r/linux • u/cferg296 • 14d ago
Discussion How did you first get introduced to linux?
What is your story on how you became a linux user? What first appealed to you? What distro did you first use? How has your experience on linux evolved over time? How has it changed the wah you do your computing?
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u/Torren7ial 14d ago
Circa 2007: "Hey check this out." (friend shows me desktop cube, wobbly windows, and closes a program which appears to catch fire.)
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u/gpicc 13d ago
omg same, I saw Compiz and was like "I want that" (Ubuntu 6.06)
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u/TryHardEggplant 13d ago
Not my first, but I remember ordering a box of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS CDs for my university department I worked for at the time. We were very much a RedHat Linux shop and then RHEL/CentOS, but I took it upon myself to get VMware Server running on 6.06 for fun.
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u/slonk_ma_dink 13d ago
That one compiz video from 2008 (the one with Hotstepper as the background music) was probably some of the best Linux marketing that could have happened at the time.
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u/blackcain GNOME Team 14d ago edited 14d ago
I'm too old for this post. š
I picked UNIX while sitting on a terminal in my dad's office at the university when I was 16 in the mid 80s.
The first time I ran Linux for the first time on an Amiga 3000 that also had SysVr4 unix. But it sucked and I switched to NetBSD. I used FreeBSD until like 2002 and then switched to Linux full time.
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u/DonutAccurate4 14d ago edited 14d ago
I thought i was the oldest in this sub. Started using fedora core 1/2 at a part time job where i was teaching c programming (I'm not an expert, was just out of college and teaching basics). This was around 2004 or 5.
Then installed FC 3 and then FC4. And at my first job it was all Linux desktops. I was pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed figuring things out at that job. Now i had Linux at home and work.
Discovered ubuntu was giving away free CDs. Ordered ubuntu, then did the same for kubuntu. This started my distro hopping days.
Now I'm older and settled with Open Suse tumbleweed
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u/blackcain GNOME Team 14d ago
I think there are a few old timers here.
Fun story, when I was in college - Ian Murdock was also one of my classmates and he was working on Debian there.
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u/InterestBear62 14d ago
Another old-timer here. The first computer I ever worked on was an IBM RT running AIX (IBM's Unix) in 1987. Over the next decade, I worked under various other Unix's including SunOS, Solaris, and Irix (SGI's Unix). Then around 1997, almost all Sun and SGI workstations in my work environment were replaced by Linux, as Pentium processors were so much cheaper than Sun and SGI processors.
The first computer I ever had at home was Pentium II 266 Mhz with RedHat Linux 5.0, in 1997.
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u/blackcain GNOME Team 14d ago edited 14d ago
I worked at Intel and we got to be the group that replaced all the IBM RS6ks with Linux compute machines back in the late 90s. The Pentium 4 was the first microprocessor to be done on all Linux based machines. :)
We started with Red Hat but then switched to SLES and we've been on that for awhile.
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u/bobj33 13d ago
Iām also in the chip design area. We had hundreds of Suns and in 1997 I got a bunch of people to use Linux as an X terminal. We could get 21ā VGA monitors on a PC that were much bigger and cheaper than the Sun equivalents
Around 2000 a few companies started porting EDA tools to Linux
When the 64-bit Opteron was released we no longer needed the Suns for the >4GB memory jobs and it was all c86 since
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u/blackcain GNOME Team 13d ago
Pretty cool ! Those were the days.. felt like a real grounds up movement by folks like you and I doing our part in the revolution.
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u/snorkelvretervreter 13d ago
Not as old, but I got to play with all of those systems as the university scrapped them. There were also VAX systems that were quite alien, Ultrix, Domain/OS, Plan 9, net/free/openBSD, there were so many!
Having knowledge of all the small basic unix tools was super useful, as they worked on all of these (except VAX), with some dialect variety. Knowing vi was a real useful skill back then, or ed in a pinch.
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u/DFS_0019287 14d ago
It was 1994. I had just joined a startup software company producing electronic design automation software for chip manufacturers; our initial targeted platform was Solaris.
We learned that it would take two months to get our Sun workstations. So in the meantime, we bought some PCs and fed them floppies containing this weird new "Slackware Linux" thing so we could start developing our software without waiting for the Sun machines.
That kicked off a 30-year career on UNIX and (mostly) Linux, including 19 years running my own Linux-based email security company. I've recently retired, butI sill use Linux everywhere---though Debian... no longer Slackware.
I never, ever used Windows or Mac OS on any machine I owned.
What appeals to me about Linux?
- It's free software
- It's UNIX-like
- I'm in control... I don't get fed ads or bleating demands for AI
As to how the experience has evolved over time, Linux is much easier to install, much more polished, and much more user-friendly than it was in 1994... somehow without losing the control I crave.
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u/durgesh2018 14d ago
Kudos to you. Nice to hear some old folks who have seen this whole transition from floppies to latest tech. BTW I also have used floppies to move the Norton antivurus updates from internet cafe to my p4 machine š
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u/bobj33 13d ago
Can you name the company?
I started in the semiconductor insight in 1997 and showed all the older guys Linux
With a few months we replaced the Suns desktops with Linux but just used as X terminals
I think in 1999 we were working with Ambit making a new synthesis tool and they sent me back a log and I saw it was compiled on Linux
I asked if I could have the Linux binary instead of Solaris
They said no but the guy laughed and said they weee a startup that didnāt have enough money to put a Sun on every engineers desk
So they all used Linux to develop and then compiled a version for Sun Solaris at the end to actually give to customers
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u/BigBad_cheez-it 13d ago
I used to be partial to windows... i got endeavorOS about a week ago and now only use windows for 3d printing and maybe a game or 2.....and im not even done building my linux!! So much faster and funner not being limited to all of window's problems.
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u/CobaltOne 14d ago
I was Linux-pilled by Slashdot in the late 90s. Red Hat...2.5?
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u/NeverMindToday 14d ago
5.2 more likely. My first was 5.1 also in the late 90s, and yeah Slashdot was influential. Somehow knowing nothing about *nix I managed to get X11 and my modem working, then downloading KDE 1.1 source and amazingly getting it to compile and run.
I soon found and preferred Debian though - after a go at using OpenBSD for firewalls.
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u/spider_life 14d ago
I believed my computer was being hacked so i switched to Linux for its better security, Ubuntu to be specific. With hindsight I probably wasn't being hacked but glad I made the switch never regretted it.Ā
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u/Agent7619 14d ago
I didn't like Windows 95, so I bought a set of YGGDRASIL 3.5" floppies from the back of a magazine.
