How did you first come across Linux?

Stories about how and when people first started to learn to use Linux are always interesting, so please share yours

For me, it was about 10 years ago, when LAMP was the king of the web. At the time, I ran my sites on a hosted solution, and while the web hosting company did provide a basic web interface for managing things, it was lacking to say the least - IIRC, they didn't even have phpMyAdmin available. So I ended up being forced to learn Linux the old fashioned (and hard) way - through SSH and the command line.

While I hated it at the time and cursed my old web host for going out of business during the dot-com bust and leaving me in that mess, in hindsight I picked up a lot of valuable server admin skills very quickly. Not to mention there's tons of things (like runlevels, for instance) that I would never have come across or would have struggled to understand had I started out using a GUI.

 

Someone had made a suggestion here, and so I decided to check out Ubuntu. That was back in 2008. I ended up sticking with Kubuntu for awhile, but eventually went to Ubuntu and used it until very recently until switching to Xubuntu.
I've never tried any other distros.

 

The very first linux distro I tried was Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. I had some free time and had also purchased my very first laptop around that time. I liked the simple interface and did not mind fine tuning things and learning some terminal commands also. Not too long after that I found out there were over 100 distros of linux! I was in awe Today I am dual booting with Xubuntu and while I mainly use Windows it is a comfort knowing that I can restart and log into something different when the mood strikes. I love alternatives

 

I got dragged into support issues with SUN Solaris SPARC, ULTRA, 220R,
280R, and V880 servers. The guy who was suppose to know everything would say:
“It’s my job, I know nothing, you do it”. The rest is history. Unix to Linux.

 

I bought a RedHat 5 retail package at CompUSA. I was learning perl/cgi at the time and I needed it for that. It came with a printed manual, and I spent the rest of my year reading that more than anything to do with school. Pretty soon after that my windows partition was gone, I had grown a long beard, my t shirts became ragged, and I developed an aversion to sunlight.

 

My first foray with Linux was at university, for a real-time systems course where we learned all about concurrency and realtime programming in C using small portions of the POSIX semaphore and pthreads APIs.

I then never touched it again (although the ideas remained with me) until I blagged my first job at a software development company where we used Linux for our workstations, and other UNIX variants on the clients production servers.

 

Got introduced to it back in the 5th grade from a friend. but didnt play with it till about 9th or 10th grade.

First i messed with fedora (bought a manual with the CDs ), then used Ubuntu, now i use a combo of FreeBSD based systems, OpenIndiana (solaris), Ubuntu, and ArchLinux (main). Sadly i also have to use windows for somethings.

 

I first used Linux because I didn't have enough money to afford Windows 98. After I bought my first Windows XP license, I never really went back to it as my main OS. I tried really hard when I tried different distros on my netbook May of last year, but before the end of September, I was back to using Windows.

 

I started off with Ubuntu about 3 years ago out of curiosity and loved it so I keep Linux around with Windows.

 

I think i started out with ubuntu 5, playing with live cd's and pendrives.

 

Did you also develop a sensitivity to garlic?

 

^^^ LOL, I had time to kill at work and saw a very cool close up picture of a dragonfly. It turned out that it was a desktop background for Mandrake Linux circa 2006?? Once I got it working the network admins ordered me to disable networing on my Linux box.

 

I was introduced to SunOS from one of my required computing classes. I thought the GUI was slow and buggy. Every other program I tried to run gave me errors and many headaches. I didn't really think much of it at the time. This was back in 2003

One of my friends kept bugging me to try out FreeBSD next. Apparently it was the best OS around and made Windows look like crap. After 2 days of banging my head against the wall I finally got the OS to work with my hardware and a session going (mainly kernel issues). I had the same problems similar to SunOS. I wasn't impressed.

In 2006 I tried gentoo out of curiosity. Guess how that went . The only thing I got out of that experience is really learning the nuts and bolts of how Linux works and how it's structured. I tried Ubuntu 8.04 next and found it pleasant but I still played Windows games back then so didn't bother messing with wine. I returned to Windows.

Fast-forward to 2009 and I won't go into details but let's just say that my situation required me to install Ubuntu 9.04 out of necessity. The OS actually worked wonderfully and the GUI was not bad. I was free from a bunch of problems that my co-workers were experiencing from Windows and wine actually worked well with most programs. I also had Windows XP installed in VirtualBox as a backup in case I needed it, and that worked out well too.

In the end I got hooked on Linux from being forced to use it for one year and learn how the system works when problems would surface and I would have to fix them. Never came back to Windows simply because I don't play games on it anymore .

 

Sometime around 1998, while working as a developer at a large international company no one's ever heard of, I was given the job of building our corporate intranet. A friend suggested Red Hat 5.x, PHP and PostgreSQL and we were off. Pentium I at 100MHz, and 64 MB RAM on a pair of 2GB HDs in RAID-1 and we were set.

I had up to then been using Windows NT, but when MS moved the gfx subsystem into kernel space in the move from NT 3.51 to 4.0 I gave up on it as a toy OS for servers after seeing machines crash hard because of the gfx drivers.

I still use windows. for games.

 

Might sound crazy... but I do not remember. I remember the distro's I used, but have no idea why I even tried them. Started out with either Mandrake 8.1 and than RedHat 8 in 2002 (or maybe 2003). Back than I had to have someone download and make CD's for me, since it was on a 56K connection.

Played Quake Quake III (or IV) and Neverwinter Nights natively on Linux.

 

Around 2004 I had a PIII with Windows 98 that was getting crushed by malware. No matter how hard I worked to secure it, I ended up reinstalling Windows once a month. It was awful.

An online buddy suggested I try Linux and steered me toward some info. I ended up choosing the first Ubuntu release and he walked me through installation. My sound didn't work but at least I could get my work done. Later that year I bought a new laptop and I have been primarily using Linux ever since.

