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.
It was around the year 2000 and I installed red hat on a laptop but I never got xorg working so I gave up and didn’t try again for a couple of years.
I vaguley remember the reason I gave up red hat being that I couldn’t get a desktop lol.
Sounds like I might be the youngest here lol. I started with Ubuntu 11.04 which I would live boot off CD in my school laptop. After I got my own laptop with Windows 8, I used Windows for a good long while until the thing got super slow after having windows 10 for a while. That’s when I got back in to linux.
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!
Mine was back in 1999 courtesy of this:
https://ia800600.us.archive.org/35/items/TheLinuxPocketbook/TheLinuxPocketbookfrontCover.jpg
The Linux Pocketbook from APCMag, which included a full copy of Red Hat 5.2 (according to this image, I vaguely recall the copy I had had a slightly different cover so they might have updated it). Having it on CD was a big deal back when we still had dial up! I remember how daunting the command line was at that point - like I had grown up on DOS and then Win 3.11, but a full blown Unix system was not something I was used to at that point.
For some extra context, my PC at that stage was a Packard Bell desktop 😅
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 2009 and I was 14. I had been using Ubuntu on my father’s PC for a year and I installed Andromeda Linux (an Ubuntu fork with a stunning theme), completely wiping my HDD. The next day I installed Windows and attempted my second Linux install, I was more careful and got a doual boot working.
Some version of kubuntu on some kind of hardware around 2001, it was a PC my parents built for windows 98
Or maybe a different distro but it had kde
A friend loaned me a CD set of Mandrake which had an early version of KDE. I was floored away by something as simple as the level of customization you could do with the taskbar. And having this alien operating system running on an alien EXT3 partition format instead of FAT32 or NTFS that you didn’t need to defragment. It seemed pretty fantastical.
I loved tweaking the desktop environment on Windows by replacing explorer.exe with LiteStep and Blackbox so likewise I did this on Linux. Over time I had fun discovering Gnome2, Fluxbox, XFCE, etc. you name it. Eventually I got a desktop I really liked and felt productive on and as Windows XP approached end of life I had no intention of using Vista so I transitioned to exclusively Linux at that point.
I did play with different distros and running servers at the time, hosted VMs back in the day you had to take whatever distro they offered. But for my desktop I basically went Mandrake, Arch (didn’t know how to make everything work), Debian, Ubuntu, back to Arch.
Beginning of the year when I got my Steam Deck and found it about the desktop mode. Now I have garuda on my living room tv-pc up and running to game and watch stuff. Best decision since a long time, thanks GabeN for giving me the final nudge to go linux.
oh wow you went fast lol. welcome to the community! love my steam deck, best purchase in years.
I think my roommates installed it on a pc in college so we are talking pre 95 but I had no idea what it was but it was in the days when they were screwing around with os/2 before win95 came out. I did not really use it until after 2000 though and that was when working in a place that was an irix shop so had the general nix experience going as I was starting to use linux. freebsd at about the same time.
Maybe around 2nd grade with the piper computer which was a small rpi based laptop that you built. I switched fully in 5th grade when my windows install broke. A few months before that I switched on my laptop when my math teacher reminded me about it. I Have rarely used windows since but for a few months I used a Mac laptop. My linux laptop (Dell xps 13 7390) I had was hidpi, kind of slow and died quickly and the m1 Mac hardware was just plain better (this was close to when the 2020 m1 Mac came out so no asahilinux). I have used pop, manjaro, arch and alpine Linux. I have been using it for a few years now and never plan on going back to windows though I do occasionally use macOS for nonfree/closed source apps. When I first switched the only game I played was Minecraft which worked just as well as windows. Now almost all the games I play are free software like Minetest and super tux kart.
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Ubantu in 2007 ish. Games didn’t work.
My first experience with Linux was in the mid 80s when I was in the service working with AT&T 3B20 and Sperry UNIX servers as an admin. I enjoyed just about every aspect of the OS, but most government, contractor, and civilian jobs required desktop software that Linux either couldn’t install or the open source equivalent just wasn’t good enough.
Over the many, MANY, years I have kept experimenting with the various desktop environments, but with my current job a large percentage of our servers are Ubuntu or RedHat Linux (although we’re being forced to migrate to Windows Servers for many of the same reasons yet again).
That being said, with the ability for many Microsoft Office365 products working well enough as web-apps, my home laptop runs 100% KDE Neon, and with the exception of needing a couple Windows-only programs (which no longer runs on Linux) I’d probably be running KDE Neon on my work laptop as well. If I can ever get Cisco ASDM to work with Wine and/or Bottles, I will be switching over soon after.
The DEs in the last few years are light years ahead, and I am personally very impressed with just how smooth everything works. My hope is to get back to a semi-40 hour work week in a few years and help contribute - not as a programmer, but perhaps as a QA tester or the like.
