When did you come to Linux?

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BG405
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Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by BG405 »

kenetics wrote: Fri Mar 02, 2018 5:08 pm Are there any more '06ers still active here?
2016 here, so 10 years missed. :|

Although I knew of Linux from the Mandrake & Red Hat days I didn't venture into Linux until early 2016, when I was looking for a way to rescue a borked Linx 7 tablet. First Linux distro I tried was LM17.3 Cinnamon and liked what I saw, in fact so much so that I pulled the old Dell 1525 from behind the sofa and gleefully selected "Erase disk and install Linux Mint" blowing away Vista. That very quickly became my fileserver, media centre and workstation.

Then swapped the hard disk in my Toshiba NB305 and installed LM17.3 Cinnamon 32-bit (It now runs Xfce). Even with a single-core Atom N455 and 1GB RAM, it was a pleasure to use, SO much more responsive than Win7 ever was. So I abandoned my initial idea of setting up a dual-boot on my better-spec. Acer D255E (N570, dual core 1.66GHz, 2GB RAM fitted) and went for a single-boot LM17.3 KDE system. I had planned on waiting for the end of the Win10 stealth downgrade period then reinstalling Win7 which was killed by my flatbed scanner. I'd done a test install of Win7 which I booted before the wipe and its incredibly slow startup, then complaining about my genuine licence key, confirmed my decision to get rid of it for good & stick with Linux Mint as my OS. This needs the hinge fixing now but is my travelling companion so not all that surprising. :mrgreen:

The rest, as they say, is history.
Dell Inspiron 1525 - LM17.3 CE 64-------------------Lenovo T440 - Manjaro KDE with Mint VMs
Toshiba NB250 - Manjaro KDE------------------------Acer Aspire One D255E - LM21.3 Xfce
Acer Aspire E11 ES1-111M - LM18.2 KDE 64 ----Two ROMS don't make a WRITE
lexon

Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by lexon »

Around Dec. 2003. I bought a Desktop PC from Walmart with Lindows OS on it. Upgraded over the years and long gone. Only use laptops now. Story in the bottom of my messages.
Much of the time, on my iPhone.
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MurphCID
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Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by MurphCID »

Wow Lindows, I have not heard that name for a long time. That IS a blast from the past.

lexon wrote: Tue Mar 06, 2018 5:18 pm Around Dec. 2003. I bought a Desktop PC from Walmart with Lindows OS on it. Upgraded over the years and long gone. Only use laptops now. Story in the bottom of my messages.
Much of the time, on my iPhone.
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Bolle1961
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Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by Bolle1961 »

MurphCID wrote: Sun Mar 11, 2018 11:15 am Wow Lindows, I have not heard that name for a long time. That IS a blast from the past.
An other blast from the past :roll: :roll:
https://youtu.be/V4-Z_nJvGsM
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Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by lsemmens »

I still have a copy of Red Hat from the 90s somewhere, never did install it. My first foray was an early version of Ubuntu but it did not play well with my hardware so moved back to that "other" OS. I tried on and off over the years until I finally found that this version of Mint works with my hardware with minimal trouble. So, have only been "serious" for about a week. :D
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Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by Arch_Enemy »

Bolle1961 wrote: Sun Mar 11, 2018 1:04 pm
MurphCID wrote: Sun Mar 11, 2018 11:15 am Wow Lindows, I have not heard that name for a long time. That IS a blast from the past.
An other blast from the past :roll: :roll:
https://youtu.be/V4-Z_nJvGsM
LOL! Nice tune. Linspire was uninspiring...
I have travelled 37629424162.9 miles in my lifetime

One thing I would suggest, create a partition as a 50G partition as /. Partition the rest as /Home. IF the system fails, reinstall and use the exact same username and all your 'stuff' comes back to you.
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Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by mediclaser »

It was mid-June of 2016 when I first tried using Linux. :D
If you're looking for a greener Linux pasture, you won't find any that is greener than Linux Mint. ;)
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Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by coffee412 »

I did with the 2.0.36 kernel. Puts me about 1996.

Thanks. Now I feel really old!

:)
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Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by MurphCID »

I did some digging, and it was Mandrake Linux 7.1 that got me started. I remember the box. I remember it with some fondness.
Penn

Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by Penn »

Short answer to the topic - When? When it was finally something that could be installed by a non-developer.

When I first heard about it not long after it had officially acquired the name "Linux" I looked into it and decided it couldn't do what I needed.