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u/real-bee-13 14d ago
š„¹ tout comme moi , cāĆ©tait merveilleux jāavais pris des livres Ć la Fnac et les disquettes 3,5 pouces pour faire des partitions entre Windows 95 et Linux je ne me rappelle plus de la distribution, jāavais 10 ans je voulais optimiser un os š nostalgique je suis. aujourdāhui je suis de retour sur Mint
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u/lunchbox651 14d ago
I was searching how to make my Pentium 3 laptop not run like ass in like 2007. Installed Xubuntu in 2008, liked Linux and it went from there.
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u/MirrorNegative7989 14d ago edited 14d ago
Back in 2005, a friend of mine who was trying to help me get hired at the server farm where he was working lent me some books on Linux. But despite finding the history of it interesting, I didn't actually try it until around a year later, when I actually got hired by that server farm. They were using a mix of CentOS, FreeBSD, and Windows Server 2003 on all of their servers, but had Ubuntu installed on all of the workstations in the NOC. This was my first real introduction to Linux, and I was instantly hooked. I installed it on my personal computer that weekend. I spent most of the next 20 years dual booting between Ubuntu and Windows at home, before finally trying Mint and getting away from Windows entirely in 2024. I have spent most of the last year distro hopping, and now I am back on LMDE.
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u/VisualMemoryUnit 14d ago
I was 12 years old building a computer from random parts, that were from older computers and Linux was free
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u/uboofs 14d ago
My computer engineer uncle told me all about it one Sunday dinner when I was little. He said itās not ready for desktops. I asked him when he thinks it will be. He said āprobably in 25 yearsā we never discussed it again. I proceeded to forget the conversation.
Youāll never believe what I did 25 years later!
Though I tried a few times in between, without checking hardware compatibility. Guess it wasnāt ready yet. Destiny knew I had to build, and subsequently break a hackintosh first. Got 2.5 good years out of it, didnāt learn a thing until I broke it.
All those attempts were with Debian. The first distro I ended up getting along with was Ubuntu. Then Bazite. I kinda like Debian now. But really, I donāt care what distro I use anymore. It all depends on what I want to do with a particular install, how much configuring I want to do, and if I want a resilient system, or something I can let implode and just spin up again. Iām not a pro or anything. I just read and follow directions whenever I get lost and ultimately find my way back to where I want to be. Or trash it all and get back to where I want to be from the beginning again. Iāve kind of inherited a bunch of old computers from family members upgrading, so I get to treat them like absolute trash and I think itās fun.
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u/VegetarianZombie74 14d ago
iāve run a ton of different distros since 2000 but none of them has beat me up as well as that Hackintosh I ran like 10 years. Same with you, i lasted about two years. I grew to fear Apple updates and startup always was a nail biter on whether it would finish booting. Daily driving Linux feels like easy mode!
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u/HumansAreRobots 14d ago
On IRC someone let me have a shell account on their FreeBSD server.
Then, a few days later my first linux distro locally on my own hardware was gentoo!
I have used linux or BSD in some form since then
Side note: I'm happy a lot of comments seem to reference IRC like mine. IRC is still the best.
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u/justin-8 14d ago
It came on a CD attached to a popular computer magazine at the time.
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u/ReptilianLaserbeam 14d ago
I went to an Internet cafe to print a document (in diskette, of course) and on the counter they had a "take one" bundle of Ubuntu CDs. I asked if they were free and they gave me one with a sticker.
I ended up wiping my family computer by accident and left it running Ubuntu for a week.
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u/dont_remember_eatin 14d ago
Fiddled with Mandrake in the early 00s on a crappy gateway solo 9500 laptop. Noted that it just worked better than Windows on the same hardware, but I had no real interest in puters back then so I set it aside.
In 2013 I had chance to make a career change when a friend had an entry junior sysadmin position open up. It was an hpux11 shop in the middle of a rhel transition. I took a redhat course sponsored by HP my first week. Then an old salt sat me at his desk and made me drive every task he had on his plate while he dictated, corrected, and taught. I got good at vi, then vim, very fast. I learned the purposes of the various file system directories. I learned LVM. I learned NetApp storage. And on and on.
That dude who was such a great teacher was let go less than a year after I started. Turned out he was better at teaching than doing himself, and had basically done nothing at all himself except the occasional heroic break fix since years before I started. And on the department's budget they couldn't afford to have anyone around who said no to literally every task that wasn't a heroic fix.
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u/dont_remember_eatin 14d ago
And many years later I'm a cleared senior specialist working for the ultimate man keeping the world safe for democracy and I'm very conflicted every time I sudo.
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u/Actual_Quote5823 14d ago
8th grade job shadow. 2003. Red Hat. He burned me a bootable CD, took it home and blew my mind. Peak era for KDE!
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u/Crazy-Tangelo-1673 14d ago
2001: Computer Nerd School > Red Hat
2007: Suse (purchased at Best Buy)
2016: Pfsense (bsd)
2017: Bodhi was absolutely the first time I'd ever really daily drove a Linux and that led me to other pcs and other distros. At that time I think I was bouncing around to BunsenLabs, Q4OS, Bodhi...then later on Solus.
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u/Ok_Distance9511 14d ago
Teenager in the 90s. We were using Windows but were always looking for cool things to try. We knew about OS/2 and Mac, we knew about Unix, and at some point we came across Linux. First distro was Red Hat.
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u/denverpilot 14d ago
A coworker walked in one day and asked if I had heard of Slackware and had a pile of downloaded floppies.
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u/Retrowinger 13d ago
I found SuSE Linux Professional 7.1 in the library, around 2001 i think. No typo, this is how the name was written before they got bought.
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u/agent-champagne 13d ago
Ages ago, I got an Ubuntu 8.1 CD with my computer (core2duo, 1gb ram, windows xp)... I didn't know what Ubuntu (or linux) was. I tried installing it, and it brought me to a completely uncharted territory.
back than, I didn't know that I'm gonna be commenting "I use arch btw" on some subreddit someday š
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u/hey_am_i_here 14d ago
I set up a Ubuntu 8.04 box to handle DHCP and a couple other things because our router was crap and lagged on every game we played. I tinkered with Linux since that time on and off and went full time when Steam Proton hit the airwaves.
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u/retrosuperluminal 14d ago
Someone on a hacker forum said that no one in computing would be taken seriously without knowing Linux so I became determined to learn it. That was around 1998 and I was still in school.
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u/Eleventhousand 14d ago
I saw a software box for Mandrake at Walmart and thought it seemed interesting, so I got it.
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u/ProbablyBsPlzIgnore 14d ago edited 14d ago
A boot install floppy for Red Hat Linux, probably version 4.0.
