2016 for me. I wanted a music production suite, and was given a new laptop for starting college (uk college, I was 15 at the time). I decided to try out Ububtu Studio, a media/art-centered branch of Ubuntu. I found that the incredibly slow laptop that I used to have just.... worked? It was somehow faster at doing day to day tasks than my much newer laptop. I also found the visual aesthetics (Ubuntu Studio was pre-Unity Ubuntu) really appealing.

As I kept using it, I found that more and more my time was being spent on my older laptop rather than the newer one. I started disteo hopping nefore setttling on Manjaro in early 2017. Then I went for i3 and dwm, which led to me using gentoo for a few years. In my last year of uni I found that my time maintaining my set-up was getting impractical on top of all the work so I went back to Windows briefly. Very quickly realised I couldn't use it anymore and so set myself back up with Manjaro.

Currently giving Ubuntu a go because my current laptop has dual amd/nvidia graphics and out of the box it just works much better on Ubuntu. There's been some frustrations but I can't see myself going back to Windows. I use it for work on my work laptop and the little things frustrate me to no end

Installed Linux Mint in 2017 when I got real tired of having to reinstall windows (+ big programs) on my laptop which got blue-screened every other month. My laptop was not compatible for Linux and had to switch back to W10. When that laptop broke, I went with an old Mac (Linux broke it so High Sierra) and an old Dell Tower with LM. Gave up the Dell and now have the Mac until I can get a steam deck which I will use as a light linux pc w/monitor. Never going back to Windows.

Windows Vista completely died on my laptop back in 2009. I'd vaguely heard about this other OS called "Ubuntu" shortly before that seemed neat and was especially cool because it was free, but was too nervous about breaking my machine to try it before, but because it was already broken at that point, I had a friend burn me an ISO and installed it. I learned Ubuntu was actually Linux when I was configuring and learning how to use it, and that's when I learned about concepts like FOSS, Linux just being a kernel and not the whole OS, and the idea of Linux distros. The only time I looked back was dual booting a gaming PC with Windows 10 for a while just before Proton came on the scene. Even then, booting into Windows was rare, only for games that did not work on Linux at the time, which with Proton releasing and constantly improving, became even rarer as time went on. A failed distro upgrade last year (likely due to me messing around with Mesa driver versions) finally had me wipe the Windows side from that PC altogether and go back to only running Linux when I clean installed over both Windows and the other broken Linux install. Truly haven't looked back since.

It was redhat around 2001. I burned 3 discs for the install. I was installing on an old computer that was struggling to run windows. I think the DM was Gnome. I remember being in awe that it got up and running after having to re-burn some of the install discs to finish the installation.

It was 2009 and I was 14. I had been using Ubuntu on my father's PC for a year and I installed Andromeda Linux (an Ubuntu fork with a stunning theme), completely wiping my HDD. The next day I installed Windows and attempted my second Linux install, I was more careful and got a doual boot working.

In 1999 / 2000 I started using Mandrake because I missed the days of using a terminal instead of a GUI. That got me into setting a web and mail server up and running things from home once I had stable internet. I have always had an on and off relationship with Linux and the other *nix. Currently I have a few servers running around the house for various things all running Ubuntu but besides upkeep and making changes I don't touch them much until my ADHD kicks in and I want to learn something new then I burn out for awhile and repeat the cycle. I am probably the outlier here that uses windows daily and Linux secondary these days.

With all due respect, wasn't this exact topic posted 17 hours ago and has 200+ comments? It's still in the top few if you sort by Hot or Active.

@eric5949 Late nineties. Joined a computer club at uni and got to play with aix, hp-ux, vms, linux, netbsd, freebsd, nextstep, amiga... Installed FreeBSD on my own box and experienced the, eh, joy of "make world", though making X Windows took longer. I kept Windows around for games but stopped even that around.. Nintendo 3DS. Used windowmaker for at least a decade, now on KDE Neon.

My first encounter with Linux was in 2008-9 when my dad bought a secondhand PC that came with PCLinuxOS. We mostly used it to play SuperTuxKart at the time.

Then a friend showed me Ubuntu (must have been 10.04 or something like that) when we started a website project together

I tried using Mint in college and ended up using it full-time by the end of the year. Then had a brief period of using Ubuntu (drive issues with Mint) before heading back to Windows when I bought a new PC for university.

I've been using Windows for study and work, and Linux for personal development when possible. I'd like to go back to Linux full-time, but I'm not sure which distro to use

Beginning of the year when I got my Steam Deck and found it about the desktop mode. Now I have garuda on my living room tv-pc up and running to game and watch stuff. Best decision since a long time, thanks GabeN for giving me the final nudge to go linux.

Linux SLS distribution, circa 1993.

My first experience with Linux was in the mid 80s when I was in the service working with AT&T 3B20 and Sperry UNIX servers as an admin. I enjoyed just about every aspect of the OS, but most government, contractor, and civilian jobs required desktop software that Linux either couldn't install or the open source equivalent just wasn't good enough.

Over the many, MANY, years I have kept experimenting with the various desktop environments, but with my current job a large percentage of our servers are Ubuntu or RedHat Linux (although we're being forced to migrate to Windows Servers for many of the same reasons yet again).