 

About 10-12 years ago - I'd built a pc and Windows simply would not install on it and if I remember right Mandrake worked perfectly. I used that distro until the first version of Ubuntu was released and used those until the first version of Mint was released. I used to try almost every distro but I'm happiest with the the apt-get debian based ones and don't bother with playing around any more.

 

I'm in the same situation. dot-com bubble. I was a Windows developer working with IIS/Visual Basic/SQL7/2000.
I got tired of the licensing cost of NT, SQL, and yearly Visual Studio.

Got a job developing for Solaris/SGI/OSX and have been UNIX/LINUX based since.

I never touch Windows. My wife boots into windows 7 once out of every 4 months to rip a bluray and that is it.

 

Best Buy used to sell Linux distros (Red Hat and Xandros) in their software aisle, so that's how I learned about Linux. I decided to give Mandrake (now Mandriva) a try because it was the most noob friendly disto at the time. I also tried Red Hat 7.2 and 7.3. I think this was around 2000 - 2001.

 

My cousin showed me SuSE near about 2002, used it on a desktop for several years. Forgot about Linux until I went to university. Been using it on and off again since then.

 

Some years ago Windows "decided" to let the Borders of two of my partitions overlap. I dont know how that happend, I didn't mess with the Partitions on that PC ever. First I didn't recognize it, but soon I got so many corrupted files, I had to check the Partitions every startup. Ultimately Windows damaged its own system files.

I got a Ubuntu live CD and learned a bit about it, investigated, found the cause. After a backup and reinstall it went smooth. As I got my first Laptop, I decided to install Linux as Dual boot, choosing Kubuntu. 2 Days later I realized: I put 3 hours into installing Linux and after 2 day I am still not done with Windows. So I was caught.

I am now using a dual boot system: Windows for Gaming and occasional creative graphics, Linux for everything else.

 

Well, it wasn't Linux but Unix on a SparcStation 1 back in 1991. I was the guy who had to get it up and running and get our network installed (by me!) so that we could have multiple people doing order entry. It was 10-based T back then (termination anyone?).
I just thought X was the coolest GUI, far ahead of DOS at the time and the Sparc's were incredibly fast for the day. We also had a Silicon Graphics Indigo workstation that was used for graphics design work, and that was a super expensive machine back in the day; you needed supergod status to even logon to that machine!
Linux is not new and for me is now just a hobby. I am not too happy about the 1000's of distros out there, again I understand how it happened but it has not helped in solidifying Linux IMHO.
Apple got it right with OSX and I just wish they had opened OSX up so that it ran on regular PC's (yes I know about Hackintosh but I am talking about full, legal support). Apple could have killed MS dead in their tracks.

 

My first time was with Ubuntu 8.04 3 years ago (I was in 9th grade ) my high school gives every student a dell latitude 2100 they had the things locked down so much that I couldn't use it as they slowed them down soooooooo much that I eventually reset the BIOS to boot from USB that when I installed Ubuntu I learned a lot since then about Linux and I still think its better than windows I now dual boot to Ubuntu 12.08 and windows 7 mostly using Ubuntu
Sent From My Rooted EVO 3D

 

Yeah, I know about the supergod status when using the SGI (Silicon Graphics) equipment.

My boss (the guy who I replaced) had the most expensive Indy Workstation with the first ever 19" wide screen. That wide screen was 1600x900 but cost like $7,000 back in the day. We had a SGI fetish for some reason and ended up spending 1/2 a million on their servers. They were super computers used by NASA and the NSA. Now, we get by with 4U rack servers and blades running cheap Linux.

SGI had the best looking desktop. Period. Indigo magic was the bomb. I wonder why NO linux distribution took up made an effort to port the Irix Window manager to their distro. I know of some efforts but nothing ever in fruition.

 

In.. '94? ...the only use I could think of for a computer was playing games. But I did some scripting in batch, and spent way too much time structuring the device-drivers to get the most free base-ram .. .. talk about waste of time.

Anyway. So my brother-in-law downloaded a demo of something from the hyper-fast internet lines they had at university for me. ..lol was the demo for Raptor: Call of Shadows. While he did that, he pulled up some news from the internet directly from the local bureau feed, while the download and the copy to disk went on in the background. I.e., windows running independently, a browser, bunch of things happening with execution priorities not locking the other tasks up (also, what's an irq conflict?). And a syntax in a terminal that actually was useful. (I.e., "I'm sending the info from this file to that operation via a pipe.. and it works every time. Also, files don't need to be three and a half character long", etc). Compare that to win3.11, and you start to frown automatically..

Even if I'm not too fond of the "it needs to be open source, or I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist"- distros, I've been using linux on and off since that. I'm not too much of a fan of the idea to consolidate linux either, because it would exaggerate some of the problems we're struggling with at the moment. It's also would be a bigger problem in terms of new hardware that might turn up. We see that with nvidia and dma-buf for Optimus, for example. I.e., "you shouldn't be able to use core functions in that way, we think". So kernel maintainers won't do it out a principle that has never really been tested before, not wishing to become too cozy with closed source providers. Same with the acpi functions being shipped to the user-level space. Had multiple gurus going berserk over the idea that this /should/ be controlled in user-space only, and that breaking functionality was necessary either way. Never going to work to have a set of gurus controlling how this works. Completely against how linux started out anyway. Of course, on the other hand, we know what Firefox looks like because of "external" influence. So I of course see the point. But still..

So I'm a huge fan of people picking together things that work individually, and eventually getting something useful out of it. As far as I'm concerned, having a documented, working and well-maintained kernel is the basic step to make linux mainstream. Outside that it should be about composition and preferences, imo.