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wanted to ask a question to all fellow board members. How did you all finally discover the Linux OS.
for me it was a quick trip to the local computer store. In the book section i glanced at the new magazines and noticed some new one touting a new Linux distro called Ubuntu and purchased the item. Went home and installed it on a old dell desktop pc and the rest is history 2 years later.
I now run 2 machines 1 with Linux Mint & the other with Linux Ubuntu and enjoy them both.
I meant to move this topic here and somehow deleted it in the process. apologies kidflash!!
anyway the quote above is the post.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason:Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
Trying to get away from windows , security issues mostly which lead me to linux, tried ubuntu 9.04 for couple of days but just didnt have everything i needed. but ubuntu i stuck with 9.10 then mint 8 then mint 9 and now using ubuntu 10.10 til mint 10 comes out.
I discovered Linux back in 2000. I had just "upgraded" my windows 98 to windows me.
well, I hated it. a few days later I was in staples looking at software and saw something wonderful.
it was Redhat 7 in a box!! I took it home, installed it and never looked back!!
over the years I bounced around distro wise and have finally settled with Linuxmint 9, LMDE and Arch.
my hopping days are over
First tried Linux back in May 2003. Windows XP was still pretty new and I was still jazzed with that, and at the time didn't think much of the Linux distro I tried. I don't even remember what distro it was. Then last January I bought a new laptop and wasn't that impressed with Windows 7 so I did a lot of reading about different distros and installed Mint 8. I immediately knew that Mint was "the one". Still tried some other distros but always wiped them and kept using Mint. The day LMDE was released I downloaded it and have no desire to try any other distro again.
Back in 2003 l was talking to my cousin and expressing the accolades of XP to him. He sort of wrinkled up his nose at me so l asked why. He said he used Macs but liked Unix the best. He had used NextStep which was a product of Steve Jobs and his cronies. My curiosity got the best of me and l started to explore the net looking for Unix. It seemed interesting enough but I wasn't interested enough to go back to something like Dos. I kept seaching for something more graphical and came across Linux in the form of Xandros and bought it right away and started on my adventure. After breaking Xandros several times I tried others until I found Mepis which become my main distro. Finally I had a small sound issue with Mepis and my card and tried Mint which happily didn't have the same issue and now Mint is my main distro.
I don't hop around much anymore and as long as Mint does the job l will stay right where I am at.
Just to let the younger crowd that may come here and say they can't learn Linux, I am 62 and had absolutely no formal computer training and l can do it ... I get even more aggressive in life experiences when someone says l can't do something ... That word and l never ever got along very well ... But l know a lot of people that really love to use it.
I remember reading something about it online back in 1999 but was basically happy with 98SE . With a forced upgrade to ME I remeber seeing Mandrake SUSE and redhat in best buy and wally world tried Mandrake for a couple weeks and disliked it more than ME. Didn't look at linux again till i got this laptop with vista about 3 years ago tried ubuntu a couple times and wasn't impressed. when i ran across mint 8 just after it was released i knew i found a distro I liked set up dual boot started using it more and more. when i upgraded to 9 i started spending up to 90 % of my time in linux and abandoned windos back around the first of August. I've tried a few other distros in dual boot but mint is my first choice and it would have to be something pretty spectacular to get me to switch. Saying that I am dual booting peppermint one it's there primaraly for when I loan my lappy to my somewhat technophobic 75 year old mother to check her gmail and do the ccasional search . peppermint confuses her less than the gnome desktop in mint .
hoe wrote:Back in 2003 l was talking to my cousin and expressing the accolades of XP to him. He sort of wrinkled up his nose at me so l asked why. He said he used Macs but liked Unix the best. He had used NextStep which was a product of Steve Jobs and his cronies. My curiosity got the best of me and l started to explore the net looking for Unix. It seemed interesting enough but I wasn't interested enough to go back to something like Dos. I kept seaching for something more graphical and came across Linux in the form of Xandros and bought it right away and started on my adventure. After breaking Xandros several times I tried others until I found Mepis which become my main distro. Finally I had a small sound issue with Mepis and my card and tried Mint which happily didn't have the same issue and now Mint is my main distro.
I don't hop around much anymore and as long as Mint does the job l will stay right where I am at.
Just to let the younger crowd that may come here and say they can't learn Linux, I am 62 and had absolutely no formal computer training and l can do it ... I get even more aggressive in life experiences when someone says l can't do something ... That word and l never ever got along very well ... But l know a lot of people that really love to use it.