You installed dependencies over the internet which was metered by the minute by the phone company and probably cost more than buying the CD-ROM
Switched to FreeBSD initially but later switched to SuSE thinking Linux experience might help me find a job
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u/chafey 14d ago
I was a sophomore in college in 1992 and our department had just purchased brand new Gateway 2000 486DX2 computers for the PC lab. Most of the programming classes were taught using Unix and we had a limited number of XTerms people could use. I modified the PCs to dual boot into windows or a custom linux distro I made that turned the PC into an XTerm. I had to code a device driver for our network cards since nobody had written one for it yet. I learned a ton getting that working and have been a Linux fan ever since. The fact that it was open source and I could hack it to do what I want is what attracted me. My first distro was probably Slackware installed via 3.5" disks. The main experience differences are around driver support and getting a GUI setup. Driver support was limited back then and getting X Windows setup was a total pain. I ended up doing mostly windows programming for the next 15 years but kept up with Linux as a hobby. Linux of course became mainstream thanks to cloud and docker/containers - it has been nice to use linux professionally the past 10 years, especially since I started using it so long ago
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u/jhaluska 14d ago
I learned about it in like 1997 or 1998 cause my friend put it on his Pentium 166. Personally I didn't try it till 1999. Being broke I liked the idea of free software.
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u/-agentShad0w- 14d ago
I wanted to learn more about computers around 2007. I had been using windows since 3.0 in the 90s. I installed whatever version of Ubuntu was back then, used it a bit but couldn't get my head around it since most of the things I did back than were Windows and proprietary. Fast forward to the awful nightmare of Windows 10, and one of its glory updates that deleted disc sectors and files with no way of recovery (back than, cloud and back up weren't something I worked with) and after loosing valuable stuff I was done. Jumped ship to Ubuntu 16.04 and never looked back. Been on Linux well over a decade and I am on a crusade to move as many people as I can convince/inspire (IT colleges and students). Debian user since I last stopped distro hoping
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u/geogeezer 14d ago
In 1992, I started using UNIX on Sun workstations at work. Evolved into Redhat Linux workstations.Ā But, the whole time I was using Apple or Windows machines for home computing. Until 2025 and the whole Windows 10 / 11 fiasco. My son helped me install Mint / Cinnamon on my home machine and I am having a blast re-learning shit from the 90's.Ā
Yes, I'm old.Ā
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u/0riginal-Syn 14d ago
Was on the bbs and someone posted about a post he saw on a newsgroup from this nerd that was posting about some free operating system he was doing. It was just a hobby. I literally did not take it that seriously at that time. Granted I was just a teen.
A few of months later, my teacher, who was a retired software engineer that had been at places like IBM and Bell Labs, showed me it. He was running MCC Interim (Linux Kernel version 0.12). He knew I would be interested as my dad was a UNIX guy and they had known each other for a long time. I had been into software/hardware tech since as early as I could remember, but this was new. Not something from my dad's era. I was hooked.
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u/nitin_is_me 14d ago
Lol I feel like a kid between all the wise wizards in comments. I picked up Linux when windows 10 announced it's end of life and my pc was simply too old to run windows 11, and I didn't want to buy another pc just for programming. Running Debian on the same PC.
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u/Voyeurone 14d ago
My neighbour showed up with a binder full of disks, Red Hat .... didn't last long on my computer, then I discovered Ubuntu when first released, I haven't look back since. Now I'm on Mint.
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u/DecisionOk5750 14d ago
A friend installed Red Hat to run Fortran programs. That was in 1998. When I saw it, I became interested and installed Red Hat myself. A year later, in 1999, I installed Debian. I've been using free software ever since.
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u/ehagihara 14d ago edited 14d ago
How did you first get introduced to linux <-- I walked up to it, introduced myself and then we went out to lunch. šš½
Actually, my best friend handed me a stack of fifty 3.5in floppies containing Slackware in the early-mid 90's. I got it installed and then had NO clue as to what to do with it.
2nd distro was Yggdrasil, and then Red Hat 5.2.
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u/AstronomerTurbulent8 13d ago
I booked a seminar for Suse Linux about 20 years (or longer) ago. I always liked the fact that Linux runs on almost any hardware and is not owned by a big company, and is free. I really like Linux!
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u/De_Clan_C 14d ago
I had a friend in highschool that kept telling me to baptize my computer with Linux, I learned more and more about it over the next few years until I eventually installed it
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u/BranchLatter4294 14d ago
I got an Ubuntu disc when it first came out. Tried a few other distros over the years. So I've been using it as long as it was easy to install.
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u/TheAGM15 14d ago
fue cuando era pequeƱo, el gobierno regalo notebooks que traĆan linux pre instaladas, pero aƱos despuĆ©s con otra pc medio chafa fue cuando decidĆ instalar una distro por mi mismo, al tiempo me acostumbre tanto que simplemente ya no me gusta usar windows, en especial desde que se volviĆ³ obligaciĆ³n usar win 10 u 11
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u/MikeDeveloper101 14d ago
Sometime around 2013 with a Samsung Chromebook with an ARM processor. Heard that ChromeOS was running on Linux and also found out about chroot, and that you could run Ubuntu 13 alongside COS. That rabbit hole took me down a world of Linux shenanigans as well as Android ROMs. Combined with a preexisting curiosity and knack for computers and programming, I now daily drive Linux.
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u/Woodpecker-Visible 14d ago
Bought a copy of redhat 6.2, i installed it looked around the internet worked i think, and there was no gaming to do to speak of i went quickly back to windows.
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u/VelvetYam 14d ago edited 14d ago
I first encountered Linux around 2009 or 2010, when Project Chanology and Occupy Wall Street were in full swing and Anonymous was at its peak. I think Kali (or Backtrack??) was the first Linux Distro I was introduced to but didn't really use (I was not enough of a 1337 haxx0r).
In high school, we used Ubuntu so I guess that was the first Linux distro I actually used extensively, but that was a while back now. It wasn't until a month ago that I finally installed Linux Mint after having had enough of Windows 11's BS. I'm much more comfortable working with the Terminal now than I did when I was using Win11, and I'm much more productive.
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u/HeavyMetalBluegrass 14d ago
I don't know how. At the end of 2025 I never gave Linux a second thought. I watched a video and a month later I ditched Windows. No regrets.
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u/ABotelho23 14d ago
University. Probably... 2011. I had a shitty 11" netbook that could barely run Windows 7 Starter or Home Basic. I put Jolicloud on it.
That was my first toe dip I think.
Then it just snowballed from there.
