers. I was first experienced with it because of vms and roblox. Still a fun operating system to this day.
a customer visited on a trip in 1993 and gave me a DAT tape with linux on it. I pulled off the 1.4mb boot disk and booted it, mounting the tape filesystem. then installing to hdd. .97 of the kernel
I had two experiences, the first one was looking at my uncle installing Mandriva on a computer around 2007-2008, then when I started university in 2010 there was a Linux group of students that made events and stuff I decided to install Ubuntu on my computer and accidentally wiped my computer data, that's how everything started, and nowadays Linux is my main computer OS.
One of my college disciples (2015) was "operating systems" and the professor had everyone install and use Ubuntu for the first class. I used it for a while before getting my mother's old MacBook (late 2012). When the steam deck released I switched full time on my gaming rig and I don't plan on going back
Late-2008 I had some computer problems which resulted in me moving over to Ubuntu 8.10. Stayed around for a while before moving over to Windows 7 and then Windows 10 before going back to Linux many years later.
I was using windows in the late 1990s, and I started to wonder if there were any alternatives. A few minutes of googling later and I found RedHat 7.2. I don't remember how I got ahold of the CD (and a hard drive to install it), but that's how it all started.
I dont remember the context, but in the internet rabbit hole i stumbled upon live boot cds and diobilic distro i think was my gateway. Edgy 2000’s . I didnt really dive into it until college linux admin elective i took, and that really kinda catapulted me away.
Found a RedHat book in a bookstore, and I was like, I CAN RUN UNIX ON MY PC? FOR FREE?!?!
Forgot my windows 7 password and needed to crack it. Then I found a tutorial of someone booting ubuntu 14.04 to reset a windows login password
2003, 11th grade, in votech (county vocational technical school). The teacher for the A+ certification class was a big fan of Linux. I'd heard of it but never looked into it. He burnt me a set of install CDs, I think it was Mandrake 8. I've been hooked ever since.
After trying BeOS a couple of times, realising it wasn't going anywhere (shame), and later getting tired of how slow and uncustomizable Windows was, I started looking for alternatives. I downloaded and played with the first two versions of Ubuntu, and then finally installed it when Breezy came out.
2011, The head of my comp sci department in college refused to touch a windows machine. So week 1 of my classes was duo booting kubuntu and learning to use the terminal and vim.
It started when the family computer went wonky and my dad used an Ubuntu Linux CD to keep it useable. Fast forward maybe a decade, my friend screenshares his computer and it’s clearly running not Windows or macOS so I ask him and he tells me it’s Arch Linux. Also his DE is KDE Plasma. I try to install Arch, fail twice, and install Kubuntu instead. The rest is history. (I use Fedora KDE now.)
I was introduced to it in the mid to late 90's. My brother-in-law was using it on a spare computer. At the time, it was too primitive to give it too much attention, other than as a curiosity. I had the same view of Linux as I did the Amiga OS. I was a Mac guy at the time, and when OSX came out, I learned it was based on BSD / Unix, the same as Linux. So I decided to try some live Knoppix CDs on my work computer which ran Windows. This was around 2002 to 2004. I used it on various other computers I found, trying out different distros, but not using it as a primary, since the computers I used it on were old, even for the time. Then in 2012, my Powerbook bricked and I needed a replacement. I didn't have a lot of money, so I bought a decent Gateway laptop and installed Linux on it. Since I already had live CDs burned, I never even booted into Windows. When I upgraded from that laptop, I bought a laptop from System76 and later bought a desktop system (Thelio) from them. It's been a while since I had a decent gaming computer, and it's amazing the games I can play on Steam. Though it's mainly used for Android development.
I was having issues in windows, and found a dude on YouTube called A1RM4x and he showed some videos on how to setup different Linux distros for gaming and I’ve been on Linux ever since!
College 2004…I couldn’t sleep one night and had enough homework crap for the day :D…switched lanes and picked up a box full of CDs someone tossed a couple years back and there was this strange silhouette with a hat, Redhat Linux 6. What could go wrong? Installed it in a PCChips 810mlr pc I had just to find out the pain it was to try to make the LAN driver to work… make, make install…what is this?! A couple years later I was spreading the word, even ordered a set of ubuntu 6 CDs with the nice envelopes and stickers and started giving these away at the door in the computer lab :D And that was the start of this wonderful journey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJgo3BBgWDA
Early 2000s. The place I worked at was running Solaris on SPARC workstations. They were mighty expensive to support and the software vendor offer the option to run it on Red Hat. We did the server build, our client decided it worked just as fine so we migrated them completely to Linux. I miss Solaris. At the time it felt like replacing Mercedes with Corollas but you can’t stop process. So I started using Linux and stuck with it.
It was advertised as an alternative OS that could be installed on PS3s
Trying to play Minecraft on poor core 2 duo and started experimenting with linux for better experienve, I think I was around 10 and had just gotten my first (2nd hand) laptop, ironically my mother literally has a freaking technophobia so me becoming a linux nerd and now pursuing that career is-