Wayne
i was also somewhat afraid to try thinking that i might not be able to handle it. but after the struggles with windows vista i searched for something else to fall back on. it took some time but i also tried to learn as i went and to my surprise i found it easier to run Linux than new windows machines. not knocking widows at all but the last version did not sit well with my taste.
i also found it refreshing to try and learn something new.
Was annoyed by Microsoft deceptive advertising, especially vis-a-vis Netware, as not being an application server but only a file server ??
--and their dismissal of directory services, simply because they (Microsoft) didn't have any at that time, circa 1986-1998
Had already for person for use moved to Linux and *bsd
--circa early 1990's
Later taught a course that included minix (Tannenbaum book) and OS design
Decided to stay with Linux, although I also dabbled with *bsd
--found that Linux development was proceeding faster
I think I can surpass the age of the posts on this topic so far...
I think it was back around 1994 or so. I was running my Amiga OS, and I *think* that web browsers were not yet available for it yet. However, I heard that a 'free' operating system called 'Linux' had a graphical web browser available for it (Mosaic?), and that I could download the OS and run it on Amiga OS -- for 'free' ("oh, this 'unix' stuff is cool!"). I managed to do so, and then when I bought my first 'PC', I started buying the 'Slackware' CD sets (cheap and practical before broadband internet was common). I think I still have those initial sets. What soon followed was 'Redhat' on CD, which years later turned into 'Fedora'. Then -- much more recently -- I was looking for an 'easy to use' distro for my mom, and ran into 'Mint Linux'. Well, the rest is history!
Sometimes I feel a bit guilty from coming from those days of compiling my own kernels -- to get the features that I wanted/needed -- and tweaking Xorg config files for the frequencies of my monitors. It just seems too darn *easy* these days for people just getting into Linux
Equally humorous to me is how 'good' I was at configuring 'dial up' internet connections under Linux in the 'olden days' -- now, in the last week or so, I have had to 're-learn' how to do that (since I wanted to be able to help potential Linux converts that only had that choice). Of course, even that is very easy now as well -- no more tweaking 'ppp' scripts!
LarryP wrote:ISaying that I am dual booting peppermint one it's there primaraly for when I loan my lappy to my somewhat technophobic 75 year old mother to check her gmail and do the ccasional search . peppermint confuses her less than the gnome desktop in mint .
At least you are keeping it in the family. Kendall based Peppermint on Linux Mint.
i was at my parents house in flordia and they had a room rented out to a computer engineer that had just moved in the area but wasnt going to stay for more than a year or so. i was heavy in to windows at the time and he told me about linux probally about 3-4 years ago when me and him were putting some computers together so i built a computer that i didnt have windows on and put linux on it tried it out on there and fully switched to linux about 2 years ago and havent touched windows other than office computers in about that long as well
I'd been in a dysfunctional relationship with Vista for about 18 months - I hated it and was convinced it hated me...
I'd read about Linux on tech blogs and thought it sounded interesting.
One day after I'd seen the Vista BSOD for the 14th time in about 6 hours I took the plunge and installed Ubuntu 8.04 - much better,but not perfect.
A few weeks later I tried Open SUSE,looked good but I didn't get on well with RPM.
Then on a tech blog I saw screenshots of Mint 7 - as soon as I'd verified it didn't use the dreaded RPM that was it,I had to have it.
That was 14 months ago - I now run Mint 9,LMDE and Crunchbang Statler
I too am from a completely non-technical background - academic background in Arts and Humanities,work background in administration,never needed to do anything more complex than type a memo.
I'm also a late starter - I didn't get a computer until I was well into middle-age and I'm completely self-taught,which means I can sometimes do fairly complex things but manage to get stuck doing the simple stuff...
Two things really.
I am way too curious, and bad luck...
No kidding? I saw a slackware 4-disc box in a local computer store in '95, and my curiosity got the better of me. Just think about all that time I could have used for drinking and smashing up bars instead...
Now I used it peaceful in front of the computer screen
In the book section i glanced at the new magazines and noticed some new one touting a new Linux distro called Ubuntu and purchased the item
I was in the local newsagent, & saw a UK magazine, with a bunch of CDs glued onto the cover.
That was Mandrake 10.0 CE, & as they say, they rest is history.