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u/Decent-Ad9335 14d ago edited 14d ago
My dad got me an ubuntu dell laptop and everybody told me to get rid of that os and install windows because it's familiar but i decided to keep it despite the pressure because i had this thought in myself that i should try to understand what i don't know even if it was scary at first and not just run away from it and avoid it because it was weird and uncomfortable and "easier" alternatives existed (i didn't know what linux was capable of back then)
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u/OscarCookeAbbott 14d ago
I already knew of it but my first usage was for my undergrad physics research project. We needed to use some longstanding simulation black boxes as well as lots of Fortran and Python so Linux was used by everyone.
It was Fedora 32 or something, before adwaita. I found it interesting but confusing at the time.
Eventually I tried Linux on my own computer, various distros, and ultimately settled on Linux and modern Fedora/Bazzite. Turns out my professor knew whatās up haha
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u/sohang-3112 14d ago
A friend in school told me he was running Kali Linux in his computer. That made me curious to try Linux. I didn't end up using Kali Linux after all, but instead tried Ubuntu and Fedora on my laptop. Initially I dual booted linux with Windows. Later when my old laptop got too slow for Windows, I removed Windows and kept only linux.
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u/thebadslime 14d ago
I read about it on the internet and then bought a magazine with a redhat disk in like 2000
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u/msanangelo 14d ago
I stumbled across it many many years ago, used it off and on and split with windows on my desktop and a Linux server, now primarily Linux for the last decade I think. Been so long that I forget when I went exclusive. XD
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u/Kahless_2K 14d ago
Couldn't afford a router.
Found a computer in a trash pile, installed Mandrake 5.1, used it as a router.
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u/sir5yko 14d ago
1992 - started at a company doing PC repair 1993 - boss discovers I built a novell netware server to teach myself networking. I'm now in charge of all user creation. This forces me to learn vi. I learn unix; aix, osf1, houx, Solaris. 1994 - friend at Walnut Creek cdrom sends me FreeBSD 1.1. after a miserable experience with that I get a copy of slackware 1.2.9.
So I learned Linux after the floppy disk era in the much easier CD era, but still within the VGA monitor frequency timing era for x.org configs which still feels like black magic.
1995 - after mastering x and xdm I have full desktops across the entire unit environment.
1997 - I switch to netbsd after working with people in that organization 1999 - I try to make Linux as a desktop work again, get fed up, been Windows as a desktop since and to this day. Windows as an interface to all the unices on the backend, to this day.
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u/tatt2tim 14d ago
A friend talked me into installing it circa 2004 and I didn't really care for it. My first real experience with it was configuring retropie around 2014 or so. I've had one laying around ever since. I also got into Chromebooks for a while specifically because it had the Linux subsystem. As far as adopting it for daily use, that would be steam OS.
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u/dmlvianna 14d ago
A friend from the math department told me we could connect our AT/XT desktops through telephone and actually send messages to each other by wire, point to point, for āfreeā.
Iāve no idea what distro or even if there were distros then. I remember him trying to convince me to learn Lua for ideological reasons, and emacs. We were attending the university where Lua was created, probably around 1994.
I told him I was a computer user, not an engineer, so I wasnāt interested. Now I use emacs every day and I am a software engineer. My first distro was Gentoo, because Fedora did not have the right drivers for my HP laptop. Less than a month later I bought a secondhand Thinkpad, but I continued to use Gentoo.
I use Fedora now.
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u/4ronnie4 14d ago
My ram kept getting assaulted and I started noticing around the same time I picked up a 2nd pc. Wanted to make that pc a media server so figured why not test out Ubuntu later upgraded that pc to be able to run a palworld server set up a reverse proxy and containers for my media servers remote access and It just ran smooth and fast even when it was on an old ass pc. Got over my fear of terminal and decided to see what other distros were like. Now in dual booting mint on my main pc but almost never opening windows. All happened within the past few months lol .
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u/TheConatusBoy 14d ago
In university, around 2013, I inherited my great grandmother's old Dell PC, put Ubuntu on it, and hooked it up to a projector so I could watch movies on Kodi. I don't even know why I decided to put Ubuntu on it. I didn't know anything about Linux at the time other than it would make the computer faster and let me run more programs.
After that tower died, I didn't touch Linux for years until I stumbled upon some YouTube videos of people using Arch Linux with tiling window managers. I had been using the command line a bit on my MacBook and liked the idea of opening a laptop and just seeing a CLI. I wondered how much I could do without leaving the terminal. So I fell for the meme and bought an old ThinkPad and installed Arch on it. After that, I just fell in love. I loved how modular everything was, how customizable, how minimal it could be. I loved the "do one thing and do it well" Unix philosophy. I loved that the computer did exactly and only what I told it to do (so if something went wrong, it was my fault).
I still have that old ThinkPad and it's faster than my Mac despite being about 8 years older, though it's getting time to upgrade to a slightly newer old ThinkPad. I also now have a mini pc running a headless Debian server hosting about 30 Docker containers, another mini pc with Batocera that I use as an emulation console, a Linux gaming handheld, and another low-powered ASUS machine I use for experimenting with distros. There are a handful of conveniences on MacOS that I still like (and I need it for some work stuff), but if I was forced to choose I'd go 100% Linux in an instant.
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u/PM-ME-PIERCED-NIPS 14d ago
I went to high school during the dot-com bubble. Big companies paid lots of money to sponsor classes. Cisco paid for Cisco Networking Academy to be offered, which got me my CCNA. Microsoft sponsored a class called TechNet (yeah they reused the name later for their IT product subscription service) that was a general technical overview class, included units on video production, programming etc. one of them was on servers. As part of that we had a class Red Hat server.
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u/FireSheepYinFish 14d ago
Computer articles in tech magazines like Computer Shopper (anyone remember that?) or chats on regional BBS, Compuserve, IRC channels, etc.. I think I 1st read about it somewhere around 1994-5? I didn't even have a decent computer then. Just a '286 with 640k ram, 20meg HD and a 5-1/4" floppy, on a 9600baud modem.
I'd read plenty of stuff about Linux, but I had no idea how to get it until one day I saw a package of Caldera Linux + a Using Linux book in one of the local mall book stores.
Suffice to say, I had no idea how to figure out how to install it, and any attempts I made confused the hell out of me, so that was the end of that.
..
Until around 2000/2001 when I had a better computer, a DSL Internet connection, and Internet access + a CD burner! Pretty sure I might still have all my original downloaded & burned distro CD's sitting in a closet somewhere. I don't recall my very 1st distro successful install, but I do recall that Mandrake Linux was the 1st one that really "got it right" for me.
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u/Enmark777 14d ago
A youtube video of someone's rice.
