@tomxcd I first got into Linux in my high school years. A friend on a forum introduced me to KDE, really enjoyed it, but gaming on Linux back then was problematic to say the least.
A few years later I started working on Linux and it had become so much more stable between 2010 and 2015 that by 2016 I was barely touching my windows partition. Now I daily drive it.

@tomxcd I bought Red Hat Linux for the Desktop. It was eventually discontinued in 2003.

I also ran Hacintosh for a bit, which had convinced me to buy a Mac until I saw how much they charge for literally identical (or even worse) hardware found in PCs. It legitimately made me laugh so hard that I actually had to dry my face from the tears.

TBH not much has changed for the user in the Linux space since then.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to sit back and eat my popcorn at the replies. 🍿

@tomxcd November '99 😂

@tomxcd
I built a router from an old desktop pc with my father around '94 when our modem could just handle 1 connection, but we had 2 clients. I think it was based off some early SUSE or something which we bought from a tech fair on 4 CDs.

Then i paused #Linux and came back 2020 when i was fed up with M$ and installed it on both my work laptop and gaming pc. Never looked back. I even give courses here and there to introduce people to Linux.

@tomxcd started with it when I began studying, abandoned it after graduating with my PhD in 2020. (I don't count Android, which I still use)

@tomxcd I think I tried out Slackware back in the late 90s. I've been using Ubuntu on my personal and work machines since about 10.04.

@tomxcd my first suse linux installer set came on many many floppy disks. Also I played around with knoppix in the early 2000s. I didn't use it at all for a couple of years, but then had a dual boot setup for a while and did a full switch shortly afterwards ~2009.

And no, I wouldn't consider myself very old, I'm 32 now.

@tomxcd My first distro was Slackware which I obtained as part of a Walnut Creek CD set, 1993ish, so close enough to 30 years ago.

@tomxcd Or ‘before 1991’ in which case you are Linus Torvalds.

@tomxcd@mas.to First install that I used in earnest was http://firewall.dubbele.com/ back in 2001ish.

I emailed John Sinteur in 2014 to say thank you :-)

@tomxcd First installed #Linux in 1996, but I preferred others (daily usage of #NetBSD, #FreeBSD or #Solaris) for several years 😇

You're not the first person telling me today that I'm old. Sigh.

@tomxcd I put 2004-2012 because I don't think my circa 1998 attempt to use Caldera should count

@tomxcd@mas.to Yes, I am old.

@tomxcd first job in 97/98 was using Red Hat. In 2001 I removed the last traces of my last windoze installation and never looked back. Nowadays it's so nice and easy as almost all games from steam work without tinkering and every serious app I need has a *better* open source replacement.

@tomxcd 1996, RedHat. And no shit, I'm old 😂

@tomxcd my first *nix was Xenix 286 and later I ran 386BSD. I tried a Linux 0.9something around -94.

@tomxcd

UNIX (SCO and Solaris) starting in 1997/98 for work and Linux in 2002 privately (various distro's). My first distro was SuSE. I bought it in a physical computer shop on a CD! 😱 I'm still young BTW. 😉

@tomxcd Slackware on floppy disks to run on a machine I cobbled together from computers found at the recycling/thrashplace.

@tomxcd 1994 here (Slackware).

@tomxcd pretty sure it was a slackware 2.3 from walnut creek. Fun times!

@tomxcd ‘94 - first installed some early redhat version distributed via CD on a computing mag when I was a teen. Here’s a screeny from about 10 years later when I was running ximian gnome

@tomxcd holy shit, I'm old and still into FOSS, lol 😁

@tomxcd I'm also old, but I used OS/2 for a long time, before I tried Linux 😊

@tomxcd I remember buying a Suse box with Kde beta 3 in it. It just worked and with some tinkering I managed to get my ISDN card working too. That was the beginning of a long relationship. From the on I needed fewer and fewer kernel builds of my own. Now it's painless. I also remember standing in front of the Shareware board of my local computer store with Linux disks. Didn't have a 386 so I couldn't use them. That was much longer before my suse box. Good times!

@tomxcd

Sorry, I don't respond to polls out of principle. But I will add a data point: after nearly 20 years of being an Apple fanboi, but using Linux on the job, I bought a System76 Thelio just over a year ago and switched to it as my daily driver.

