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.
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.
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.
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.
@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.
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 can’t remember if my dad sent me up an Ubuntu server on an azure hosted VM or if we installed it on an old laptop that was shitting out but either way, I’ve always gone back and forth since I was like 13 or 14.
For servers, I use Linux exclusively. I don’t see a need for windows on them and as such have just always used either Ubuntu or RHEL for anything that I need to treat as a server. For laptops, I generally started with windows and then installed Linux a few years later but if I get a new one it’s gonna be Linux out of the gate.
My desktop, on the other hand, is different. I’ve always used windows on my gaming desktops due to compatibility but a few years ago I tried Linux as my only OS for a bit. I loved using it at first, but then I ran into all the issues with trying to run a beefy gaming PC on Linux. Fan curves were a nightmare to set and half the time they couldn’t find my fans so they were either at full blast or off, and I hated the idea of using the bios because I don’t want to turn my PC off to set them. RGB was okay but some of my stuff didn’t get found, and all I wanted was a solid color but it was very hard. Some games didn’t work and they were the ones I wanted most.
Ultimately, I went back to windows but then a year or two later the steam deck came out, so gaming has come a long way. I’m very much considering it again but I have to do my research beforehand to see what tools I’ll need. If anyone has any suggestions, I’ll take them!
I’m not sure what fan issues you were hitting, but I’ve been gaming on linux (with nvidia on manjaro) for the last couple of years just fine. Steam/proton has made so much possible that wasn’t before.
Can’t recommend manjaro btw. EndeavourOS is my new go-to.
Wild. Maybe I did something wrong but I tried finding a simple interface to set fan curves and most places I found were terminal-based, and as much as I love the terminal, I don’t like it for things like fan curves.
Also for OS, last time I went with Pop!_OS and I have that on my laptop now, but I’m not that picky. I just liked that Pop!_OS had drivers built in for Nvidia.
I do plan on trying again, but my #1 priority is standing up this Poweredge R720XD I have sitting behind me. Server racks are too expensive.
To be clear, I haven’t messed with my fan curves on linux, I’ve just never had an issue with my fans being on “full blast or off”.
I know manjaro and endeavour both have tools that handle proprietary nvidia driver installation, but I’ve only tried manjaro’s so far (
mhwd). It works fine, but running updates are a bit of a manual chore. Completely defeats the purpose of the tool imo.Ah okay, I get you now. When I said “full blast or off” what I meant was using the tools I found, I could either turn them on or off, I couldn’t find the granular controls to set like, “at +10 degrees go to 25% power” type thing. And again, maybe I was doing it wrong, but I’m pretty fluent with Linux and just had no idea what I was doing.
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.
Started on Mint at 13 years old and never goimg navk to Windows. I use Artix btw
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?
I used Mint Cinnamon as well. Full story is that I got a new PC and decided to try out Mint, I way daily driving it for about 2-3 months but than I needed to use some windows software and I did not yet know about the existence of wine so I installed windows 10. But then my windows 10 install blue screened after a few months and it wasn’t fixable. Luckily, i had a backup but windows refused to recognize it so I said fuck it and switched to back to Linux mint. I have been using it for about 6 months but some packages started breaking, I wanted to try out KDE (I was using Cinnamon) and I was lazy to do it all so I switched to Artix a few weeks ago. That’s basically it.
Tried installing debian in 2002 but had no idea what I was doing editing xorg configs so didn’t succeed. Succeeded in running knoppix soon after, but didn’t really know what to do with it because I mainly used a computer for gaming in those days.
Ran ubuntu in 2007 for a while but I needed to do too many things in a VM so I skulked back to windows.
Used linux for random bits and pieces over the years but was always too tied to art software and games. Proton fixed the games side of things in 2018 so I decided to go all in reworking my art workflow to be linux focused because I wanted not to worry about needing a windows license for all my machines, buying expensive software, etc. etc. (And I wanted to get into creative programming more.)
Running linux has made automation and programming a much more seamless part of the way I use computers and I am endlessly grateful for this. General computing is fun again and I now have a heap of skills I always wanted.
I tried linux and went back to windows to many times to count, mostly in the halcyon days of late dialup/early “Broadband” (back when broadband was a whopping single meg down), always for the same reason… Had a problem I couldnt find a solution for, and the few times I reached out to linux focused IRCs and stuff, well, so say that my head was bit off would be putting it lightly, which always ultimately lead to me reinstalling windows95/98/xp
Thankfully, there was a perfect storm of Valve dumping dumptrucks of money into linux, creating proton, and Windows 7 reaching EoL that I finally said fuck it and switched for good around… late 2018ish I think? I still kept Windows 7 for dualbooting for games that didnt work via proton, but eventually I was booting into windows less and less as more games just worked on linux with proton until… about 6 months ago, I realized I hadnt logged into my Windows 7 drive in over a year, and finally wiped it.
My very first experience with Linux was in probably 1993 or so. I ran a dial-up BBS with a Usenet feed and a friend UUCP’d me the first few floppies of slackware to try. I don’t remember getting very far but I had used OS/9 earlier on my Coco 3, so the shell was pretty familiar.
For actual work, about a year later I started working for a dial-up ISP and my workstation was a Linux box connected via Serial PPP to a Sun pizzabox.
I’ve used Linux on and off as a Desktop over the years but always maintained at least one server. In my current jobs there is a mix of Linux and FreeBSD servers I run on a Linux based virtualization platform.
Used ophcrack back when I was a teen so i could learn my parent’s windows password and fuck around when they were asleep. Then I figured just using live cds was cleaner (no browsing history to delete). Then once they upgraded, I was given the old pc to nuke and pave as I saw fit. It was a lot of fun outsmarting my parents in the wee hours of the night, not that they were terribly tech savvy.
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
I used dalnet around 2000 or so. Hung out in #speaker’s_corner quite a bit.
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!
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
