I started fairly recently (probably somewhere between nine and seven years ago; time isn’t my strong suit, cut me some slack) on Debian. Now I’m on Arch Linux.
I started working for a video game company in 2000. It was dominated by Linux nerds (including the CEO) and they indoctrinated me into their cult. My first distro was SuSe, then Redhat for a while, then Gentoo for about a decade, then Arch, which is where I am now.
My last Windows “daily driver” was Windows 98se.
Lucky bastard. You didn’t have to struggle with the allure of the somewhat decent Windows NT based OSes following the shit show that was Windows Me.
Slackware in 93 or 94, on a 386DX40 with 4MiB ram and a 40MiB HDD. A friend and I split downloading the disk sets 1/2 disks a day on our limited ISP time.
When Netscape came out, I ran it on that machine. It took literally 30 minutes to start (with much swapping), but was actually usable thereafter.
Back in 1996 I was studying computer science, and one of my courses required me to write programs in Prolog. Rather than go to the school to work on the computers there, I bought an enormous book (I think it was a printout of all the man pages) that had Yggdrasil Linux CD-ROM, and ran it on my home desktop.
It was at home on my first PC. The year was 1993, and it was a Slackware distro with a kernel 0.99.12.
Next to it I had an old Atari ST with MiNT, and it had the bigger harddisk and the nicer GUI, but the PC had more RAM and horsepower.
Hello fellow graybeard! I, too, started back in the 90s. Internet felt like a video game, always something new, hacker culture, bleeding in from phone phreaking and with Linux hitting the market we had the FreeBSD vs GNU/Linux debates, TLDP.org and forums and BBs and so much more.
Fun times.
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Mid 90s at work as a project support technician in Sony Broadcast R&D in the UK. Slackware, then red hat mostly. Installed Linux boxes in various digital TV stations in London in 1999/2000, used to insert interactive games into the broadcast stream.
I was a sysadmin from 99 to about 2018, from then onwards I’m more DevOps. Done a bunch of stuff with CentOS too, including migrating 500k email accounts to our hosted solution. Other cool stuff included a VMware based development environment using Foreman + FreeIPA to auto provision dev VMs with all sorts of puppet code.
Now at home I run Fedora and work on macOS, writing Terraform and Python. And some nodejs too.
Been at it a long ass time now lol
I am also fairly new to the game. I had an iMac from around 2010 that was starting to show its age. Newer macOS versions were glacial on it. I eventually realized they were meant to boot off SSDs, but my options in that regard weren’t great. I would either have to take the whole thing apart to replace the internal drive or live with USB2 speeds on an external SSD. Then it dawned on me I could just put Ubuntu on there and call it a day. This worked great and bought me a few more years out of that machine.
More recently, we started buying threadripper workstations at the office for scientific modelling. These have since migrated into a server room where they are currently acting as a small compute cluster.
And most recently, I’ve been tinkering around a bit on my Steam Deck. It’s a little walled-garden-ish but it let me put VSCode and a few tools on there so I’m playing around.
Around 25 years ago I had read about this Linux thingy in a computer magazine somewhere in the middle east. We had a Windows 95/98 PC. I got my hands on some Red Hat CDs (or floppies) and managed to install it on the PC. It booted into a prompt, but I had zero knowledge of Linux or any Unix-like OSes and had absolutely no idea of man pages. Didn’t manage to start the graphical environment. I took my case and rode my motorcycle to some computer engineering student (the most knowledgeable person I had access too, we had no Internet) and asked him for help. He told me it’s my graphics card (some old ISA VGA card), but couldn’t help more. In the computer market no one knew about Linux either. So my first try to switch to Linux failed.
Fast forward 25 years… I’m surrounded with Linux and computers in general. Desktops, laptops, single board computers, virtual machines, local or remote. I started with Ubuntu (free CDs posted to my poor country…) with Gnome and later gnome shell, tried Debian, Mint, Parsix, and finally Arch Linux. Moved from graphical to command line and started absorbing the Unix philosophy of simplicity and robustness. Nowadays I use sway and KDE on Arch Linux for work and pleasure, and follow very old Unix mailing lists looking for hidden internet gems.
P.S.: forgot to mention Libreelec (kodi) as my media server and OpenSUSE Leap on laptop which I chose to enjoy some automated install with encryption and btrfs which worked surprisingly well. If I live long enough, I might start thinkering with BSDs (openbsd probably, because of the picture at the bottom of their homepage). I already use pfsense which is based on FreeBSD.
I want to know more about this picture.
- Is it on display in an Haunted House exhibition to frighten children?
- Does the owner of these racks sleeps next to it, and is that under his mum’s house?
- Can it run doom?
First experience was trying to dual boot Slackware and Windows ME on the family computer in 2003 after getting a magazine with the install disc on. Nuked the Windows install and got banned from the family PC for a while.
Then I got my own laptop with Windows 98 on it at 18. I’d just found dyne:bolic which was one of the first Linux live CDs if I recall correctly and was designed to work on older hardware (this was mid 00s). That machine served me well for 2 or 3 years.
A few years of bouncing between various distros and Windows followed. Eventually I made the full switch in about 2012 first to Ubuntu then Debian which I’ve been using for the last 5 years or so.
Over the summer, and these days I’m somewhat comfortable typing in terminal. Got foundry and steam and my vpn all running using Garuda
Actually no wait I tried ubuntu in college but I couldn’t figure it out while doing my senior year of engineering school
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Some time before Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04), so somewhere around 2006-2007. Had a spare laptop I had installed (unsuccessfully) Gentoo on, then played around with stuff like Mandriva and Debian, and early versions of Fedora and OpenSuse. I’m a developer now, using Pop right now. Honestly I don’t really care which one as long as my tools and hardware work, and it works well enough on Pop.
Freshman year of college, about 11 years ago.
Been using Manjaro exclusively for about 3 years.
Started: ~2008 because I saw compiz had the virtual desktop cube & wobbly windows animations. Now I’m on Debian.
Must have been 2001 or 2002, and I started with the Red Hat CD that came in the back of my friend’s Linux For Dummies book.
Canada, 2005, fresh off the boat immigrant, just graduated high school in Europe. I had already bought the open source idea years prior and used mostly open source software on Windows. Having recently switched to NVIDIA from ATi, I tested DotA 5.x (Warcraft 3 TFT) on Ubuntu via Wine. It worked great and that was the final hurdle to a full migration. Wiped Windows and installed Ubuntu. I’ve been using Ubuntu as the primary OS on all my computers ever since. I went through university with a Dell laptop, intentionally purchased to be compatible with Ubuntu. No NDISwrapper shit. The knowledge acquired over this period naturally flowed into my professional career where I’ve primarily used Ubuntu and RHEL for various use cases. From software development to software deployment and cloud operation in production. These skills keep helping my day to day work in automotive these days.
