Not a veteran, but… During the 90s, while still in primary school, a friend of mine bought a Chip magazine with a CD attached and instructions inside the magazine how to install a mysterious thing called “Linux” from said CD. It was supposed to be something like Windows 95, but new, better and it had a Penguin on it, so we decided to try it.
We followed magazine’s installation guide to the letter (or at least we thought so) until the installation stuck at error saying KERNEL PANIC!!! and wouldn’t let us finish. We didn’t understand English much back then, but we found the panicking kernel hilarious. Anyway, we figured it’s been enough h4Ck!nG for that day and got back to playing Diablo 1.