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.
Ubuntu in the early 2000s. My dad bought a little netbook that had it pre-installed. I was hooked, I was using Windows XP up to that point and it was something entirely different. My dad was kind of a techie at the time but none of us had any experience with Linux up to that point, still, we got the hang of it rather quickly and Linux had a lot more not so obvious problems at that time.
That’s why I’m saying a long time now, Linux is good enough as it is. It has been good enough for a long time. If you give it to people it works. But you have to give it to them. Normal people don’t install their OS’, as far as they are concerned it’s a part of the machine itself. Linux will only take off if it gets pre-loaded on systems as Windows and Mac was/is to this day. I Canonical wouldn’t have partnered with some laptop OEMs back in the day and I wouldn’t have gotten linux in my hand it maybe would have took years before I got to know linux and I don’t know if I would have installed it on my own.
Around 2004, maybe 2005, I had to recover some files from an old laptop and landed on a live CD of Knoppix for the job. Dabbled in Linux a bit after, but not seriously, for the better part of the decade after - mostly distro hopping and having fun, especially with old hardware, back when Ubuntu was in better standing with the community.
Ended up using it more seriously in the last ~5 years. Hopped around Mint, Manjaro (actually lasted 2 years before I borked it), and OpenSUSE before finally landing on Fedora, which has been my daily for maybe 2 years now. With the Red Hat stuff, depending on how that pans out, I’m debating on just going to vanilla Debian at this point. But I’ve always had a soft spot for Mint, so we’ll just have to see.
As for Windows, I still have my main tower with Win 10 (no Linux) that I’ve upgraded throughout the years from Win 7. But Win 11 isn’t having it, so once Win 10 hits EOL, it’ll get Linux as well (assuming it doesn’t kick the bucket first).
Knoppix was my gateway as well. I’d checked out Linux before, but I used Knoppix to help out regularly for a while, which led to dual booting my laptop with Ubuntu 6.06, ending with Linux being my main OS.
The first thing I tried wax knoppix but the disk my mom burned for me didn’t work, I didn’t wind up actually getting to use knoppix until high school and then I found DSL was better for my needs at the time.
11 releasing was the catalyst for me just straight up not using my Windows drive anymore, I installed it to my Thinkpad (it’s still there, next to arch) to check it out and holy shit was it bad. Before then I’d boot in to play games with anticheat that didn’t work on Linux. Nowadays if I can’t play it on Linux I just don’t. Want my money? At the very least support proton. Don’t? Ok I’ll keep my money.
I was about 16 and made a Slax CD to get around my schools locked down WinNT/XP installs. After school I ran Ubuntu on an '06 Acer laptop for a while but later switched to W7 for gaming. When W10 launched with ads in the start menu I moved to Debian and have been totally happy since then.
All I remember about my first time is being tricked into using Slackware. They told me it was the easiest distro. And this was in like 94 or 95; just a year or two after the damn thing came out.
Slackware was mine too - all it took was a box of floppy disks and tens of hours of downloading and installing! It was great though, something so different. But it was just a toy, and I went back to DOS/Windows on PC - mainly for the games and hardware support (Voodoo!)
A year or so later I spent a lot of time playing with Solaris and VAX/VMS at University and really developed a love for the command-line and UNIX environment. It was that which led me to my first job (with HP-UX) and my second (Debian/Yellow Dog). From then on I used it at home a lot more. Now I use Windows for games/gamedev, and Ubuntu for everything else (desktop, laptop, servers).
But it’s amazing how far things have come in some respects, but how some things have regressed over those 20 years - window managers/themes never reached the heights I envisioned in the Enlightenment hay day, session management/restoration/remoting seems to have been eroded away, virtual desktops/window management/tiling regressed and became fractured, the wonder of Compiz didn’t really move things in an interesting way, and I felt sure Quicksilver (for MacOS) was the future of launcher, but it’s not really been taken up - though the Expose feature is an excellent essential part of Gnome now (Activities)!