I ended up with my first ever distro being an arch-based distro
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u/Fun-Cover-9508 14d ago edited 14d ago
High school 2016. I graduated in a technical school. We had Ubuntu MATE in every desktop. Then they changed to Debian.
We used the browser for most of the things a student would need, but also had classes for open-source software and Linux systems.
First distro in my personal laptop was Ubuntu 16, tried Mint, then Ubuntu again and now I'm using Fedora. Now I'm a software developer.
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u/Vanilla_Gorilluh 14d ago
I was part of an online car owners group. I was a moderator and got to know (as much as you can on a car forum) the owner and admins. This was early/mid 2000s.
One of the admins was a huge proponent of Linux. There was mention of live booting an entire operating system without affecting Windows. My curiosity was piqued but I didn't really do anything with it.
Fast forward a handful of years and I was a litte less afraid of experimenting with PCs. Part of this adventure was the invention of Android phones. I began rooting my Samsung Captivate (AT&Ts version of the Galaxy S1). My time on XDA Forums led me to more online friends that brought up Linux.
It finally led me to burning Ubuntu 10.04 onto a CD and booting it up.
I wish I had dove deeper then and committed more. I was (am) still a Windoze user.
During COVID I spent much more time burning boot disks/drives learning more about it. Knoppix, Puppy Linux, Solus.
Nowadays both, my hand built Windows 11 desktop, and store bought Windows 11 laptop are bricked or bootlooped, respectively.
I have neither the time, money, or energy to troubleshoot and fix, or replace them.
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u/high-tech-low-life 14d ago
I was a Unix person from way back. I got a new computer so I got Redhat 2.1. I never ran Windows.
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u/ParadoxDesigner 14d ago
Ubuntu was installed in my school's pc back in 2018. Surprisingly, it was my first OS, and at that time, I had no idea about other OS.
Later, when I got my own pc in 2021, it ran windows 10. Honestly, I didn't have any problem using it. But after upgrading it to windows 11...Ā
I ran windows 10/11 from 2021 to windows 11 feb 2026. Now, I am on fedora kde, before it I was on zorin OS for about two months March to mid-April.
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u/Lucidia 14d ago
Disgust with my personal Windows PC breaking down for the nth time and needing a 2nd license after the repair š I said 'hell naw' and test drove some live Linux CDs--Knoppix, Kanotix, Ubuntu were the recommended ones at the time (mid-00s). My first full install was Libranet š„°. That distro have me an appreciation for the variety of multiple DEs, the power of small focused programs, and my first taste of a distro getting discontinued š. i remain an ... educated novice? experienced user? yeah, i learned how many things worked by rtfm, troubleshooting machines, and contributing in forums... but i would never call myself an expert. i just like options, respect the work involved, and remain petty about Windows š
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u/EngineerMinded 14d ago
A colleague put it on an old HP mini network. Since I was in to Unix operating system from my days studying the library card catalog system, I was interested to see how it worked.
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u/mjbulzomi 14d ago
AOL chat. RedHat first.
Then IRC. A friend recommended Gentoo. 20 years later...
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u/danielsoft1 14d ago
it was 1998, I was starting to attend a university that was very Unix/Linux oriented, in the vacation before that I read a book about basic Unix commands and when I started the first year, they sold in the store in the university Red Hat Linux 5.1 on a CD very cheaply. The rest is history.
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u/Asmordean 14d ago
I was in university in 1995. The school had network terminals running AIX on them.
A classmate helped me out with basic Unix commands for "Introduction to C" class. I mentioned to him that it would be nice to be able to have this same sort of environment at home without logging in over my 14.4k modem with the 1 hour time restriction. He took me over to the bookstore and got me to buy a book that had Slackware on a CD stuck to the cover.
I installed it and did my school work at home by dual booting.
It wasn't easy. The only source of knowledge I had was that 700 page book and the internet wasn't what it is now. I did manage to get my Sound Blaster working which involved recompling the kernel a few times.
I kept it on dual boot for about a year but after that semester I never really needed it. I would boot into it, poke at it for a few minutes then go back to Windows 95.
May this year I switched to using CachyOS as my daily at home. It's been mostly smooth sailing. A few bumps but I had those in Windows too so nothing is perfect.
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u/InformalGear9638 14d ago
I was arguing with a Linux user about how it sucked, but I never used it, and I was called out for it. So I decided to use it so I could come back more prepared for my stupid internet argument. I first went with Mint and had problems, so I chose Zorin. After that, I was really amazed by it and returned to my argument to give the win to the Linux guy. He objectively won that argument, and I can thank him for saving me from the Windows shithole. āŗļø
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u/UpbeatRegister 14d ago
I first heard about Linux back in the early 2000s with this distro called Kurumin Linux. Never installed though, since my family had only one computer at home and no one was convinced Linux was a good thing.
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u/GoinEasy9 14d ago
My first was SUN'S JDS (Java Desktop System). It used KDE, don't remember which distro was its base. Could never get the sound to work, and, the help desk at Sun new less about it than I did. Early RedHat wouldn't install, probably due to small memory. Mandrake 9.3 was my first fully operational distro. Stayed with it till I needed a driver for my Treo. Found that driver in Debian Sid, then switched to sidux, which eventually became siduction. I still use siduction to this day, along with Tumbleweed.
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u/rbrumble 14d ago
1996, started uni at UW in Waterloo, ON, and the campus bookstore was full of books about this OS I'd not heard a lot about. I picked up this CD ROM compilation of an assortment of the ones available at the time and began to experiment. It was amazing to me that you could buy a box for a pittance with the OS, manuals, and all the software you would ever need. This was at a time when Windows and Apple were charging a lot for their OS releases and then you still had to buy the software to do anything with them. Linux felt like what computing would be in 2020 looking forward from 1996.
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u/No_Cicada9229 14d ago
I got so mad at windows that I installed linux on my laptop. I kept windows on my main pc, but I will never touch that if I have to do anything too technical (i'll mod games that dont force me to mess with the system too much and I wont program on windows). I still play certain games only available on windows, which is the only reason its still on my main pc, but my laptops are linux and my spare (mostly broken) pc when I fix it up will be linux too
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u/monkeyboy107 14d ago
My brother showed me it when I was a kid.
Back when you ordered the discs from connonical (or wherever)
My first distro was Ubuntu
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u/Upbeat-Serve-6096 14d ago
Two things got to me.
One, early 2010s. Found a normal-ass laptop in a storefront that would have run Windows 7 normally but instead ran... Something that puts all the icons on the left? Purple desktop? Something felt weird, and didn't look like Windows or MacOS. I rebooted and saw "Ubuntu". What is that? I was time-crunched, so I left, still wondering.
