I’ve started with lubuntu 11.10 on a Pentium 4. I was 11. Time flies!

I messed around with Linspire in the early 2000s after seeing a segment about it on The Screen Savers (on TechTV). It was about Microsoft suing them for originally calling the OS "Lindows", so called because it was among the first OSes designed to attract people who are used to Windows.

I believe that it was among the first distros to induce the concept of app stores to Linux, and since I couldn't figure out how tar.gz files worked at the time, it sounded like a good idea to me. Used it for about a year or three, before moving onto Ubuntu for many years then eventually Arch.

And now I'm back on Windows again because I bought an HDR display and learned the hard way that Linux has terrible support for it. Can't get the HDR intensity slider to work properly in KDE, and there's no SDR-to-HDR conversion at all in Linux, which means no AutoHDR and no RTX HDR. So in the meantime I'm dual booting Win11 and Arch, but I find myself using Windows more and more because it's HDR support keeps getting better and better, especially if you have an nVidia GPU.

Around '99 or '00. A friend of mine was gifted a Linux Magazine subscription and made me a copy of the CD. It was noteworthy at the time because it didn't have any copy protection and we were neck deep in piracy, keeping our friend group supplied with copies of games that we pulled off of IRC.

Getting a CD full of software that made no effort to prevent copying was intriguing enough that we sacrificed a spare machine one weekend (giving up the ability to play LAN StarCraft!) to see what another operating system looked like.

We tinkered on and off for a year, once we could get dual boot working (thanks to the IRC crowd) we used it a bit more often. Mostly ricing, though that wasn't a term at the time, and playing with the hacking tools (for educational purposes only, of course).

I think there was some copy protection mode that was annoying to write on Windows but trivially easy on Linux, which was the first time that I can remember where it was just better than Windows. That, and ARP poisoning our LAN parties to packet capture and read people's AIM and ICQ conversations because we were little shits.

I think my very first exposure to Linux was when I got a Pi 3 for Christmas when I was 10; by next year, I was trying out Ubuntu 16.04 in a VM.

However, it took several years before I began daily-driving; I had thrown it on an old laptop during my sophomore year of high school that I mostly used from the couch.

I then did a “test install” of Debian Testing on my main desktop pater that year, which just became what I used every day and quickly just became my main operating system.

I soon installed it on everything else I owned and haven’t looked back.

Kudos gentoo colleague! Its the best distro all around.

I started when I was less than 18. It was some prehistoric redhat, like redhat 0.1 or such (joking, but really, it was the '90s)

Then around -can't remember- guess 18 or 19. It was Linux From Scratches because... Gentoo didn't exist back then...

Gentoo has been love at first sight and still today I only use gentoo everywhere. Servers, laptops, mediacenters....

I even ported gentoo on an android tablet 10 years ago.

I remember quite well burning an Ubuntu 9.04 Live CD, and before that trying an ancient Knoppix Live CD that my dad had laying in a drawer. I must have been 15 back then.

I started robotics at 12, started linux aroumd the same time but had to use windows for the program used for robotics competitions,

Stopped attending them at 14 so started using arch right after that and used it for 6 years.

After that used gentoo for a year at 20, and now I'm 21 using nixos.

I also started selfhosting with linix vps-s at around the age of 18, with debian. And last week started to move all my server to nixos with nixos-anywhere and deploying the server with deploy-rs.

Might make a blogpost on my selfhosting journey and on how I use nixos for selfhosting. Haven't made a post since the start of the year.

Not really, i first used Linux in 2001 or 3... It's been some time. I think it was fedora 1. I was 21/3.

First installed Linux in 2008, Ubuntu 8.04 and started daily driving Ubuntu 10.04 in late 2010.

Since then I've used a lot of different distros, I'm now running mint.

In saying that, my son has only had Linux (and Chromebooks at school), I got him to help install his own system, he was 7 at the time.

Around 2014 I had hacker phase so I've installed BackTrack(Kali Linux), ofcourse I didn't knew a thing about Linux but hey it was a start :D

Since then I had dual boot with Windows until 2020 when Ubuntu 20.04 dropped and Windows never touched my computers again.

In my early teens, I got really into computers, built my first PC when I was about 13, started learning Windows batch scripting and using GameMaker to make goofy PC games.

Along the way, I found Trinity Rescue Kit and was also introduced to Fedora Core by a nerdy guy who worked at my local YMCA.

I didn't actually enjoy it too much back then, so I left it alone for years until about 5 years ago when I started to get back into the free software movement and related interests.

I've been 100% on Linux for about 4 years now and never looked back.

I started 28 years ago with Slackware 3.0, then Gentoo, Ubuntu, took a detour via OS X, then back to Ubuntu, now Arch.

I started using openSuSE full time on my laptop after the disastrous Windows 8 upgrade (it kept bluescreening and had problems suspending on that laptop.*), I guess I was 11 at the time.

But I’ve been messing around with Live CDs on my parents’ computer that came with a computer magazine my dad subscribed to for a while before that. I remember spending a lot of time in Knoppix specifically. Probably mostly playing the games that came on it.