In some ways I think Linux has lost that “wow factor” that we used to have with all those cool features - but it is much more rock-solid and professional now! I use it more now than I ever have.
@eric5949 Red Hat 5.1 1998/99, I was aged 40. I attempted dual booting with Win98, but Disk Druid wiped my Win98 partition:-) I was a little upset but stayed with RH. I had actually purchased the RH CD’s and manual from the US (I am in the UK), and incurred import duty, so it was not free as in beer but around £50. I looked at Windows again when 2000 was released. Now I use Linux Mint, Chrome OS and Windows 11.
I had literally the exact same experience with the installer corrupting my Windows partition and me accepting the indication and just switching to Linux-only. 🙂
IIRC Kubuntu/Ubuntu and DSL in 2003-5ish, and IIRC programs were compiled on the local machine back then.
I mostly sticked with Windows cause most of the 3D packages are on Windows (I’m a 3D generalist). Was exposed to centos variants while working in the industry.
After covid, I had a lot of time to get back onto GNU Linux.
Man I forgot about DSL, I used to carry around a USB with DSL on it I’d throw onto school computers in high school lol.
Ubuntu in the early 2010s. Installing flash player to get YouTube working.
It took me more than 10 years, but I am finally windows free. Linux came a long way in such a short time man.It really did. Even 5 years ago it was much less easily usable.
I was 13 or 14. Must have been 1995 or 96. Learned about it from friends on IRC (any old dalnet nerds out there?)
Ruined my mom’s computer multiple times leaning how to partition HDDs 😆
I only recently went back to windows bc I was doing some .net projects and found WSFL was more than adequate for my other projects. Still kind of feel dirty using windows shudder
Sounds pretty close to me! spider.dal.net was my go-to server.
I installed Red Hat 5 circa 98-99 when we got a new computer - so I didn’t have to worry about destroying the existing Windows installation!
I used dalnet around 2000 or so. Hung out in #speaker’s_corner quite a bit.
Back in college my CS 201 class was on C programing and needed to use the Linux machines in the lab for the class. They were running CentOS. That was my first time using Linux. After that I starting playing around with different distros (Ubuntu and Debian mostly). Then I took a “system administration” class that was really “Linux 101” that was taught by the departments sys-admin who is a Linux Evangelist and they showed me the light. Havent owned a windows or Mac machine since (about 20 years ago now)
Similar story here, my first encounter was my previous semester of Uni, a Systems Administration and Maintenance class, where we used Rocky Linux. Queue two semesters later, and I’m in love with it, hell I’m even typing this on my Thinkpad’s Ubuntu (ofc I had to get a thinkpad lmao), biding my time until I switch to Arch, since several of my highschool classmates use it, and in general I like the concept behind it.
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.
After reading this question, I got strangely excited the thinking I had a relatively older and/or unique experience. Nope, most all you guys are as old as me. Late 90’s, early 2000…got a red hat CD in some literature…installed it. Now only use Windows if I need to for work which I haven’t needed to for over a decade.
I’m starting to think all the older folks are the ones who left reddit lol. Between stuff like this and the old memes, I’m definitely on the younger side of people here lol.
You can’t get nostalgic if you aren’t at least a boomer.
I think my first experience was around 1993 or 1994. I downloaded the 3.5" disks at the university and then uploaded onto my 386. No GUI, all command prompt. :).
Right around that time, too, I found some network cards and co-axial cables and 3-4 of us in the house put the cards in our computers and could see each other’s computer. Couldn’t do much else though. Hahahaha.
You could definitely play Doom!
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Sounds like my story. I think I started with Ubuntu, but installed mints cinnamon Desktop environment later on.
I suppose this made you work in it later on as well?
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Maybe around 2006, I booted a live CD of Ubuntu and ran the 6 disc install of Unreal Tournament 2004 so that I could play UT with a friend who was staying over - the laptop was my mum’s, so I wasn’t allowed to install anything directly on it. UT2004 had a native Linux version on disc.
The install took until 4am and we played until the sun came up, absolute bliss getting it working.