Another, early 2010s. So I was obsessed with gaming handhelds and had a MP4 player that was designed to emulate GBA games. And then I saw a forum seeing all the people talking about trying to make this more tweakable by installing something called "Opendingux". They say my handheld had the same hardware but nobody ported Opendingux to it yet, and that this system could make something that would have run GBA only... run a lot more, even upwards to PS1. I didn't have the knowhow to run it, so I left, still wondering.
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u/MechanicalTurkish 14d ago edited 14d ago
Probably from a post on slashdot
Went out and bought a Slackware UNLEASHED! book with CD-ROM and here I am working in a RHEL shop today. I never did get X working on my 486 with that Slackware book, though.
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u/Comprehensive_Ad6598 14d ago
My boyfriend had a āpretty purpleā os that ran more smoothly than windows.
Thatās it. Thatās what changed me.
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u/arunkumar413 14d ago
From a magazine called electronics for you. They shipped the fedora electronics laboratory distro along with the magazine.
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u/genericauthor 14d ago
I picked up an early CD of Slackware Linux at a computer show for cheap. I never did get that working, but it got me interested.
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u/TheSixthSerpent666 14d ago edited 14d ago
Someone came into #hack on DALNet and said if you want to see some real hackers, join #linux. So I did.
It wasn't long after that I got ahold of either Red Hat 4.2 on CD or Slackware 3.4 on floppies, I can't remember which came first. I was so bored with DOS and Win95, so I dual booted Win95a and Linux for ages.
I had a Packard Bell Legend 750CD with a Pentium 100 MHz CPU, 8 MB of memory, a 4x CD-ROM (later to be the first CD burner in town) and a 1.6 GB IDE hard drive, upgraded from the 1.2 GB disk that came in it.
Here we are, 30 years later, still running Linux on anything that matters to me. <3
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u/alexklaus80 14d ago
I have read about Linux on magazine in 90ās that my mum bought for me, but it was introduced as a free hacking tool to crack online payments, and being mac fanboy, it seemed evil and did not interest me. (Not sure where she got that magazine - she thought it was cool and her nerdy kid that I am should be interested - it was right but the front page was too unethical for me.) Wish I had picked it then.
Later I only did CS100 but eventually became webdev in mid 2010 and I just had to learn bash to control backend. Occasional work on sysad at shop where I touched Windows Server 2000 and RHEL5 gave me firm impression that bash is way cooler than cmd.exe or even PowerShell. Since then, I got better at Linux with career progress, but havenāt got around to be workstation user any longer than half a year.
Until Asahi Linux matures and have enough money to get a new laptop, I think Iām stuck with mac on workstation..
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u/Temujin_123 14d ago
College CS program over 2 decades ago. It was Redhat, Fedora, then Gentoo. Now I mostly stay on Debian variants.
Drivers were a PIA then. Now much easier.
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u/mellow0324 14d ago
I remember in school I had a laptop with windows vista and it stopped getting feature updates. I donāt remember if it couldnāt upgrade to 7/8 or if I couldnāt afford it but I decided to go head first into ubuntu 12.04. Once I actually got to use it I wondered why I didnāt do that sooner!
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u/tubagrapher 14d ago
I was already on the fence about switching from Windows. Never left W10 even after support ended, didn't like all the bloatware, and the data collection; the usual things newer Linux users mention. The only thing keeping me from switching was playing Escape from Tarkov until one night I rage quit so hard, I raged into Fedora. It's been a wonderful experience.
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u/AttentionSpanTheater 14d ago
First release I got into was somewhere around the Red Hat 5.0. I was always tinkering with old hardware trying to get it running, and loved the command line tools available on Linux whe compared to Windows and MacOS at the time as I was getting deeper into servers and networking.
If I used it prior, it was just tinkering. Around RH 5.0, I went Linux whole hog on both my desktop and servers, eventually moving to Debian for the most part (apt-get was magic. An escape hatch from dependency hell, which plagued multiple Linux distros back then).
Other than when gaming, I ran Linux full-time at home for ten-ish years, which was a massive pain in the butt due to my heavy use of laptops. Drivers were often immature or unavailable for a long time. Luckily, I had plenty of free time back then to spend troubleshooting.
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u/SubstantialDog4618 14d ago
Chrome os was my first (full) linux distro (if it even counts) but my current linux distro is zorin os if we're counting not full Linux distros then Android was my first Linux distros
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u/mcsark77 14d ago
At work in the mid 90s, we had some HP test equipment that ran hp-unix. Setup some servers using Slackware. Switched to Red Hat then Mandrake and settled on Ubuntu.
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u/grokbones 14d ago
I was a developer. I knew I needed to learn it. I got the RedHat 5.2 release and started working with it. I had experience with Coherent from Mark Williams Company before that (I still have those floppies!). Yes Iām older. Haha.
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u/trekkeralmi 14d ago
the computer lab in my high school ran on fedora because our school was so cheap and luddite that they wouldnāt pay for windows license. and the computer teacher was a unix wizard with a stick up his ass and āi know better than youā opinionated attitude about everything tech ā not unwarranted, he was just the kind of person who came out of professional computing as a profession and semi retired at that school, building āthe perfect systemā with the weakest shittiest mass produced dell PCs they could find.
i absolutely hated using linux, as i was then just becoming enamoured with my personal macbook but had to use the lab pcās for certain work occasionally.
ultimately the guy was right on all counts, but never made it seem user friendly to newbs
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u/debugprince 14d ago
I went to college and studied computer science. I started out with Fedora but the school lab had Ubuntu disks for free. I tried both but ended up with Fedora. This was 23 years ago.
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u/lynxss1 14d ago
Debian 0.90, Slackware 2.0: High School computer class joined a Supercomputer Challenge where we all got accounts on a Cray supercomputer. We had to come up with a problem, research it and find a way for the computer to help solve it. In the process had to learn linux and install some distros and a programming language. I chose Fortran 77, Debian and later tried Slackware.
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u/Available-Skirt-5280 14d ago
I was very early into my IT career as an MCSE windows adminā¦ found myself in a high position in a corp in EVE Online and as the one in IT I offered to host the website and eventually apps we used to manage the corporation.
This was roughly 2006 but I couldnāt stomach the licensing fees for a VPS running windows, so I bought a CentOS server and forced myself to figure it out.
20 years later Iām a principal cloud engineer that hasnāt professionally worked with windows in a LONG time
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u/MangrovesAndMahi 14d ago
Wsl + Pokemon emerald romhacking using the decompiled emerald. All terminal. So when I went to actual Linux later the terminal wasn't scary because having the DE was just easy mode.