* Windows 10 still has the same issues on it last time I checked lmao

I've been daily driving Ubuntu for at least 16 years. I miss when Ubuntu had Windows style Start Menus and barely functional entertainment software.

I don't care about specific distros, I chose Ubuntu because I liek purple

Started messing around with it some time in 2003, on Mandrake Linux when I was 21 years old. Experimented and ran servers with various distros in the years since but it didn't become my daily driver until about 2014-15, with Debian.

I'd say I was around that age. Maybe earlier, 10? But only because my dad was into linux. This was back in 1998 to 2000 though. I wasn't actually allowed access to a computer's hardware (and therefore the ability to install an OS, given my extremely restricted access) until I started uni with an old computer that didn't even have onboard sound.

My college buddy first told me about Linux at around the start of 1998. After some research I decided I would make the switch at the end of the semester. For a couple years I had mac but I’ve always had a Linux box running.

about a decade ago i used to mess around with some debian based distros on dual boot, mostly as a toy
then used xenialpup for a bit when my drives got toasted
then used mint for a year ish as my daily driver before moving to arch which i've been on ever since

Yggdrasil somewhere around ‘93… maybe ‘94. Recompiling a kernel took a VERY long time.

I’ve been doing this a while.

I was in 8th grade so 13-14 years old right?

My son's first computer was Linux. ;) He was still toddling but wanted to hit my computer, so I set up an old one for him.

I was 14 in 1991 I should add. I switched from minix not long after I could get Linux to boot. I think that was actually 1992. Both the computer and Linux weren't very good back then ..

I was given a logging on a RedHat server in 1997. It was operated by a fellow student in the dorm.

My school taught the engineers how to use SunOS for class, so it wasn't a huge leap to start using a telnet connection to a local Linux machine.

Within a few months I was dual booting an older desktop Linux/Win95, and away I went. Since then it's been about 90%+ of my daily computer use on Linux machines.

Started with Ubuntu's initial 4.10 release back in '04. I wish I still had the Live CD they mailed me. When Ubuntu ditched Gnome for Unity I switched to Mint. Up until a few months ago I was dual-booting Windows alongside it, but with 10's EOL approaching I'm ditching it.

I do keep an old laptop running Win10 specifically for some Audio-related software I just can't get to work in Linux.

Purchased a copy of Redhat from compusa in 1997... never did get my modem working with it unfortunately,

when I first heard about MS recall

I think I tried DamnSmallLinux in a VM around like 2008 or something which I thought was really cool, then I tried Fedora which I didn't really like, then I tried Ubuntu which I really liked and still do, although I'm going to switch to Mint at some point because I prefer the idea of having a community-owned distro.

Also early 2000s here, but I was in my late 20s by then. Started out on Debian not that long before Woody came out, then before too long I tried Mandrake alongside it.

Exciting stuff for someone who first set hands (and started into BASIC) on a TRS-80, and then ran GEOS on a C64 for years. I was drawn to the opportunities for more tinkering, among other things.

I started using linux with dual boot in June 2024 where I installed Fedora/Fedora immutable kde and bazzite.
Tried GNOME on my brother's old Laptop but using Extensions for changing one thing(and breaking every update) was annoying I have been using Fedora till I stumbled across CachyOS I switched to Cinnamon around this time from KDE I found kde kinda Buggy (heard it's Nvidia or smth) and it just felt uncomfortable Around December 2024 Where I used Linux full time (no windows dual boot) this is when I found Cachyos (or arch variants) and Cinnamon comfortable the only problem is that Cinnamon doesn't have Vrr,HDR and Wayland for me but I use Gamescope if I need vrr and HDR

I installed Ubuntu in 2007 or so, but moved right after and got a new computer, so I didn't really do anything with it. I installed Peppermint 9 on a new laptop a few years before Windows 7 went EOL because it came with Windows 10 installed but couldn't actually run it. Ran great with Linux. When Windows 7 stopped getting security updates, I installed Peppermint on my desktop, too. After the man dev passed away, the project went it a different direction, so I switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. That was a few years ago. Still with it, still happy.

Caldera in 1999 or 2000 at home. RedHat and SuSE at work.

I got to cut my teeth on CP/M (not nix of course) on a Kaypro II thanks to my uncle. 1982. I owe him a lot for giving me a headstart on computing.

I first heard about it in about 1994 when a Unix guy I knew told me about a type of Unix that could run on regular computers. He loaned me a POSIX book, but I didn't really hear anything until 98. I started getting fed up with all the problems with Windows 98, and I started installing it and breaking it on any machine I could get access too. I don't know how many floppies I formatted with each disk image of RedHat and Debian. I broke the school network a few times with things like accidentally setting up a DHCP server. I sent a patch to the kernel. I Learned a whole lot those first years.

Mandrake 6, not quite twice as long since you were born?

I'd love to make Linux my daily driver, but there's an issue with 2d animations on any Linux distro I install on my laptop. Windows 10 does not have this issue. So that means like half the Internet is stuttery.

Until that is fixed, I cannot use it as my daily driver.

Recently started learning Linux with ChatGPT..

And WOW! I love Linux!! It's so easy to deploy apps with Docker!