I didn't really quit Apple. It was more like their business direction quit me. I'd still be on OSX if Apple hadn't turned towards profit maximization on every device. And I really miss the old iTunes.

@tomxcd I still remember getting a package from Ubuntu Foundation with Linux on CDs. Yes, it fitted the CD back then, and yes most of the PCs had CD drives back then 🥲

@tomxcd I was student, in 2001, it was Mandrake Linux

@tomxcd @heathborders What does “join Linux” mean?

@tomxcd

@tomxcd does Steam Deck count? I've never used or installed Linux on anything else, but I've used desktop mode on the deck.

@tomxcd I'm not old, I'm "vintage".

@tomxcd first Linux distribution I bought (yes. Bought. On CDs. In a box) was Suse Linux 6.0 back in 1998.
Yes, I'm old.
Then again my first computer ran CP/M so I'm actually very old in IT terms.

@tomxcd UNCALLED FOR (and I *know*)

holy shit

if this isnt a fedi banger i dont know what is

@tomxcd my first try at it was ubuntu 10.04 on a school laptop i had gotten admin permission on (which i wasnt supposed to have). This laptop was a Dell Latitude D505 with Windows XP, 512MB of RAM and in Intel Core 2 Duo and i ran it in VirtualBox. Bet you can guess how that went. IT WAS SHIT! Then i learned how to boot from a flash drive and use persistance and thats how i used the laptop from then on since Xubuntu was faster than windows even with running from a micro size flash drive

@tomxcd Red Hat 5.0 1998 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Linux

@tomxcd I was at uni in 05-06 and was doing more software development than anything else. There was no VS community edition at the time, I had no cash to buy VS and was using MinGW. I tried out Ubuntu and had a very positive experience. Used Linux as a desktop for the next 6-7 years.

@tomxcd thanks, I just had just forgotten how old I have become...

@tomxcd Kernel 1.2.8 isn't old. It's the noob kernel.

@tomxcd 1999, wanted to learn Linux for work. I started with SCO Unix in 1988 when ORNL gave out free accounts to kids not yet in college.

@tomxcd 1993, now get off my lawn.

@tomxcd i'm extremely not old but you sure are making me feel old by claiming 2012 was "a long time ago" 😬

@tomxcd First time was around 2005 with Ubuntu, dual boot. Always been dual booting since, various distros.
Finally gave up windows and since 2021 running linux only, Debian 11 on server and endeavour os on laptop.

@tomxcd Before I installed Linux for the first time, I had A/UX on IIci. I bought that system in 1991. Computers have gotten so cheap.

@tomxcd Wait 2012 wasn't in the last 10 years?

Maaaaaaaan

@tomxcd I'm pretty sure I installed Red Hat on an old computer sometime between 2002 and 2004, but not exactly sure when

@tomxcd Slackware 3.3 from floppy disks, baby!

@tomxcd@mas.to My first experience with Linux, I remember it vividly, was when I was probably 10 years old and a coffee shop had a public-use computer they had setup and it was running some distribution of Linux. It was a really cool computer and one of my first times being able to use a computer.

I first tried Linux as an adult in about 2019 installing Manjaro on an Intel MacBook. Later, in 2020/2021, I went "all in" with Linux. I distrohopped a bunch but have now settled with Debian as my desktop distro of choice.

@tomxcd I installed SLS 1.03 on my 33MHz, 4MB 386SX in 1994. I'm pretty sure the HDD on that machine was no larger than 100MB. It cost about $30 (including shipping) and came on 31 3.5" floppy disks.

It was cheaper and faster to order it on floppies than to download at 9600bps (back in the days of long distance call fees).

@tomxcd in 1998 after being frustrated with having to reinstall windows to retain performance and angry about their anticompetitive business practices.

@tomxcd Linux m68K v0.9 on an Atari Falcon in late 1993. So yeah... pretty old. 😅​

@tomxcd 2006 thought it was more like 2004 though, Distro was Gentoo, with xgl, and compiz. Cube desktop and wobbly windows ftw.

@tomxcd In 1999 my university group was evaluating replacements for our aging, low-end Unix workstation for undergraduate teaching. None of the existing Unix workstation vendors could match the price and performance of name-brand PCs running Linux (not even the ones that basically used PC hardware), so we switched. As part of the switch, my office machine changed from an SGI Indy to a PC running Linux (although I kept the Indy running in a corner for years afterward, for reasons).

