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.

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.

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.

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).

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 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.

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

All I remember about my first time is being tricked into using Slackware. They told me it was the easiest distro. And this was in like 94 or 95; just a year or two after the damn thing came out.

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)

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 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.

I have an old hp mini netbook with an atom processor and 1gb RAM. I needed something light to run on it so I put Lubuntu on it.

It was fun dabbling in it and getting everything to work but I haven’t really messed with it since.

I was probably 40.

I run Win on my main pc only for gaming really. Maybe if linux gets better support I would consider switching over.

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.

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.

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.

Caldera OpenLinux^[a chorus of "ding dong, the witch is dead" may be appropriate here], in 1999. It didn't really impress me, and I went back to Windows 98SE (then 2K Pro) until 2005 . . . at which point I found Gentoo, and it was love at first compile. 😅

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.

Maybe around 2006, I booted a live CD of Ubuntu and ran the 6 disc install of Unreal Tournament 2004 so that I could play UT with a friend who was staying over - the laptop was my mum's, so I wasn't allowed to install anything directly on it. UT2004 had a native Linux version on disc.

The install took until 4am and we played until the sun came up, absolute bliss getting it working.

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 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!

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.

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.

@eric5949 Red Hat 5.1 1998/99, I was aged 40. I attempted dual booting with Win98, but Disk Druid wiped my Win98 partition:-) I was a little upset but stayed with RH. I had actually purchased the RH CD's and manual from the US (I am in the UK), and incurred import duty, so it was not free as in beer but around £50. I looked at Windows again when 2000 was released. Now I use Linux Mint, Chrome OS and Windows 11.

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.

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.

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.

I discovered Linux when I was learning programming in my childhood. I used it side-by-side with Windows all the way through college where I started daily driving only Linux. I hopped this order mainly: Ubuntu > Elementary > Debian > Arch > Gentoo > Arch > Fedora > Nix. Probably not right when I started programming in 2007 when I was 8, but before I was doing Arduino development at 11, so like 2009-2010ish. Started daily driving in 2018 or 2019

I never went back and forth as I wanted to get away from Windows ASAP since it's such a terrible line of operating systems that do things the most backwards way possible. For a long time I was in the "I need to have Windows for my games" camp, which is why I maintained a dual boot or a computer with Windows installed, but then Proton happened, and there was no longer any need, and I could fully wipe my hands of that filth

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.

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.

Linux FT. From a magazine cover disk in around 1996. I was a teenage oik working at a company where I suggested setting up the Internet for email and support use. The manager at the time subscribed to bill Gates' belief that the Internet was a fad. I was granted an old 486 desktop pc, and modem and a basic modem account.

I setup a squid proxy and email server with dial on demand. It was slow but it worked.

I moved onto redhat 5 after (before it became the enterprise thing), we went to isdn and leased line and I even had a stack of usr courier modems under my desk by the end with dial in for both Internet and collecting mail (for sales mostly).

It only got replaced when the company actually paid for a full time IT manager (I was primarily a software developer, doing IT on the side) and they switched everything to windows.

1997, I was 22, it was m68k on an 030 Amiga 1200... for some reason.

I seem to remember I had to buy an FPU to plug into my 030 accelerator, specifically to get this to run. I have no idea what I wanted it for, other than curiosity. I got it working, played around with it for ten minutes, then deleted the partition.

I tried Linux on and off many times after that, but always bounced off it. The last time, 2021, I installed Linux Mint and it has finally stuck.

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

I don't remember my exact first experiences, it was ages ago, like probably almost a couple decades, and I think with something like OpenSUSE. My first real experience came a bit later with Linux Mint, which I used on a Laptop, while continuing with Windows on my desktop, specifically for my gaming needs. Back then we just had Wine, and it was still a hot mess, but I was able to play some Guild Wars for example and other games fairly decently already. A few years ago, after the Windows 10 "freebie" nuked itself and my entire C partition, with all its data on it (especially the hidden user folders), I continued a little with 7 but shortly after my gpu died. I didn't knew which component at the time, as it started to hang during the boot process, so I assumed other components. Anyway, I didn't had a desktop for well over a year after, and used above laptop to at least browse the web and watch videos, and test some Linux distros. I eventually landed at Manjaro, which also later became my system OS on my newly built desktop a couple years ago. From there I went to EOS after I wanted to switch to btrfs for the system partition anyway, which nuked itself recently. Since the community rather wanted to troll and gaslight instead of helping me I left EOS behind and am currently experiencing the horrors of Gnome in Nobara, which I didn't used since the Unity rework, and am probably trying the KDE version soonish, because there's just too many issues and lack of baseline functions that I need and miss from KDE, and it's also just way too buggy.

I know it was some time in 2002. IDK what my first Linux distro was TBH, but I quickly returned to windows. Then Shortly after I took a dive off the deep end to try to really learn Linux some and spent days installing Gentoo on some probably 400-600 MHz single core box (was in college at the time). That, while being pretty painful overall, was a good learning experience. I was in school for computer aided drafting, got my associates, and here I am 20 years later as a DevOps engineer. I am comfortable with the big 3 OSes, tho mac would be my weakest. Gaming keeps bringing me back to a home Windows desktop, tho. Actually just set up a USB stick with nix plasma to check out this weekend as I think I'm missing the train on nix.
Edits: mostly spelling, originally posted on phone, typos galore

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.

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.

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 didnt have access to good internet, this was back in dial-up era in the 90s and even though my pals had 56k, I was still on a very spotty 33k modem. I bought "Corel Linux" on disc(s) from Costco. It wasn't particularly great, but I definitely learned a lot about getting linux to play nice with hardware!

94 my uni used HP-ux work stations. So many of us set up Linux on a home machine. Slackware at the time. I was forced to dual boot through most of my uni time. As many needed programs just did not have viable candidates on linux. But by 2000 I found windows annoying and rarely needed to use it. Was likely about 2005 before I stopped installing windows all together. But even now. I have a cheap mini PC with win 11. It is used rarely. But photography and ham radio being my main hobbies. I find many Chinese products have 0 linux option for upgrading firmware or some other configuration option. So keep a mini pc just for that.

I mostly installed Ubuntu on old machines after nuking them with dban right before selling them. Stuck with Windows until 7 stopped getting security updates. I'd still be fully on 7 if I could, tbh. Though living in Linux is helpful for selfhosting.

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 installed Ubuntu back in 2012 to get the Tux TF2 item when they made Steam available for Linux. After that, I just kind of tinkered with it on the side until recently when I switched completely.

Roughly about 92/93 is when I got my first exposure to Linux, but had been using older legacy UNIX systems which were accessed through the dial-up VAX systems at the local uni.

First distro was SLS Linux, as a buddy was a C developer for a UNIX house. They had been gifted a copy from SoftLanding for testing for possible future developments. It was usable, but pretty rough. You could bypass the login, by simply holding the backspace key (removing the login prompt) and pressing Enter.

Ran it on a IBM PS/2 for about 6 months, before moving it back to DOS.. then about a year later moved to Slackware, when it become available through Usenet.