I’ll go first, I took my mom’s college textbooks which came with discs for a couple distros and failed to install RHEL before managing to get Fedora Core 4 working. The first desktop environment I used was KDE and despite trying out a few others over the years I always come back to plasma. Due to being like 12, I wanted to run my games on it, and man wine was not nearly as easy to use (or as good) as it is nowadays. So I switched back to windows until around 2015 or so when I spent the next few years trying to replace windows as much as I could. Once valve released proton, I switched fully and have t looked back, unless my still there windows partition tries to take over my computer when I restart it at least.
That would have been Slackware, which in those days came on a stack of 3.5" floppy disks. So early 90’s (and hence I was in my mid-30s) but I was still mainly using Windows 3.1 and Trumpet Winsock to connect to the Internet.
I think the first time I really took it seriously was in the mid 90’s with Debian, a copy of which was posted to me, on CD-ROM I think, by Ian Murdock himself (back in the days when he was still with Debra 😏).
It was 2009 and I was 14. I had been using Ubuntu on my father’s PC for a year and I installed Andromeda Linux (an Ubuntu fork with a stunning theme), completely wiping my HDD. The next day I installed Windows and attempted my second Linux install, I was more careful and got a doual boot working.
My first experience was with Red Hat 5.x back in the late 90’s, I got ahold of a huge book that came with it on CD. Since then I’ve used several distros both on my PC as dual boot, but also running a server. I’ve always defaulted to Windows again because of gaming mainly, and I’m honestly not a big fan of booting back and forth between different systems.
I’ve currently got EndeavourOS installed and am playing around seeing if I can get everything to work, and so far it seems this may be the time I actually switch for good.
Slax and puppy on a 128mb usb that i would take with me to school to test
A friend loaned me a CD set of Mandrake which had an early version of KDE. I was floored away by something as simple as the level of customization you could do with the taskbar. And having this alien operating system running on an alien EXT3 partition format instead of FAT32 or NTFS that you didn’t need to defragment. It seemed pretty fantastical.
I loved tweaking the desktop environment on Windows by replacing explorer.exe with LiteStep and Blackbox so likewise I did this on Linux. Over time I had fun discovering Gnome2, Fluxbox, XFCE, etc. you name it. Eventually I got a desktop I really liked and felt productive on and as Windows XP approached end of life I had no intention of using Vista so I transitioned to exclusively Linux at that point.
I did play with different distros and running servers at the time, hosted VMs back in the day you had to take whatever distro they offered. But for my desktop I basically went Mandrake, Arch (didn’t know how to make everything work), Debian, Ubuntu, back to Arch.
It was Ubuntu 8.04 in around 2013. I only did it to get a promotional item for Team Fortress 2 called Tux, a cosmetic item that looks like… Tux. I remember hating the UI/UX and promptly uninstalled it afterwards.
Eventually circled back around to Xubuntu for my low-end hardware and various other distros. Currently daily driving Fedora.
is that cosemtic still around
sadly no longer available to get
First intro was Knoppix when I was 12. Used it to bypass limits on library computers, and started learning the command line.
Dual booted the family computer with Debian when I was 13.
Played with Fedora and Ubuntu on my own computer when I was 15.
Hosted my own web communities when I was 16.
I’m 34 now and I’m 100% Linux. PopOS desktop, and Debian headless preferred.
Kernel panic after installing Redhat 6, not RHEL, in the late 90s or early 2000s. Later tried 7 and has been using Linux since.
Slackware 1998. I spent 6 months in a text only freebsd install in 1999. Because of a dram issue I wasn’t able to run windows without blue screens. Text based internet wasn’t that bad in 1999. I could load up xwindows if I wanted to see a picture but rarely did. Talking on irc somebody mentioned memtest and my memory had a very long warranty so I took it back to the store. Then I spent the next several years addicted to quake/quake2
Around '08 or '09 I found Hak5 and was live booting backtrack on my macbook to play with the tools. Was really out of my depth, but hey, it’s easy to get stuff done when you run everything as root ;)
Ubantu in 2007 ish. Games didn’t work.
Knoppix in 2nd year at Uni. It made me more productive because there were few distractions from programming. So zen.
Started dabbling in Linux some 15+ years ago, dualbooting with windows XP. Tried bunch of different distros - suse, Slackware, RedHat (pre-enterprise) etc. Didn’t really understand it and kept going back to windows. A classmate had told me Gentoo was good for learning Linux. So once I was trying to shrink my windows partition to make space for another dualboot experiment, and in the process borked my partitions. They were probably recoverable, but I got furious, ragequit windows and installed gentoo on the whole disk and used it as my daily. That helped me learn.
Red Hat 5.2. 13 years old. Came from WFW 3.11. Used Red Hat for about six months, then switched to FreeBSD for the next decade.
Never went back to Windows. Windows has always been a thing that school and work computers use. My kids have never used it.
I can’t remember how old I was, but it was during my youth when I bought a computer magazine that came with a “rescue CD” with Knoppix on it. I thought it was really cool, but never did more than looking around in the OS and playing around with it. It had KDE 3.5, which I really liked though. It felt comfy, and that would manifest in the back of my mind. Months or years later, I bought a magazine with a SUSE Linux… I believe 9.2 and supposedly modified for Linux gaming. That got me curious. Same thing, I took a closer look at it, found it really cool and comfy, played around with it, but ultimately it could never replace Windows for me at the time. But the seed was planted, and curiosity remained. Years later, I learned more about Linux during some training for an IT job, and I got the LPIC-1 certification. My journey with magazine DVDs continued, this time with Ubuntu. I got more and more comfortable with the applications and desktop environments, but still, it would not replace Windows for me. I tested Ubuntu and Linux Mint on a cheap notebook for a while, and later, as Linux got better and better on the desktop, I gave Linux Mint a shot on my PC in dual boot. Years of distro hopping, testing, coming back to Windows for gaming and music production software, Windows frustration and the urge to switch to Linux… Then, in 2018, I had enough. I really wanted to get rid of Windows. I bought a 27" iMac as a studio machine for my music production. Of course I evaluated it for a while as a Windows replacement, but where it shines for creative applications, it is useless for a gamer. The durations I spent with Linux on my main PC increased. Still often would come back to Windows. I was changing my OS like pants basically, just because of fucking gaming. FINALLY, as Valve pushed Proton and Steam on Linux, I was able to make the final jump to Linux in 2022. It was now supporting so many great games that I could live with the few that won’t run. Since 2022, I am exclusively on Linux on my PC and notebook(s) and I won’t look back. It keeps getting better, where Windows falls apart in quality, privacy invasion and user experience. I’m still distro hopping, but I actually enjoy that. It has become almost a hobby. And I’m about to discover the BSD world, I think. Cute little detail: That SUSE Linux from the magazine DVD in my youth had some nice wallpapers that I liked and that I associate with that “comfy” feeling I had while exploring it. I still keep those wallpapers in my wallpaper folder like a treasure, even if I don’t actually use them. Except for one, that I still use from time to time: https://wallhere.com/id/wallpaper/163038 That in combination with KDE 3.5 was really lovely, and I still enjoy this one from time to time on my desktop.
