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.

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.

Ubuntu in the early 2010s. Installing flash player to get YouTube working.
It took me more than 10 years, but I am finally windows free. Linux came a long way in such a short time man.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Slax and puppy on a 128mb usb that i would take with me to school to test

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.

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.

so linus made his first linux post when i was in highschool. (freshman). i didnt know of it but thats what wikipedia says. windows 95 came out when i was in college and by my junior year i knew about linux. in our networking class most everything was unix, one sun machine and the instructor got linux on one or two. students would rush to get the linux machines. it was seen as a better unix. at that point it wasnt seen as a desktop alternative just a better server experience. right before windows xp came out, i built a new computer for xp and used a disc from a magazine with redhat. installed it on their ma hi e and it didnt work because the hardware was to new. i soon got XP and learned about boot loaders.had to call microsoft since xp wouldnt install. tbe guy just recently i stalled linux on a few machines and helped me out.

didnt try linux again till broadband and the web was more of a thing.

Around 2002 when I tried Ubuntu for the first time on an old Dell laptop.

I only tried it initially as I was bored with Windows UI and liked the look of Linux. Used Linux ever since on and off.

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 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 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 think my first experience was around 1993 or 1994. I downloaded the 3.5" disks at the university and then uploaded onto my 386. No GUI, all command prompt. :).

Right around that time, too, I found some network cards and co-axial cables and 3-4 of us in the house put the cards in our computers and could see each other's computer. Couldn't do much else though. Hahahaha.

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'd been a Fidonet BBS sysop for years when I read Torvald's post on comp.os.minux and I was interested, as MS-DOS was too limited. So I downloaded my first "not distro" on a midnight call (300 baud!) to Finland. It wasn't even a distro back then, just a bare kernel and a few programs. Then SLS came out in late '92 and I was off and running.

I've hopped all the major distros just out of curiosity and torture/fun, many times, too many to count. Each has it's own quirks and usability, but they all have the kernel. So it doesn't matter which you run as long as you like it, you're having fun exploring, and it does what you want it to do.

Installed an early version of Slackware on a 386 in the 90's. Went through a couple it jobs so I ran windows for a bit until 2002. I had bought a nice laptop and it came with windows xp. Xp was so bad after windows 2000 that I had to find something else. Played with redhat and a couple other dostros then went back to Slackware and have been on it ever since.

My first experience was with Red Hat 5.x back in the late 90's, I got ahold of a huge book that came with it on CD. Since then I've used several distros both on my PC as dual boot, but also running a server. I've always defaulted to Windows again because of gaming mainly, and I'm honestly not a big fan of booting back and forth between different systems.

I've currently got EndeavourOS installed and am playing around seeing if I can get everything to work, and so far it seems this may be the time I actually switch for good.

Heh, this inspires a neat little bio.

I had access to then-usual computer-related stuff growing up as a teenager in the late 80's/early 90's (C16, C64, Amiga, DOS/Windows on 286/386). One of the nicer things in that environment was a PostScript capable laser (well, LED) printer. At that time struggling with PageMaker and the likes, the possibilities of a page description language fascinated me.

Later, but still in teenage years, I came across NeXT(STEP) - first through a friend who had one, and its manuals and TeX documents out that PostScript printer like nothing I'd ever seen (done in-house) before. I was hooked. ;-)

A NeXT computer then became my daily driver through "college" and university, where at the time there also were Unix workstations by HP, Sun and SGI. DOS/Windows was all happening at that time, and it always felt to me like the VHS of operating systems - the technically worst implementation taking the market share.

When Linux appeared on the scene, I was obviously interested. The first distro I remember was SLS, followed by SlackWare and Red Hat. Mostly for communication/networking (UUCP, PPP, eMail, Usenet, IP connectivity, ...) I started to use Red Hat in 1996, with the NeXT keeping its place for its graphical desktop on my personal desk. At the time I started working for a software startup where we used a mix of Linux (Red Hat) and Windows (NT) desktops, and Linux (Red Hat) mostly for servers (some Sun and BSD as well, IIRC). Around 2002(?) maybe I had mostly migrated to Linux also for my home desktop, but I kept the NeXT around for a long time, most specifically because of Diagram!, a predecessor (in spirit) to OmniGraffle.

Moving to Apple/OS X never sat right with me due to its proprietary, closed-source nature. "It works great when it works. When it doesn't, you're even more SOL than on Windows."

When Red Hat went EOL in 2004 I looked around for alternatives and most seriously tried out gentoo Linux. I love the flexibility of being able to use one distro with consistent paradigms all the way from (almost) embedded through various server configurations to a fully multimedia capable desktop. I haven't looked back since, typing this into LibreWolf on a KDE Plasma desktop running on gentoo.

All the while, I've also been using, supporting, and developing for Windows professionally to some degree (in addition to working for/on Linux and other more Unix-y stuff). It's such a quality of life hit compared to open source - I remember phone calls with prominent Microsoft employees over weird support cases involving DCOM permissions (or rather, bugs therein) - Microsoft's reply certainly felt quite like de Maizière's infamous "some of those answers could unsettle too many people" quote, hinting at security through obscurity.