@tomxcd slackware. i ordered the cdrom from cheapbytes. dont ask me where i got the credit card.

@tomxcd "join" Linux? 🤔

@tomxcd I somehow managed to keep using an #Amiga until 2001 when I finally decided I should give Linux a spin. I started with #Slackware which I liked, but I figured I needed to be going the extra mile so in 2002 I switched to the newly-released #Gentoo which I still use to this day.

@tomxcd ‘93, and I still have my copy of the original Patrick Volkerding Linux book that came with install CDs. Yep, old.

@tomxcd I dont't remember my first distro tried, but it came on several 1.44 MB floppy disk images that I had to download using a 56k dial-up modem.

@tomxcd i think that was 2001. A friend inserted a cd in a library's machine and it started booting with weird console displays with colors, that I had never seen, it was not DOS. Sure enough, that was redhat.

@tomxcd@mas.to I rememeber installing Ubuntu around 2021 since my old laptop cannot properly run Windows 10, and not only did it actually make it usable, I was impressed by how clean and easy the user interface was even as something quite different from Windows. Even now, I consider many parts Linux to be better-looking than Windows (GNOME has a solid minimalistic design, KDE is also modern with its clean Breeze style).

@tomxcd @achilleas 1998! I’m indeed old (37), but I wasn’t then. I was a perfectly normal 12 year old in every way except I was installing linux so not very fucking normal at all.

@tomxcd I installed Fedora Core 1 in 2004 and Ubuntu Warty shortly after, but I went all Linux in 2019. Currently, using Devuan.

@tomxcd SuSE 5.3, 1998, CPuU was modt likely an Intel Pentium 133, later an Intel Celeron 300A

https://archive.org/details/SUSELinux5.3I386

@tomxcd SuSE Linux 4 (1996), killed the MBR of my harddisk, took a while to get my data back.

Next try: Gentoo (2001), recommended by a colleague. Took my brand new PC to work (b/c of fast internet), installation compiled packages for three days, still didn't work, hardware not recognized, etc.

@tomxcd there’s a lot of old people it seems …

@tomxcd I guess I’m old then: it was from a CD offered in some PC magazine I bought while on holidays, and the distribution was called Mandrake from @gael

@tomxcd Did an ubuntu install my freshman year of college, mid-00s

@tomxcd first attempt in 2009 with Ubuntu 9.10, but really embraced it in 2010 with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
Then in 2013-2014 I tried openSUSE and Debian. Now using Arch btw since mid-2014.

@tomxcd
I'm no data expert
But it may be a #statisticalbias in your pole,
If you're young you can't have access to the last answers, and if you're old there's low probability you choose the firsts ones...

😋

Yeah I'm old... 😅

@tomxcd oh man. I was like 12 or 13, and accidentally overwrote the win2k bootloader with lilo instead of chain booting because grub wasn't popular yet.

@tomxcd 2004, I think. Linux is the only way I can get certain tasks done, and I keep it around as an emergency failsafe. But ultimately I hate using it, so all my non-server machines run MacOS or Windows. I’ll use linux locally in a VM/container/WSL, but never natively.

@tomxcd my first dabble was in the late 90's, and then went full Linux in the early 2000's

@tomxcd

In first installed Linux in 1996. And have been using it since then.

Prior to that, I had been using Solaris & IRIX operating systems at school. And DOS at home.

(Solaris & IRIX are both flavors of Unix.)

I preferred Solaris & IRIX to DOS. So when I discovered Linux, I was able to install something similar to Solaris & IRIX on my home computer.

Also, being able to look at Linux's source code was interesting.

But, that is how I became, and continue to be, a Linux users.

@tomxcd Mandrake Linux 5. Great CD that gave new life to my computer.

@tomxcd I distinctly remember my father buying SUSE Linux and me and him installing that in 1999 / 2000 I think? From then on I've used Linux on and off until 2009, where I took the plunge and worked almost exclusively with it since then 😊

@tomxcd, in the mid 90's I bought this. It took more than five years for Linux to become my primary system and a couple more to finally erase the Windows partition.
https://flic.kr/p/yZ7MP7