Please edit your original post title to include [SOLVED] - when your problem is solved!
and DO LOOK at those Unanswered Topics - - you may be able to answer some!.
When I found out about Firefox, that was the first time I'd heard the term "open source." So I started trying out different freeware and open source apps in XP. Hunting around for those is how I found out about Linux.
I had never owned a PC until the summer or 2008. PCs, to me, had always been work tools (work=electronic power supply and battery charger design and testing), using DOS 2.0, that I had little interest in using for recreational purposes. I finally broke down and bought a system in July 2008, just to see what all the hoopla was about. That system ( a Dell Inspiron 530S desktop unit) came with Windows Vista SP1 installed. I had not used any version of Windows extensively and had been trained only on Windows 3.1 so I was a total newb.
After using Vista for a couple of months, I bought a laptop with XP Pro installed. I found I liked XP much more than Vista so I converted everything I owned to XP. While searching EBay for reliable sources for XP install disks, I kept seeing these OS install disks offered for almost no cost for things called Ubuntu, Fedora, Open Suse, Debian, etc. This intrigued me as, at this time, I was buying, upgrading, and reselling laptops locally and Windows installs were getting expensive.
I spent a couple of months doing research on Linux and different distros. Since Ubuntu was the "BIG THING", I ordered a disk of Ubuntu 8.10 and installed it on my desktop in dual boot with XP. Of course I had the normal newbie problems with transitioning from Windows to Linux. This soured me so much on Ubuntu that for over a month I never booted into it.
During this time I read several articles and reviews that had very good things to say about Linux Mint. I bought a CD of Mint 6 Felicia on EBay in January 2009, and installed it over Ubuntu. Within 2 weeks it became my primary OS and has been ever since.
I quickly learned to download and burn my own live CDs and DVDs. Once I had this skill, I started distro hopping (always dual booting with Mint). Tried all versions of Mint, retried Ubuntu (still not crazy about it), PCLinuxOS, Freespire, Puppy, etc for about half a page. Always returned to Mint Gnome or Xfce, (sometimes LXDE or LMDE). I do not care for KDE.
I have learned a lot in the last 18 months and am learning more every day.
I was in the Electronics department of a Wal-Mart in 1998 and saw a disk titled "Complete Idiot's Guide Linux". I bought it, tried it and was not very impressed but started following the development of Linux. Then in 2003 I got involved as an investor and manager in an Internet Service in Belize which used Mandrake as its OS. That made me more aware of the problems with Windows security and subsequently I started using Mandrake myself, then Mepis, Ubuntu and finally Mint in 2007. But since I am an engineer and do some CAD and other engineering programs only available for DOS or Windows I still use Windows in a dual boot manner with Mint.
I discovered Linux on Tech TV years ago. Leo Laporte talked about Linux and provided enough information to successfully get it installed. Back in those days Linux was not so easy to install. My first successful install was with Caldara but my modem did not work, so it was just something to play with in my spare time. Mepis was the first distribution I ran full time. I was amazed at how well Mepis ran and Linux became my main operating system. The Mepis CD was in "Point and Click Linux" or something like that, I installed it before I even finished reading the book. I have never looked back.
A little over a year ago, I was getting really frustrated with Vista. It had slowed down to a crawl, and this was on a pretty darn good machine. Someone mentioned to me that their brother was a computer geek and greatly preferred Linux-based OS's. So I started doing some research. I found that Linux Mint was the OS most recommended for the newbie. That was LM 7 Gloria. I installed it and loved it from day one. After about 2 months, I wiped Windows off of my hard drive and installed it in a VM as I needed Quickbooks for work. Since then, I haven't even considered using Windows as my main OS (and I get so frustrated when I have to do something on my wife's Windows-based PC; she has to have Windows for some of the apps that she needs in homeschooling our kids.) Anyway, I have tried more distros than I can count, but I always come back to LM. Right now, I am running LMDE, but having experienced LMDE, my next plan is to setup a dual-boot with LMDE and Debian XFCE. I have played around with Debian XFCE in a VM, but I really want to try it as run directly from the HD. Anyway, that's how I got here.
, security issues mostly which lead me to linux, tried ubuntu 9.04 for couple of days but just didnt have everything i needed. but ubuntu i stuck with 9.10 then mint 8 then mint 9 and now using ubuntu 10.10 til mint 10 comes out.