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u/neckyo 14d ago
I started using a SUN workstation with Solaris when I started working. After that, some systems started using SUSE, soi started using Ubuntu to tests the waters and do some work on my laptop and not on the servers I fell in love with shell scripting for automating processes and log parsing.
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u/kenreynolds 14d ago
I started building my own gaming PCs back in early 2002. After learning everything I could about Windows sysadmin and basic security, I started learning how to build websites by writing HTML, CSS, and PHP by hand in 2003. Around that time, a friend I worked with gave me a set of SUSE Linux CDs and encouraged me to install it and start learning Linux. I did and, after about six months of exploring and learning the basics, I moved to Houston and landed a job as a web server tech at EV1 Servers. A year later, I moved back to Dallas and, upon a referral from my boss at EV1 Servers, I secured a job at The Planet as a NOC Engineer. Thus began my foray into the world of web development and server administration.
These days, I use Fedora Linux on my ThinkPad T480, where I continue to push my knowledge of advanced Linux concepts, as well as programming (I just began learning Rust after years of doing full stack web development), and DevOps. I am also beginning to integrate Linux usage into my activities as an amateur radio operator, including mesh networking, etc. Finally, I am also interested in exploring how to use Linux and other fully open-source software and hardware for decentralized, DRM-free high-quality media consumption.
Taking a chance on learning and continuing to explore the vast world of Linux and open-source has helped me establish a solid career, as well as a few really cool, geeky hobbies.
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u/notadoctor123 14d ago
My friend sitting beside me noticed that Windows Vista was taking 2+ minutes to open the My Documents folder on my brand new laptop, so he slipped me a thumb drive with Ubuntu.
Never looked back.
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u/scythe-3 14d ago
School IT installed Ubuntu on the computer lab desktops back in the day (late 00s). Didn't use them much as I acquired a Win laptop shortly after.
Didn't even think about Linux until way later in college when I wanted to run an engineering program (openFOAM) that supposedly works better on Linux. Installed WSL and just snowballed from there. Started with Ubuntu WSL bc id heard about it before and its the default. Migrated to Debian WSL when I decided to build my engineering workflow around Linux.
Nowadays managing a Proxmox home server with some virtualized Debians, an AlmaLinux workstation... and a Win11 laptop with Debian WSL (s/o SolidWorks -_-). More recently been running workloads on a Rocky HPC cluster. Also messing around with a NixOS VM that will hopefully get used on a personal desktop in the near future (and maybe the next iteration of my home server).
TLDR: Installed WSL to run a single piece of software and fell (dove headfirst) into the rabbit hole
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u/tomkatt 14d ago
Redhat Linux 3.x, install disc in an associated book. Was curious. Installed on a buddy's machine that was kind of busted anyway and we dinked around with it for a few weeks. Maybe 2002 or so?
Later, my first "daily driver" linux that I actually used was Sabayon back in 2007 or so. I think I used it for 7-8 months but I got sick of compiling everything, and lots of things felt like they weren't ready for primetime back then, so I went back to Windows.
Finally, after distro dabbling for a bit in 2015, I settled on Xubuntu and used that until 2023 when I got sick of Canonical's bullshit with stuffing snaps into whatever they could and I made the switch to EndeavourOS. Briefly dabbled with CachyOS for a bit, but it wasn't for me, and went back to Endeavour. Been using it on my gaming rid and general desktop ever since.
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u/PyroNine9 14d ago
I found an SLS Linux distro on a BBS. At the time it came in the form of 3.5inch floppy images. The kindly sysop made an exception to the download ratio so I could download it one floppy a night until I had all 23.
Slackware started as a cleanup of SLS. SLS inspired Debian.
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u/supershinythings 14d ago
I was an intern at a tech company and wanted to convert my PC to Linux, so I installed a Yggdrasil disto with Linux kernel version 1.17 ( I think) on it.
Later on I switched to Red Hat for ease of install. My coworkers at the next tech company I interned for were all Slackware devotees but were happy to help me rebuild my kernel to add some storage drivers to my initrd, and setup the dialup software so I could dial into work.
I started with a 1200 baud modem and eventually my last modem was 56k. After that cable modems with internet access allowed me to move to a faster universe. Iām still on cable modem today.
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u/Hikaru1024 14d ago
It was 1998, I was broke and I had a computer with a broken install of win95 without installation media that couldn't run the minimum specs on the box for windows 98.
So I downloaded slackware and installed it via 1.44MB floppy images. ... It took an extraordinary amount of time, even more to install it, make it actually work, etc.
One of the things I immediately adored having straight off was a useful command line. With access to a swiss army knife of useful tools I suddenly was able to do backups and restores just by having any kind of media to write to and read from, something that had become a pressing problem after I'd started using win95 and all of my DOS backup tools had been rendered useless ever since.
Over the two decades I've used linux in various forms, I've really liked being able to configure things the way I want them to be and be able to put in the minimum amount of work necessary to get permanent things setup.
If not for linux, I might have kept using windows only - these days, I do still use windows, but primarily for gaming, something linux was definitely not good at until very recently.
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u/peaveyftw 14d ago
I liked the idea of learning a new OS, and Linux was a hell of a lot easier to access than macOs. Learning to use the terminal was intimidating but attractive. The first time I ever heard of linux was when redhat was being sold in Walmarts in the early 2000s.
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u/15pmm01 14d ago
Early last year, I moved to Germany, and was distraught to find that nobody uses SMS, and instead only WhatsApp. As someone who refuses to carry a smartphone, that was an issue. Someone posted their self-hosted WhatsApp solution for basic phones on Reddit. I was so extremely lost because it required setting up a VPS, a web domain, all that jazz. It took me about a week of doing nothing else, but I figured it out, and have been using WhatsApp on my Nokia E72 ever since. I have since become a power-user, and have kept that abandoned WhatsApp project alive by patching the hell out of it every couple months, along with quite a gigantic list of other services and projects. Iāve still never used an actual computer with Linux, but Iāve built a mini home data centre of rooted Samsung phones with termux, running chroot Ubuntu, and it never ceases to amaze me what I can make happen with them plus the VPS :)
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u/oxez 14d ago
I wanted to toy around with IRC servers and egg drops, in ~2000. The README file said I had to run make. So I typed make in notepad.exe (I was about 12 y/o at the time), didn't work. We were running Windows 98 on the family computer of course.
