How did you all discover Linux ?

[Mogster]

The first time I used Linux was, funnily enough, to rescue files from my first Windows laptop. The hard drive had completely packed up, and by the time it managed to boot Windows, the whole thing would freeze up. I vaguely remembered that you could run some Linux distros from the CD, which might allow me to access the hard drive long enough to prise out the files I needed, and ended up doing just that with Knoppix.

A few years later, my parents ended up getting their hands on a laptop, but it didn't have an OS installed. I offered to stick Ubuntu on it for them (8.04 I think), and managed to get everything working except for the wireless card. Unfortunately they weren't big fans and went with Windows XP in the end, but I was intrigued enough to try dual booting my PC with it.

Since then I've always been dual booting Windows and some form of Linux. I really liked Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10, and after discovering Mint I put Isadora on an old Pentium 4 laptop I use for playing music. I was really impressed with what it managed to achieve with Gnome, but Ubuntu still appealed to me more. I've just set up Julia on my desktop though, and after a bit of tweaking it's finally surpassed Ubuntu in my eyes as the best OS I've ever used. It runs like a dream, and with the addition of Docky and a spot of transparency for the gnome panel it looks stunning too. The main menu is just genius.

I actually rather like WIndows 7, but if it wasn't for the small matter of games I'd happily ditch it altogether for Mint 10.

[penguinuser]

I read a computer book that mentioned it but didn't explain what it was.

I then read an article in a computer magazine that explained what Linux was and also how to use it as a desktop operating system.

The first Linux distribution I tried was Ubuntu 6.06.


Ubuntu 6.06 - 7.04 >Mandriva 2008 Spring >Ubuntu 9.04 > Opensuse 11.1 > Opensuse 11.2 > Ubuntu 10.04 > Mint 9

[NumberSeventeen]

How did i discover Linux?

I got 14 ipc's at my work.
They needed an upgrade. The only thing they needed was an internet browser.

The harddisk in the ipc was an compact flash cart with only 128 MB memory.
The internal memory was nothing more then 64 MB and a part of that was used for video memory.

Windows doesn't really have anything suitable for a machine like that (except for CE but that didn't work out that well).
After some time on the internet i found Damn Small Linux. It did have anything i needed to have.

I only have troubles getting a touchscreen driver.

[Theologian]

A good friend gave me a copy of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty in 2007: although it was impressively fast, it was no use to me because it didn't recognise my printer & I didn't have an internet connexion. So I reinstalled XP, which worked with everything, & gave my Feisty disc to a friend who has used Ubuntu ever since (AFAIK).

Roll on 2009 & Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty (from the same good friend) & CUPS drivers & USB modem support & nearly as good for my wants as XP: 'no reason to ever go back' ... until the upgrade to 9.10 broke everything, so back to XP, & trying out every *nix distro I could find ... then I heard of this distro called LinuxMint (8 Helena) ('an improved *buntu'), which I tried & on which everything worked again: YIPPEE! I even passed it on to a couple of friends, who love it & have adopted it as their main/only OS/distro.

Then I was given an official DVD of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid on my birthday & immediately hated the 'One' menu, etc., the removal of which killed the desktop! Then Isadora turned up, etc., etc., but presumably upstream problems ... then my laptop died, leaving me with a blank old AMD & no way of ever going back - well I'm not prepared to pay Redmond again!

Then, up popped Xubuntu 10.10, which along with #!9.04.1 sustained me while I waited impatiently for Julia, which now has me waiting impatiently for a FluxBox/OpenBox version, which I'll probably end up doing myself, although LinuxMint has this strange knack of making the GNOME desktop very pleasing to me.

I have learned exponentially over the past year! I imagine I'll stay with LinuxMint - if what it does with Ubuntu is anything to go by, then I have no doubt of how the pure Debian version will develop.

[azathoth]

I've been a computer enthusiast since the late 80s. In the late 90s I was attending school here at MHCC on a CS major of which I only completed 2 years because of a family tragedy. I also taught myself a decent amount of x86 Assembly and C, so I've done a lot of reading. I first got intrigued by reading some of Mark Ludwig's earlier stuff and as he illustrated how easy it was to take control of a Windows network he also mentioned that he preferred Slackware for personal use. Well, this dude is a freaking physicist who has also written two of the best tutorials on Assembly Language ever written and pretty much a genius, so I wanted to know more. The Internet was young, I had dialup and so I researched the whats and whys. Then I found that all the dudes on CultDeadCow (old hacker's site) were all also using either FreeBSD or Slack. And so even though I was using Windows at the time I was very curious about the alternatives, because even then the crap was starting to really irritate me. So Linux was always an appealing idea to me.