Whereas in the Linux ecosystem, I can analyze to their root and facilitate taking care of even decidedly weird corner cases.

One thing I still miss a lot from the NeXTSTEP desktop is its concept of "services": Global utilities that could/would operate on anything (of suitable data type, e.g. text, image) that is currently selected (and show up in what today would amount to the context menu of the selection, regardless of which program it's in). In the simplest case, this could be a Wikipedia lookup of the currently selected word. But, services also had the ability to replace the selection, allowing for all manner of things like unit conversions, 'intelligent' expansion (what this could do together with ChatGPT!), at-the-fingertips OCR and so on and so forth.

I got into linux at ~20 in ~2010. It's great but got anoyed with installing windows support for games/work, and have been stuck with window since. The game engines I work on and the tools I use (visual studio, visual assist, vsvim, etc..) simply refuse to cooperate on Linux and I can't spend valuable work time fighting my distro.

Windows is soon forcing me to switch, and changing my entire workflow, but I'll keep it going as long as I can

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)

My first experience with Linux was Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. I dual-booted for over a decade and even went back to just using Windows for a while before finally making the full switch. I think I spent two or three years without using my Windows partition before deciding to give Windows one last chance, which lasted a month, then wiping it and sticking to EndeavourOS for my daily driver/gaming desktop and vanilla Arch Linux on my laptop.

I'd used Linux in VMs since the early 2010s, though only really for curiosity purposes and never did much worthwhile. Got a job that uses Linux pretty extensively back in 2016 and by 2019 once I'd noticed proton was a thing I was using Arch Linux on my own laptop. Distro hopped several times in the following years and now on a new PC I've decided to just stay on Debian bookworm and just keep applications up to date using flatpak.

When I was about 12 I had a computer nerd friend who used linux almost exclusively. I used various linux distros at his house. I don't know what they were.

He gave me a knopix CD so I could use linux too and that was the easiest way.

I thought I'd try linux myself so I burned Ubuntu to a cd and tried to install it on a family computer as a dual boot. I did it wrong and deleted everything. My dad is a computer network specialist so he understood what happened and wasn't mad. He made a backup of the family computer a while ago and restored it. We still lost some things, but not everything.

My friend got me a desktop computer for free and put SUSE on it. My parents wouldn't allow me to have internet in my bedroom so I just played games and made stuff on blender with it.

My friend also got me a free laptop at this computer nerd conference we went to. We listened to a bunch of people talk about computer stuff. They also had free stuff we could grab. I got myself a laptop. It didn't have an operating system so my friend installed Ubuntu on it for me.

Eventually that laptop and my desktop stopped working and I never used linux again. After reading about linux here I started to miss my Ubuntu laptop and I'd like to try it again, but I don't want ruin my current laptop like I did with the family computer.

My dad got me a Raspberry Pi for my 10th birthday. I used Ubuntu Mate 16.04 and was amazed by the customizability. Switched my laptop in 2019, never looked back.

That would have been Slackware, which in those days came on a stack of 3.5" floppy disks. So early 90's (and hence I was in my mid-30s) but I was still mainly using Windows 3.1 and Trumpet Winsock to connect to the Internet.

I think the first time I really took it seriously was in the mid 90's with Debian, a copy of which was posted to me, on CD-ROM I think, by Ian Murdock himself (back in the days when he was still with Debra 😏).

1998 - Mandrake Linux

I bought a random Linux magazine that came with a Mandrake CD, I installed it, struggled with everything, but fell in love with the idea of Linux. So, I kept trying distros until last year, when I finally settled on an Arch based distro called Crystal Linux.

SuSE @ 1999, then Slackware in the same year.

Tried SuSE (bought as a box) as an alternative to the annoying, unstable and insecure Windows 9x, it was also the time when Linux as an alternative desktop OS was starting to get hyped in the media. Especially in regards to stability and security. Well, it wasn't hard to beat Win9x in those areas. Tried it a bit, didn't like it that much (I think it was KDE 1.x) and also didn't understand much of it. I was still intrigued though and wanted to really learn it starting from the commandline, but I felt I couldn't with all the SuSE stuff like YaST being preinstalled.

So I bought a big book (by Michael Kofler), it was the de facto standard book for really learning Linux from the ground up back then. And I chose a distribution which would be much more minimalistic (because I felt that makes it easier to learn). So I installed Slackware. I used it for like 3 years and learned a lot (all the basics), it was a hard journey though and other distros started appearing and they promised to be more modern or better than Slackware.

So I tried Debian next, then Crux, then Arch. This was all around 2002-2006. I can't remember exactly how long I used each, but I do know I've used Slack for quite a lot, then Debian rather shortly, then Crux also not very long (basically I just wanted to test a source based distro but compile times were annoyingly long back in the day), and then it was Arch all the way. Arch was fast, rather simple, always up to date, and it had the great AUR. I didn't ever look back.

