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.

I dabbled in Linux for a while (since 2009, college). I did some distro hopping for a while ( Ubuntu, opensuse, mint, Debian). I finally mained Linux after windows 8 came out, ugh.

I mained Manjaro and then switched over to Endeavour. I couldn’t be happier. My opinion of Linux keeps getting better and better, but that’s probably because I have to fix my parents computers once in a while. They run windows 10 now. I hate it. Ads in the start menu?! Kill me now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In university in 2000. Now I am a Linux DevOps Engineer.

Currently writing some python so we can get a report out of our shiny new harbor docker registry.

2001, I was 19 in USAF tech school in Biloxi, Mississippi, just bought a second hand computer from someone else in the dorm and needed a budget OS, and the local BX/PX had a copy of Corel Linux for $30. I had no idea WTF it was at the time, I thought it was just some kinda cheap bootleg Windows or something, something with half-ass compatibility like OS/2. I had no clue how to use it and I couldn’t get any familiar programs to work, so I just paid another dude like $20 to burn me his copy of Windows 2000 for me.

Didn’t even realize its potential until later, 2004 when I got a civilian IT job. Now Debian has been my daily driver for ten years.

Edit: oh yeah, the box came with an inflatable penguin, which I gave to the dorm guard on duty when I got back because he recognized it and I didn’t think anything of it. If you ever see this post I want my penguin back now, dude.

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.

I was about 13, parents were getting divorced, house was being shortsaled, mom had moved out already and took the main computer with her, dad got a really old Windows XP Dell laptop (had a red nubbin) from a friend to use, it ran so extremely slow on XP already (literally would take minutes to load a video and it was choppy doing just that) I knew Vista or 7 couldn’t run on it so I looked online for other OSes that might work.

Landed on Linux mint, got that bad boy set up in my little sisters (now empty) room as it was in the corner where I could reach my neighbor friend’s wifi. I watched so much Bleach/Naruto that summer lol

Luckily I had setup that neighbor friends wifi with DDWRT so I knew the pw :P

Started in Brazil, at home, in 1998, using Conectiva Linux (a Brazilian version of Red Hat on steroids); migrated to Slackware in 2000-2001, and then to Debian, in early 2003. Still using Debian in 2024! 🧡🫶🍺 I use Linux for everything, from desktops/multimedia/blender/daw/games (I used to play WoW on Linux back in 2004-2005; hahaha; was a pain to tune it + wine) to routers, to servers… I loved my old Linux mobiles too (Nokia N900 & Nokia N9)! My N9 is still working (but I don’t use it anymore)! 🧡

I used Unix for the first time 1989 in university. Windows was hardly even a thing then and Linux certainly wasn’t. Then I used both Windows and various Unix flavors throughout my working life. In the late nineties we first started using SUSE Linux in a project so that was my first direct hand-on experience with it. I wasn’t terribly impressed. In my last job before my current one we had AIX so I had to use that. Then I exclusively used Windows for a couple of years after changing jobs. But I’ve been growing increasingly frustrated with the enshittification so about two years ago I finally made the jump and all my private systems are on Linux Mint now. I’m never going back, unless they open source the whole thing or something.

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.

Started: ~2008 because I saw compiz had the virtual desktop cube & wobbly windows animations. Now I’m on Debian.

January 2023, started effectively with Fedora and I’m still on Fedora, before that I used Ubuntu in 2013/2015 but was not on my machine.