I had also been doing computer repair and upgrade for while by this time and was experiencing other people's "Windows moments" all the time. When people would bring me a box to repair, it was rarely a hardware failure. (I used to use regedit a lot more than a screwdriver.) To compound things, I had started to help out at a couple of security forums and then later, Wilders. And between employment and volunteer work I was getting really fed up with this nonsense.

Most of the issues were usually the result of ignorance on the user's part and very faulty design on the part of m$ which left the door open for the dumb-dumb to walk through or let some asshole in. So for the last decade and a half my biggest complaint was putting an inherently faulty and insecure product out there and then targeting the marketing to those who were the least able to maintain it.

I personally don't like using Windows, compared to any of the Linux installs I've had it's slow, bloated and clumsy in any flavor right out of the box. I have DVDs for XP Pro, Vista and w7, I've used them all and it's all garbage. Some people think it's shiny and pretty- Yeah, it glistens with promise like a festering boil.

Anyway, what kept me using Windows was work and complacency. And what got me to try Linux for the first time was I just got to the point where enough was enough. I just burned out on the stupidity of the whole thing.
I first tried Ubuntu March of this year (took me a while) and I loved it and I understood it. Everything was so much more efficient and it all made total sense to me. --Although I feel compelled to add here, that I don't use Ubuntu or Ubuntu respins anymore, it's an okay place to start but there's a lot more things out there that are a lot better.-- I formatted my Windows install a week later. It was a whole new thing to learn about and I love to learn and explore. I mean, I've been having a blast. I'm picking stuff up super fast, I've been told, and I plan on building my first LFS next month. After that I want to build a BSD from source. I will have all this done before I've been using Linux for one year. Hopefully I'll be doing Linux administration someday, those dudes make bank, something like 50% more than a mcse and they actually know something instead of just memorizing that stupid Networking Essentials.(which seriously narrows your employment options)

Whatever happens, I'm having a lot of fun with it and I wouldn't go back for anything.

[JonM33]

I discovered actual Unix back in 1998 when I was in 3C0X1 technical school in the US Air Force. The basic Unix course was given to us because there were military systems that used Unix. That particular subject was basically a few day crash course on using Unix commands. It was around the same time that we were shown DOS commands - of which I already knew like the back of my hand so Unix commands sort of made more sense. I saw a little more in 1998 when I went to Korea and got some hands on with Sun SPARC servers running Solaris. Then I never touched anything *nix again until 2007 when I had a co-worker using Ubuntu. He was a network admin and refused to use Windows XP. Anyway, it peaked my interest and I started messing around with Ubuntu in a VM. I eventually put PCLinuxOS on a Dell Latitude D400. It just went from there with different distros.

What's funny is that when you learn command line and don't use it for a very long time, going back to it is just like riding a bike.

[paulo.delavega]

The first time I actually used Linux was back on 2002, a brazilian distro called Techlinux.
I double booted it with XP and it worked fine, but it wouldn't recognize my soundboard nor my modem. So, after a few months, I gave up and switched back to XP.

This year, my old pc died and I decided to buy a new one and give the famous Ubuntu a try. Not for my surprise, I really enjoyed it. Then, discovering other great distros was just a step away. Now I'm very happy with Julia. Still have W7 double booted, but rarely use it.

The greatest part, I'm never going to spend any money with Windows again

[willie42]

I first ran into Redhat 9 in Bestbuys. I dont remember the year but anyways I bought it and played with it off and on for a couple of years. then 2004 when I was in college had a Linux class which was also with Redhat 9. I was on XP and happy at that point and then I was searching the web and found Gloria and played with it for a while. Had a few issues with it so went back to XP then downloaded 8 and my video would not cooperate so it went into my archieve of CDs for later. After 30 Application crashes with MS office and Vista I was so over it. I so I searched and seen LM9 and now I only boot to the broken Vista when I have to work on a computer. My main systems are Linux mint 9 on my office PC and my regular PC has 10. my Laptop shares XFCE with a tiny partition of XP talking XP has 9 gig and Linux has the rest. I dont intend on going back to windows.

[filosofem666]

I first "discovered" Linux via a friend of mine way back in 2001. At that time Linux was pretty much off-limits to non-techies like myself, but after hours and hours of learning, I did manage to build an almost perfect desktop system. A mistaken switch from CLE (Chinese Linux Extension) to Red Hat ruined it, however, and with the adoption of Windows 2000, my enthusiasm gradually waned. It was not until last year, when I was looking for a backup OS for my laptop, that I returned to the Linux world. Sadly, the aforementioned friend has long switched to Mac OS X and I am the only one I personally know who uses Linux.