When did you start using Linux and why?

[entropyfoe]

I was mentored on linux my Mike Furlotti, linux advocate, software genius, and all round smart guy. He showed me the power, the security, when in parallel I saw windows. So I bought a Suse DVD (or was it CD?) based set for fifty bucks, big thick books came with it, must have been version 7 or 8 maybe2001-2002? It had kde desktop. It worked kind of. It was Germanic. Everything had green lizards on it and began with a k.

Then I heard about Mepis in 2007, and it worked. I was converted to Warren's polishing of debian. And From that we went to antiX and MX, where I learned and tried different DEs, now an xfce daily driver, with some lighter experiments within antiX.

[radonrose]

I would say out of curiosity. I got a Knoppix Live CD from a magazine some time in 2005, and by the summer of 2006 Fedora Core was my main distro. Fedora was my main OS until a few months ago, apart from about a year when Win8 came out and until it was replaced by 8.1 (this was also when I switched from KDE, first to XFCE, and then Gnome). I have also used Knoppix, Knoppel, Slax, Mandrake, Mandriva, Mageia, Gentoo, DSL, and more recently PCLinuxOS.

[andyprough]

In the late 1990's a friend told me about a "totally free" computer Operating System, and I was fascinated, and started digging through bookstore computer book shelves looking for anything that mentioned GNU or Linux. I found I could get some old computers running on it and settled on SuSE pretty quickly as my distro of choice (after RedHat started demanding significant amounts of money for free software updates). I stayed with SuSE or openSUSE primarily until a couple years ago when I tried Debian and really liked it. Then I tried antiX and loved it, and this past fall I decided to give MX19 a try and am completely satisfied with it, especially with a KDE desktop.

[m_frank]

In the early 2000s, I was running FreeBSD on a surplus Compaq tower and playing with picoBSD (it ran off a floppy!),
when I needed a laptop for my consulting business. I ended up getting a LC2430 from LinuxCertified that came with
Debian 3.0 (Woody). Around the time I was upgrading the 40GB hard drive to a 60GB hard drive, I heard about
SimplyMEPIS 3.3 and decided to give it shot. The CD install on the new disk was a piece of cake and MEPIS ran great
on the laptop (Pentium 4 2.80GHz, 1.0 GB Memory, ATI RV250/M9 1400x1050 screen). I still have it, and just recently
booted MX-19_386 on it, even got the the PCMCIA wireless card running after hunting down some prism54 firmware.
I upgraded my Dell desktop to MEPIS 3.3 and haven't done Windows since. I sat out the Ubuntu-based SimplyMEPIS 6.x
detour, and didn't upgrade until SimplyMEPIS 8.0. I eventually ended up running SimplyMEPIS 11.0 and needing an upgrade made the switch to MX-Linux.

Been very happy with MX-Linux 18.3 & 19 on my desktop and 3 laptops.

The Raspberry Pi 1b runs Raspbian 10, so it's Buster based like MX-19, but uses systemd (that's another story).

It's been a hoot trying MX-Linux LiveUSBs (x64 and i386) on various systems including my Mom's MacBookAir.

Love digging into some of the issues that come up the MX forums.

[JayM]

I think I already answered this when I introduced myself upon joining the forum, but I was working as a sysadmin for a server app that was running on Unix (System V release 3.2 IIRC) in around 1990-91 and wanted a Unix of my own to run on my home PC, a 386, so I could learn more about it, and Minix was out of my budget. This was in the days before such things as distros or even a graphical desktop (Xwindows.) I found a way to get 2400-baud Internet connectivity at work and spent about six or seven weeks downloading GNU/Linux .tar files from an FTP site and saving them to 1.44MB floppies to take home and set everything up manually. I could get one tarball during the day and left my computer on downloading another one overnight. By setting up manually I mean creating the entire *nix directory structure myself: /dev, /etc and all that including subdirectories then untarring and copy-pasting everything where it needed to go. I don't even remember how I obtained a bootable kernel or installed whatever the bootloader was back then, it was so long ago.

My first actual distro on a single CD was SLS (Soft Landing Software) 1.0. I got the disk for free when the company that was selling it (Morse) was about to release discs with a newer version and decided that in the spirit of free/open source software they'd just give away their remaining few 1.0 discs to whoever asked for one, first-come first-served, until they were gone. Installing from a CD was way better than 40 or so floppies, I can tell you. It may have even come with XFree86 on it but I don't remember.

The idea of desktop environments and window managers was still in the future. IIRC the first two DEs were Gnome and KDE. I prferred KDE of the two as it was more Windows-like and Gnome was more like MacOS, and I was more used to Windows (95) even though there was some controversy at the time because KDE was partially built with a non-free/open source toolkit of some sort and Gnome was all F/OSS including its build tools.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

A "friend" tricked me into installing Xubuntu 13.10 and then I accidentally deleted Windows with those wonderfully confusing partitioning tools so now I'm stuck. I miss Windows :-(

[NM5TF]

I began using Linux in 2008 after fighting Windoze Vista for a year...it got to the point where upon boot it
immediately went to the dreaded blue screen of death...I installed Ubuntu and have never looked back.
Over the years I have tried various distros...Ubuntu, Mint,Debian, Fedora, etc...I have now finally settled
on just 2...ARCH & MX...they are my daily drivers now

tommy

[andyprough]

A "friend" tricked me into installing Xubuntu 13.10 and then I accidentally deleted Windows with those wonderfully confusing partitioning tools so now I'm stuck. I miss Windows :-(

Early on I had a dual boot of Win98 and SuSE, and I started happily accessing the Win98 partition and pointing at program folders and Win98 system files from within SuSE in an effort to try to get programs running under wine. I thought I was very, very smart. After a few months I needed to boot Win98 again for some reason, and found I had completely obliterated it. Good times.

[Bonzoo2525]

Bought my first Dell in 1995(cost as much as a pickup truck) with Wundermus Windoze 95. Got notified shortly it was time for the "incredible new" 1998. Reboot 20 times a day until notification of " Gift from Gawd" second edition !Reboot 19X a day ! YAY....Learn partitions/dual boot Debian.
Find Xandros and Win 2000.Looking better ! Learned to hack registry with the boyz doing 2000 Lite. Getting real good !
Informed of XP. End of Windows for me. Met Ian Murdock and learned....lets say..."Debian from scratch" while adding the Stormix package management.Toyed with them all from Ubuntwho? to Clems mint( still have LMDE.) Ran the most excellent Saline for a while,Linux Lite is a champ too. Been an almost Deb purist since. MX is the best wrap in a long time and I remain an XFCE fanboi....for now. Chromium is beginning to piss me off lately so I'm learning to Brave as I post this.I have had a couple Mactops over the years. Steve was right. Microsoft has no soul....LOL

[jeffreyC]

In 2006 a friend gave me an IBM ThinkPad with Windows 2000 on it, it worked okay for a while but then after a failed update it never booted into Windows again. Messed around with Knoppix for a bit, tried Ubuntu, settled on Xubuntu as a base with Xfce replaced with Fluxbox for a while, then found CrunchBang Xfce which started me on Debian based distros or Debian itself sometimes.