Where, and when, did you start using Linux? Where are you now?

CaptPretentious , 5 months ago

I was in college. I was talking with a classmate how I tried to burn this OS called Linux that I heard of on TechTV, bit the stupid disc never worked. I leaned how to properly burn iso after that. Pretty sure he showed me some copy of Fedora or Mandrake, maybe SuSe. Didn’t care for Fedora, bit found this other one that seemed real interesting everyone was talking about, Ubuntu.

NorthWestWind , 5 months ago

2020

I got bored during the summer holiday and installed Ubuntu for the first time. Now I’m a CS major.

harsh3466 , 5 months ago

I’ve dabbled with Linux here annd there since 1999 when I installed Caldera Open Linux 2.2 on a pos desktop I had at the time.

Caldera ran pretty well on that machine for about six months, until the machine up and died. IIRC, the motherboard fried.

My next foray was around 2007ish when I had a dell laptop that was struggling to run windows. I was also interested in tinkering, so I installed Ubuntu for the first time. I think it was Hardy Heron (8.04).

I ran that for a good year or so, until the charging port on the laptop took a shit, but I didn’t really get deep into Linux. I just used it for general computing.

My next computer was a MacBook Pro 2009 13”. This began a long relationship with Macs and macOS that continues to this day, though I am far less enamored of Apple and macOS now than I was in the past.

What was great about Macs and osx/macos over that period was that by and large it did what Apple promised. It just worked. The hardware was powerful and reliable, and the software let me get my work done (photo and video production), and so I had no desire to use anything else.

During this time period I also built a windows pc dedicated to live streaming as part of my production work, which is relevant, because about four years ago, right before the pandemic hit, I quit photo and video production.

So I had this pc sitting around, and I once again decided it was time to give Linux a spin, and now I’m all in. For three years running, that pc has been my home server running Ubuntu (just updated it to 22.04). With that server I’ve really been learning about Linux, and it’s been a lot of fun.

I’d love to put Asahi on the m1 Mac mini that is our main household computer, but my wife wouldn’t be too happy with me if I did that, so I’m still using macOS. I spend a lot of time at the terminal, often working on the server over ssh, but also just working with my files locally.

Since macOS is bsd based I’ve run across a number of cli tools that work just different enough from their Linux counterparts. I found that frustrating and confusing, and decided I wanted consistency in my cli tools. Since I can’t install Asahi, I found Multipass and installed that on the Mac mini. So now I have an Ubuntu vm with my pertinent local drives mounted to give me a consistent experience with shell whether I’m working on the server or working on the Mac.

NeoNachtwaechter , 5 months ago

It was at home on my first PC. The year was 1993, and it was a Slackware distro with a kernel 0.99.12.

Next to it I had an old Atari ST with MiNT, and it had the bigger harddisk and the nicer GUI, but the PC had more RAM and horsepower.

BOFH , 5 months ago

Hello fellow graybeard! I, too, started back in the 90s. Internet felt like a video game, always something new, hacker culture, bleeding in from phone phreaking and with Linux hitting the market we had the FreeBSD vs GNU/Linux debates, TLDP.org and forums and BBs and so much more.

Fun times.

danielquinn , 5 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

I started working for a video game company in 2000. It was dominated by Linux nerds (including the CEO) and they indoctrinated me into their cult. My first distro was SuSe, then Redhat for a while, then Gentoo for about a decade, then Arch, which is where I am now.

My last Windows “daily driver” was Windows 98se.

avidamoeba , 5 months ago

Lucky bastard. You didn’t have to struggle with the allure of the somewhat decent Windows NT based OSes following the shit show that was Windows Me.

avidamoeba , 5 months ago

Canada, 2005, fresh off the boat immigrant, just graduated high school in Europe. I had already bought the open source idea years prior and used mostly open source software on Windows. Having recently switched to NVIDIA from ATi, I tested DotA 5.x (Warcraft 3 TFT) on Ubuntu via Wine. It worked great and that was the final hurdle to a full migration. Wiped Windows and installed Ubuntu. I’ve been using Ubuntu as the primary OS on all my computers ever since. I went through university with a Dell laptop, intentionally purchased to be compatible with Ubuntu. No NDISwrapper shit. The knowledge acquired over this period naturally flowed into my professional career where I’ve primarily used Ubuntu and RHEL for various use cases. From software development to software deployment and cloud operation in production. These skills keep helping my day to day work in automotive these days.

Naloxone , 5 months ago

Must have been 2001 or 2002, and I started with the Red Hat CD that came in the back of my friend’s Linux For Dummies book.

Beefytootz , 5 months ago

In highschool, back in 2007, I got my first taste of Linux in my highschool electronics class. The class was mostly focused on electrical engineering, however we had a computer in the room for research and for whatever reason, my teacher was a hardcore Linux guy. We talked about it for hours and eventually, I ordered a CD from Ubuntu by mail and installed it on my home PC, a computer that originally ran Windows ME. I’ve primarily used Windows since I do a fair bit of gaming, but I’ve always maintained a linux partition of some kind. On my laptop, I’m currently testing out the latest Ubuntu release, but before that, I was running Linux Mint DE in the Mate flavor with BSPWM as the window manager. On my main PC, I have a Windows 10 partition, and a Garuda Linux partition. Garuda is running Mate with BSPWM as well. The funny thing is, I’m not really a tech guy. I just like it and use it mostly just as a consumer. I can work my way around and fix most things when they break, but I’m more likely to just nuke my installation and spin up a new one when things get really bad. I’m planning a full PC upgrade soon and plan to go AMD instead of Nvidia so I can enjoy Wayland. The latest Gnome release feels really good and matches my rose tinted memories of Unity from way back when. Hoping to run that, but may still mess with a tiling window manager set up as well.

heleos , 5 months ago

I started with Gentoo in college back in 2004. I recently got rid of my windows partition and am rocking tumbleweed

darius , 5 months ago

Started: ~2008 because I saw compiz had the virtual desktop cube & wobbly windows animations. Now I’m on Debian.

captainlezbian , 5 months ago

Over the summer, and these days I’m somewhat comfortable typing in terminal. Got foundry and steam and my vpn all running using Garuda

Actually no wait I tried ubuntu in college but I couldn’t figure it out while doing my senior year of engineering school

Father_Redbeard , 5 months ago

This time last year I decided I wanted to selfhost services in an effort to take control of my data. Now I run Pop!_OS as my primary OS, host 13 services across 4 different servers, and am having a blast learning.

Prior to selfhostint in earnest I had a Pi-hole instance running on a Pi 3, but those are pretty hands off once it’s setup.

folkrav , 5 months ago

Some time before Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04), so somewhere around 2006-2007. Had a spare laptop I had installed (unsuccessfully) Gentoo on, then played around with stuff like Mandriva and Debian, and early versions of Fedora and OpenSuse. I’m a developer now, using Pop right now. Honestly I don’t really care which one as long as my tools and hardware work, and it works well enough on Pop.

ghewl , 5 months ago

I started around the time when Windows 95 came out. Slackware was my jam. I now run Arch on one box and Debian 12 on another. It helped my career as a sysadmin.

JoeKrogan , 5 months ago

First install was Fedora core 6 it came with like 5 or 6 cds. This would have been mid 2000s I was mostly using it offline and then reinstalled windows so I could game on the lan with AoE and cossacks. (I had 2 PCs beside each other)

The in 08 I installed Ubuntu , 4 years later was Debian and ive been at home with Debian since.

Its been great to see the improvements over this time particularly in gaming.

I still use Ubuntu in work.