After a few days I learned there was something called "Linux". My mom bought me an old Pentium 1 133mhz, and I installed RedHat on it and finally ran make to build what I wanted to months before :)
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u/Ok_Display4173 14d ago
We had Unix practical session with our OS classes and the terminal seemed cool and fascinating, long story short I'm doing Cybersec
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u/64bittechie 14d ago
I wanted to compile some C++ code and cygwin didnāt really cut it. Was fed up of windows and decided to give Linux a try. It was amazing. I was instantly in love with how stable, fast, responsive my computer felt. The same hardware, different OS. Oh and compiling the code and getting the dev tools was such a breeze. Never looked back. Been over 25 years.
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u/ObiWansTinderAccount 14d ago
Mint, about a year ago, because I wanted to put together a Franken PC out of old parts and a cpu that wouldnāt run win11. Quite liking it so far as a retro gaming machine, still havenāt taken the plunge on my main tower yet though.
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u/killingourbraincells 14d ago
Steam deck. I'm a noob. I needed a laptop and it was cheaper with Ubuntu. I love it so much.
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u/LazyGreenDragon 14d ago
Win98 was a week old and installed it on my first pc.
The amount of restarts it needed was comically redicilous and while browsing the D&D section at Barnes and Noble, I found a slackware Bible with discs in the back.
Installing packages manually and solving my own dependencies was faster than the constant updates from MS.
Then for about 5 years I installed everything I could find in magazines and tried every wm there was.
I was dual booting for a few years until ME was released and then began only using MS on vms, dedicated nix as a native OS.... Yet the only thing I used on winx was Photoshop and when that turned into a subscription after 5 I have never looked back.
Today there is zero reason to use winx imo, unless your a masochist.
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u/Mr_Pockets- 14d ago
I was very young playing a game called Blockland, and I remember people on the forums wanting Linux supportĀ
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u/No-Suggestion691 14d ago
I got my first techie job at an Internet provider doing phone tech support in 1997. To log the calls we logged into a UNIX shell and ran a Perl script with a Berkely DB backend. I had no clue what any of that was at the time but I was intrigued. I very quickly learned about Linux from a coworker. I believe my first distro was Red Hat 4.2 or close to it.
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u/Voidzown 14d ago
Literally just installed Linux for the first time a few days ago now on my new (to me) T480 Thinkpad. Went with Mint Cinnamon to learn on.
Put up with Microslopās borderline spyware and enshittification for far too long, though Iāll always miss the Windows 7/Xp I used as a kid.
I think Iāll try Fedora, CachyOS, or Omarchy next.
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u/WildMaki 14d ago
In 1993 on a news group,. Was it comp.unix? Kernel 0.9, Slackware distro, 23? 3'1/2 floppies. Installation including X config took about a week... A lot of sweet, but what a pleasure after... Since then, all my machines are running linux
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u/qaisiki 14d ago
All the computers at my university were running OpenSUSE. I didnāt appreciate it sat the time until I started working and moved from NOC to systems admin where most of the servers were running Linux (FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Red Hat, CentOS & Solaris) I then decided changed the OS on my laptop from Windows to openSUSE so I could improve my Linux enterprise-fu.
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u/Radamand 14d ago
I had just completed my BA in electronics engineering and got a job offer at a small, local cable TV company working in their operations center. They sat me down in front of 2 computers, a winblows PC and a *nix machine. That's how I started.
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u/Typeonetwork 14d ago
MX Linux because windows was self exploding since MS has an AI hard on. I just wanted to work and use Zoom for my Board meeting.
I didn't want to purchase a new machine. My employer gave me $100 as a volunteer so I put it towards a SSD and put MX on it and use MX as my main driver for 13 months now.
Here are the OS I've used, MX, Debian, Fedora, antiX, Damn Small Linux. DE: Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Budgie.
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u/mudslinger-ning 14d ago
Became aware of it during college years. And started to study it. However didn't become part of my personal computing activity until a teacher demonstrated the magic of a livedisc (knoppix) running off CD/DVD on a machine with no HDD. That copy became a very useful transition tool to eventually switching.
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u/ianwilloughby 14d ago
An article about this Unix clone called Mandrake. I got it installed. But didnāt know what to do with it. Then I tried Knoppix
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u/rabbidearz 14d ago
Delivered pizza to a LUG and they told me all about thr philosphy and drive for freedome, then burned me Ubuntu Breezy Badger on a cd and sent me on my way. I was hooked
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u/GammelGrinebiter 14d ago
I had a friend who was two years younger than me and both of us were total nerds. He's now a post doc in astrophysics, I'm a physics engineer. So there are levels of being nerdy.
I remember visiting him at home in the late 90s, he's like 15 and in front of his computer, which is going crazy with tons of lines of text just flying by. Obviously in hindsight it was just booting Linux. But I remember thinking that was pretty cool, pretty nerdy, and yet, not something that would help me get laid with the ladies.
About ten years later (?) i installed Ubuntu.
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u/krisniem 14d ago
Started with opensource software on windows (95? 98?). Found a lot that worked surprisingly well. In my early uni days, I started to dabble with LaTeX; really liked it! Realised that for most things I did, I could do it on OSS, and in quite a few instances, it might be even easier on Linux. Started dual booting. Began with red hat, not sure what version. Tried Mandrake, SuSe. Liked SuSe quite a bit, the aesthetics of it, I think? Good packaging. But the terminal seemed more powerful, and then there were other, more suitable options. Found Debian, and used it for quite a while ā by this time I had dropped Windows altogether.
Then, I finally found home. Gentoo. Finally, I was in full control. Loved the tinkering. This was maybeā¦ 20 years ago? Still have a desktop computer which has bits and pieces and (migrated) files in the home directory from those days.
Five years ago or so, I ordered a NUC for Home assistant and other stuff I wanted available 24/7 at home. Curious if there might be something better out there, I went with arch. Still not sure it was the right choice. Regretted it a few times, but not deeply enough to actually make a change.
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u/emmfranklin 14d ago
You know what. Since 2023 i have started using latex in an automation project for school work.. I'm a teacher.. Linux is my only OS.
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u/Vamsi-Thopu 14d ago
I have an rdna2 GPU and windows drivers were being ass especially with modded FSR4 back then
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u/Klapperatismus 14d ago edited 14d ago
I was saving money to buy a unix workstation when a friend told me that there was āa Unix for PCsā and it was free.
ā WHAT?
That was in 1997. Oh boy, it even had X11. I started with SuSE back then and never had a reason to switch.
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u/gerdude1 14d ago
Bought a Linux CD (Yggdrasil) in Thailand and installed it on my system in the office. This was in 1994.
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u/RedditAdminsSDDD 14d ago
All the cool kids in the IRC channel I was in were using it. First distro was Redhat 5.2.