Next looked into it again and heard about Damn Small Linux being something you didn't need to dedicate a computer to since it could boot form a CD. Still didn't work. I started researching to get it to work and I didn't feel a desire to join some group just to have developers be rude and condescending to someone that just wanted to learn and experiment. (at this time I had even re-written drivers from old OSs to newer more than once and a few other things that would impress average users but knew I didn't know enough to satisfy the elitists)

Revisited about a year later. Someone happened to post step by step instructions to create a bootable CD on almost the same machine as I was using. Got Damn Small Linux running but it didn't run right on that machine. More reading and all the major distros back then said the same, that chipset just wasn't going to work. The apparent change in the Linux community at this time was reassuring that some day this Linux thing could be doable but there was still some amount of elitist mentality.

Tried again when I first heard about dual boot and still the same. It was a different machine but still didn't work right. At that time I was still building my own machines and I didn't want to buy all hardware based on some obscure OS when I could buy anything and it would work on the biggest name OS.

Overheating was going to be an issue for the Toshiba laptop I bought not long after Windows 7 service pack 1 came out and, again, no one had an answer to stop this.

For quite some time after that I just stuck to my Mac Mini and the Toshiba laptop and just never thought about Linux. When I finally got new machine (factory built desktop, gasp) I decided to try again, this time deciding I would really commit and LEARN everything I need to know. That was just about a week before joining here and I didn't need to learn anything to just install it. Burned a disc, booted, installed. Simple. Still had the Mac Mini and decided to try with that. No problem (don't use it but wanted to try).

Two months after that I reached a point where I just didn't need anything else. Even with that the last thing was just deciding Rhythmbox with a bunch of plugins was something I was willing to SETTLE for since no media player in Linux came even close to Winamp or MediaMonkey.

Oh, I did have to boot Windows to update my GPS. Other than that I have only booted Windows to make sure the updates are applied in case I need to use it for some reason later or, once, to talk a person through installing a printer while I was on the phone with them. I have still used it enough to fix a few other people's computers but haven't converted anyone.
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Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by Arch_Enemy »

Penn wrote: Wed May 02, 2018 11:57 am

Two months after that I reached a point where I just didn't need anything else. Even with that the last thing was just deciding Rhythmbox with a bunch of plugins was something I was willing to SETTLE for since no media player in Linux came even close to Winamp or MediaMonkey.
Have you tried QMMP? It's the follow up to XMMS and it quite WinAmp-like.
AFAIK, WinAmp skins even work with it.
I have travelled 37629424162.9 miles in my lifetime

One thing I would suggest, create a partition as a 50G partition as /. Partition the rest as /Home. IF the system fails, reinstall and use the exact same username and all your 'stuff' comes back to you.
rado84

Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by rado84 »

On the day I registered here. :) This was a few years ago. But back in those days no Linux distro (Mint included) was what it is now, so I stayed with Windows during that time. Not to mention there were some major issues that I managed to fix or circumvent only in the past month, so that I can use Linux normally. The first one is quite an old issue, starting with Ubuntu 10.10 - all the files on my main NTFS partition (where all of my music, games and movies are) appeared as "Picture CD" and for this reason that partition was accessible only as read-only and only for text files. If I wanted to listen to music, I had to copy it to the Linux partition. Surely you can understand that with having this issue using Linux for me was out of the question. And only recently I discovered this problem was caused by some stupid plugin in the default program - either for burning CDs or for viewing images. On Ubuntu 10.10 it was Brasero, on other distroes it was Pix. I tried to disable that plugin but these programs had the option for that greyed out, so disabling it was impossible. Then I discovered that FINALLY the developers of Linux have made it possible for the default programs to be completely removed from Linux. So, long story short - removing the default program fixed the main problem I had with all Linux distroes. Which left me with the other problem preventing me from liking Linux - the distortion I had with all distroes and it took several hours of digging through Google to finally get an idea of how to fix it. But before I chose a distro I liked the most, I tried about a dozen distroes: all Ubuntu, all Mint, all Fedora, all Debians I could find, even some Red Hat, Zorin-morin, PCLinuxOS and a few others. From all I tried Mint Cinnamon agreed with me the most. And now that all the problems are gone, I'm fully enjoying Linux. I was even amazed of how fast it detected my phone when I attached it to the computer. :shock: Windows needs more than 2 minutes for that.
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Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by MurphCID »

The Arch linux users seem to have the same issues now that I encountered back then in the early days of Linux. They remind me of the Debian zealots back in the day. Thank goodness for Mint, it just works.
jaymot

Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by jaymot »

Mine was an entirely different experience than that of MurphCID. I started playing with Linux back in the 1990s before there were such things as distributions: there was only Linux. You downloaded tarballs and unarchived them in your /etc, /var, etc. directories which you created by hand. I got my first Linux over a 2400 baud Hayes modem dial-up link to an internal corporate Internet gateway that I found when I was working for Ma Bell and saved everything to floppies which I then took home. I must have had six or seven boxes worth of floppies, mostly reused AOL ones! :)

My first distro IIRC was Soft Landing Software or something like that, the precursor to Slackware, that I got on a CD from a company called Morse that among other things sold SLS Linux CD distros. They were getting ready to start selling a newer version and still had a few version 1.0 CDs left, and in the spirit of free software they offered to give them to the first X number of people who replied to their message in Usenet to ask for one, until they were all gone. I got the second to the last one, or maybe it was the last.