I did take a break from Linux as my primary OS from approximately 2009 to 2017, mostly due to playing a ton of video games (Windows only, not runnable at all on Linux back then) and also due to my career path making me work with lots of Windows Servers, Powershell and other Microsoft stuff.

Since about 2017/2018 I'm back to Linux as primary OS (Arch, again) and haven't looked back since. Even managed to fully delete all physical Windows partitions now (I only keep it in a VM in case I need to test something).

I'm testing NixOS on my notebook currently, it seems to be "the future", but my main desktop will probably stay Arch for a bit longer still.

Looking back at using Slackware early on, I don't regret it, since I learned a ton, but it was tough using Slackware around the 2000s. I still remember a lot of fighting with programs which wouldn't compile due to dependency errors or other compilation errors. And a lot of Google searches for various compilation errors leading to rare and hard to understand solutions found in random forum posts. Compared to that, any Linux distro feels like mainstream these days. But it was an efficient way to learn.

Accidentally fried the windows install on my first laptop in 2005 or 2006. My friend told me to try Ubuntu and I loved it. A few years later I had an art school GF and she introduced me to Macs. I wanted to be cool so I upgraded to a 2008 unibody MacBook. I used Mac OS for a while until apple started to really wall off the garden and the laptop was no longer supported. Got a new Dell XPS around 2016 and got back on the Linux train. Not hopping off again except maybe for a BSD.

I had an eccentric roommate around 2008 that was crazy enthusiastic about a computer he built that had a desktop with multiple workspaces he could access on a cube. I only cared if it could play Counter Strike; so not at all. It was my first exposure to the idea of something other than Windows. I had a problem with a Windows 8 license on a laptop I only used for Arduino stuff in 2014. I put Lubuntu on it and never looked back. I've been slowly grinding my way into Linux ever since.

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

Once I got Warcraft 3 working on Wine on Ubuntu 4.10, I quit Windows cold turkey. I was ~18. The first "OS" I've used was a BASIC interpreter. Then DOS. Then Windows till Ubuntu 4.10. I've also used Debian concurrently here and there since then.

Erase disk and install Ubuntu

Been using Linux since the 00s. Took until maybe 2014 or 2015 until it got to the point where I no longer had Windows even on dual boot.

Around 2004, maybe 2005, I had to recover some files from an old laptop and landed on a live CD of Knoppix for the job. Dabbled in Linux a bit after, but not seriously, for the better part of the decade after - mostly distro hopping and having fun, especially with old hardware, back when Ubuntu was in better standing with the community.

Ended up using it more seriously in the last ~5 years. Hopped around Mint, Manjaro (actually lasted 2 years before I borked it), and OpenSUSE before finally landing on Fedora, which has been my daily for maybe 2 years now. With the Red Hat stuff, depending on how that pans out, I'm debating on just going to vanilla Debian at this point. But I've always had a soft spot for Mint, so we'll just have to see.

As for Windows, I still have my main tower with Win 10 (no Linux) that I've upgraded throughout the years from Win 7. But Win 11 isn't having it, so once Win 10 hits EOL, it'll get Linux as well (assuming it doesn't kick the bucket first).

When I was about 11 roughly two decades ago, on the first PC I got to actively use. I think it was OpenSuSe. My father had unix at work back then and saw no reason to use anything but a -ix system.

I liked it a lot, back then so was mainly reading things on the internet, no gaming needed.

Haven’t cycled back yet, since I play a few games that don’t run well on linux at all and use some proprietary software. I do find myself trying to use linux commands on windows from time to time, getting annoyed with it not working before remembering.

Linux was kinda sketchy on the hardware I had available so my first experience was installing NetBSD on an '040 Mac with a stack of floppy disks. I was able to get WindowMaker running at 16bits, 640x480. I was pretty slick, with my 'transparent' eterm.

Oh gosh, it must have been 1999? 2000ish? I have no idea what distro it was or if distros were even a thing. It took me 3-4 days to get all of my driver's working. I clunked along with it for a week or two until an update borked the system and I didn't know how to fix it, so I went back to Windows. I tried many more times over the following decades, usually with similar results. About 6 years ago I really learned a lot more about Unix servers and therefore about Linux itself. So I installed it again and I've had it on at least one computer in the house ever since then.

I was in high school and decided to use Lubuntu as my daily driver while in my network engineering class. It was a novelty to me but I didn't really take Linux seriously.

I started community college in 2007 with no idea what I wanted to do with my life, I don’t remember how, but I came across Linux and spent that year brining ISOs to cds, testing different distros, customizing my DE, etc… By my second year I decided that computers was what I wanted to do and specifically something involving Linux. Fast forward 16 years and I’m still working in tech with 7+ Linux machine between my homelab and my cloud providers and dozens of FOSS services. Funny enough, I just recently moved and found a stack of like 30 bootable ISO cds as old as Ubuntu 7.10.