I remember when I had problems with a certain thingamajig in Linux once and posted a question in the Usenet group (I think it was still comp.os.linux or something like that) and the developer himself replied and helped me out. Those were the good old days! Back before there was such a thing as spam, even. The very devs hung out on Usenet and helped the lowly end-(l)users in those days.

Heck, I remember when XFree86 was new and you had to manually edit its config files with your monitor's various clock rates, and if you got them wrong you could destroy your monitor. (I did once, too.) When KDE and Gnome were released it was a big deal: the very concept of a unified, Windowslike desktop manager instead of just an Xterminal emulator. Wow! (I kind of miss Neko chasing my mouse cursor around though.)

I also remember reading a message by some guy that thought that Linux was great and wanted to help out but he wasn't a coder or anything, so all he could offer was a bit of artwork that he made, sort of a Linux logo that Linus Torvalds was free to use: a cartoon penguin named Tux. (Jeez, I sound like that guy that talks about all the mad things he's seen then says "Time to die"!)

Linux was always just kind of a toy for me though, and my own computers either ran just windows or (more usually) were dual-boot, until about six or seven years ago when I decided to finally go Windows-free. My wife hated Linux at first, but she got used to it before long and stopped complaining (I did discuss the change with her and got approval before I did it. I didn't just surprise her with a new OS one day, just FYI.)
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Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by MurphCID »

It is funny as long as I don't tell my Dad he is using LINUX, he is great with "that great WIndows XP laptop" I got for him. I don't tell him it is Mint 18.2 running cinnamon.
Ascaris

Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by Ascaris »

First tried Linux in the form of Ubuntu "Feisty Fawn," on my old Compaq laptop (Turion single core CPU, 15 inch 5:4), which I still have and still works, btw (now with Mint Xfce 32-bit 18.3). I knew nothing of Linux, but was able to get wifi and everything else I can think of working, which was a bit of a thrill at the time, but I wasn't particularly motivated to get away from XP at that point. Something happened and I had to restore a backup, and (as is still common now) GRUB got messed up, and I wasn't really interested in finding out how to fix it, so I just got rid of it (while keeping the backup and fully intending to restore it later, which never actually happened).

I tried Linux again in 2015. When Windows 10 was released that year, I hated it, but I foolishly thought Microsoft would fix it eventually when they heard what customers thought. Still, in the "unlikely" event they chose not to do that, I thought it was time I started learning about Linux, just in case. I installed Kubuntu (having heard good things about KDE), but had no end of issues with it; after giving up on it for issues that I am pretty sure I could fix with what I know now, I tried Mint KDE and found that it worked brilliantly out of the box.

I kept KDE and 10 installed as a dual-boot setup on my "test" PC, a Sandy i5 not unlike my "main" desktop (which I am using now to write this), which is also a Sandy i5 but with a higher-end variant of the same motherboard (Asus P8P67) and some other improvements. I kept Windows 7 on my main desktop and my laptop (Core 2 Duo) for the time being.

The purpose of Mint KDE was to get used to Linux; the purpose of 10 was to monitor it and see when it got close to being usable for me. To my surprise, it never actually got any better... it got worse. Each new update seemed to be full of trash no one had asked for, but at the cost of user control over his own PC. It was clear where Microsoft "wanted to go today," which was to a place where it was king and the user's computer (every user's computer) was the kingdom. It was a steady drumbeat of loss of user control in an OS that was short on user control right from the start.

That was when I gave up on 10 and repurposed the SSD I had in the test PC into a boot device for Linux on my main PC (alongside the SSD I already have in there as a Windows boot device). With 10 showing no signs of ever becoming decent, I was going to have to do better than just running Linux on a test PC every now and then (or in a VM, for that matter). I was going to have to use it on hardware I already knew well, so that I could compare and contrast and know how it's supposed to run so I can know if it's working well or just working. I'd have to try to do everything in Linux, migrating all my stuff over there on my own schedule, but eventually beginning the phase-out of Windows, which I by then knew was all but inevitable.

I also repartitioned the drive in my laptop to make room for Linux, for the same reason. Since Mint isn't the pig with regard to drive space that Windows is, I at first made small partitions; root, home, and swap.

I tried Mint KDE at first for both, but there were some annoyances (which I can no longer remember) which made me look elsewhere. I tried all the DEs available in Mint, and Cinnamon was the one that struck me as being just right. I put it on both PCs, and that's what I am still using now on both. At some point I upgraded the Windows to 8.1 (gives me more time to migrate before the drop-dead date, but now I know I don't need it) on both PCs, alongside Mint.

Over time, the home and root partitions on the laptop's drive have gotten bigger and bigger as I shrunk the Windows ones and reallocated the space to Linux. There's so much room on the desktop that I haven't had to bother with any of that.

I now consider Mint the primary OS and Windows the secondary one on both of those PCs.

I also bought a cheap Dell 11 inch laptop in December of last year. It's a Chromebook in everything except the OS, and has only a 32GB eMMC storage device which cannot be upgraded. It's too small for even the Windows 10 with which it came, but I knew that when I bought it. I never intended to keep it on there long enough to see it fail to update (as many of the 32GB Win 10 laptops were). I wiped it and put Mint (Cinnamon x64, as usual) on it, and it runs very well, and still has two thirds of its internal storage free (/home is encrypted and on the removable microSD) despite having all Mint came with and some other things I put on, like Waterfox. For the time being, it's my only pure Linux machine, though the plan is to go that way with the rest of them too.
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Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by BG405 »

Ascaris wrote: Fri May 25, 2018 2:43 am 32GB eMMC storage device
Same storage as one I was given a while back, with a borked Win10 installation, possibly due to this:
Ascaris wrote: Fri May 25, 2018 2:43 am I never intended to keep it on there long enough to see it fail to update (as many of the 32GB Win 10 laptops were).
If you keep an eye on /var/cache/apt/archives/ and get rid of old packages, likewise removing old kernels, you should be OK.
Dell Inspiron 1525 - LM17.3 CE 64-------------------Lenovo T440 - Manjaro KDE with Mint VMs
Toshiba NB250 - Manjaro KDE------------------------Acer Aspire One D255E - LM21.3 Xfce
Acer Aspire E11 ES1-111M - LM18.2 KDE 64 ----Two ROMS don't make a WRITE
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Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by ajgreeny »

I came to Linux in July 2005 with Ubuntu 5.04 (can't remember its code name) and have been with either variations of Ubuntu, mainly Xubuntu, since then. I have no need for any proprietary applications that run on Windows or Mac only so do not miss those OSs in any way.
I installed Mint on my wife's machine as a test, also many years ago, when Vista was on her laptop and became so slow as to make it almost unusable. That worked very well also, but by then I was more used to Ubuntu so when that Mint version lost support I installed Ubuntu on her computer as well.
I still always look at Mint versions when they appear and try them as VMs in Virtualbox, but I'm sorry to tell this forum that I prefer the straight *ubuntu family OSs; I'm not quite sure why, but that's the situation in our household.
houninym

Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by houninym »

I come to Linux from UNIX... Digital Unix, HPUX, Solaris, AIX, Sequent, ICL Unix... and first installed Linux for serious use with Ubuntu 5.04. The company I worked for wouldn't allow me to bring a windows laptop on-site but had no rules about Linux ones and they wanted me to be mobile but only provided a desktop.

Moved to Mint when Unity became the default interface in Ubuntu (10.4?). I hated Unity, it really didn't work well on a SVGA laptop, too much space went on fluff round the edges and I couldn't be bothered to de-unity it when there were distros with prettier desktops. And I hated the macification of the Unity interface.

Commercially moved to Linux roles probably around 2003,had too many years being a UNIX professional before that!
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Re: When did you come to Linux?

Post by Arch_Enemy »

houninym wrote: Sun May 27, 2018 9:32 am I come to Linux from UNIX... Digital Unix, HPUX, Solaris, AIX, Sequent, ICL Unix... and first installed Linux for serious use with Ubuntu 5.04. The company I worked for wouldn't allow me to bring a windows laptop on-site but had no rules about Linux ones and they wanted me to be mobile but only provided a desktop.

Moved to Mint when Unity became the default interface in Ubuntu (10.4?). I hated Unity, it really didn't work well on a SVGA laptop, too much space went on fluff round the edges and I couldn't be bothered to de-unity it when there were distros with prettier desktops. And I hated the macification of the Unity interface.

Commercially moved to Linux roles probably around 2003,had too many years being a UNIX professional before that!
Digital Unix...VMS? My word, how old ARE you?!?!

Why I remember running a PDP11...er...never mind...:D
I have travelled 37629424162.9 miles in my lifetime

One thing I would suggest, create a partition as a 50G partition as /. Partition the rest as /Home. IF the system fails, reinstall and use the exact same username and all your 'stuff' comes back to you.
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