That being said, with the ability for many Microsoft Office365 products working well enough as web-apps, my home laptop runs 100% KDE Neon, and with the exception of needing a couple Windows-only programs (which no longer runs on Linux) I'd probably be running KDE Neon on my work laptop as well. If I can ever get Cisco ASDM to work with Wine and/or Bottles, I will be switching over soon after.

The DEs in the last few years are light years ahead, and I am personally very impressed with just how smooth everything works. My hope is to get back to a semi-40 hour work week in a few years and help contribute - not as a programmer, but perhaps as a QA tester or the like.

I don't remember my exact first experiences, it was ages ago, like probably almost a couple decades, and I think with something like OpenSUSE. My first real experience came a bit later with Linux Mint, which I used on a Laptop, while continuing with Windows on my desktop, specifically for my gaming needs. Back then we just had Wine, and it was still a hot mess, but I was able to play some Guild Wars for example and other games fairly decently already. A few years ago, after the Windows 10 "freebie" nuked itself and my entire C partition, with all its data on it (especially the hidden user folders), I continued a little with 7 but shortly after my gpu died. I didn't knew which component at the time, as it started to hang during the boot process, so I assumed other components. Anyway, I didn't had a desktop for well over a year after, and used above laptop to at least browse the web and watch videos, and test some Linux distros. I eventually landed at Manjaro, which also later became my system OS on my newly built desktop a couple years ago. From there I went to EOS after I wanted to switch to btrfs for the system partition anyway, which nuked itself recently. Since the community rather wanted to troll and gaslight instead of helping me I left EOS behind and am currently experiencing the horrors of Gnome in Nobara, which I didn't used since the Unity rework, and am probably trying the KDE version soonish, because there's just too many issues and lack of baseline functions that I need and miss from KDE, and it's also just way too buggy.

Started dabbling in Linux some 15+ years ago, dualbooting with windows XP. Tried bunch of different distros - suse, Slackware, RedHat (pre-enterprise) etc. Didn't really understand it and kept going back to windows. A classmate had told me Gentoo was good for learning Linux. So once I was trying to shrink my windows partition to make space for another dualboot experiment, and in the process borked my partitions. They were probably recoverable, but I got furious, ragequit windows and installed gentoo on the whole disk and used it as my daily. That helped me learn.

MKLinux on my PowerPC Macintosh when I was ~14. Read about it online. Got my mom to take me to the book store to look for a book on Linux. They had none. Booted to a command prompt and had zero idea what to do. Didn't run it again until (many) years later.

First was Corel Linux, boxed, from Circuit City, on a dodgy Pentium hand-me-down. Then Gentoo on a second-hand HP laptop in college. Distro hopped a lot alongside Windows in the subsequent years. Now Arch (btw), for about a decade.

Kernel panic after installing Redhat 6, not RHEL, in the late 90s or early 2000s. Later tried 7 and has been using Linux since.

1998 - Mandrake Linux

I bought a random Linux magazine that came with a Mandrake CD, I installed it, struggled with everything, but fell in love with the idea of Linux. So, I kept trying distros until last year, when I finally settled on an Arch based distro called Crystal Linux.

When I was a kid, we used to visit relatives a lot. I was 12 as well and listening to adults talk about boring stuff wasn't cutting it anymore. Most of my relatives had PCs, but none with any games I'd be interested in. So I took my mom's 8gb USB stick and turned it into a Linux Mint bootable usb.

Now, keep in mind that I didn't know that much English at the time and honestly I'm amazed I managed to do that, but... I wasn't aware stuff on the stick would be overwritten, and let's just say my mom wasn't too pleased!

Didn't even solve my problem, since the only game that would run was Terraria, and that with like 5 fps on most of the computers I tried it on!

I picked up RedHat 6.0 (hedwig) on the front of a Linux magazine in 2000. Took a few days to get X working on my Pentium3 at the time. In the end the thing that sent me back to Windows was an inability to get my modem running and thus no internet.

When I was at university in 2004 doing a network administration course, our lecturer was very proud of the livecd he'd created with an environment for the course. It was based on Fedora core 2. It was fascinating. Tried to install fc on my laptop at the time but struggled with ndis wrapper to get WiFi running.

Would try again out my early career (2006), went out to Ubuntu and debian. Gamed in early dx7/8 days in wine and Cedega. Would run home servers and mythtv on Linux over the years.

When the steam client beta came out I tried again in earnest to move to Linux full time and was ultimately successful, coming back to Fedora KDE 19 and staying there until moving to Fedora Kinoite last year.

Don't use Windows really except when I have to with building the SOE and a few windows servers at work. I am involved with azure and azureAD at work, so to me Microsoft is mostly a website and a powershell prompt.

Maybe around 2nd grade with the piper computer which was a small rpi based laptop that you built. I switched fully in 5th grade when my windows install broke. A few months before that I switched on my laptop when my math teacher reminded me about it. I Have rarely used windows since but for a few months I used a Mac laptop. My linux laptop (Dell xps 13 7390) I had was hidpi, kind of slow and died quickly and the m1 Mac hardware was just plain better (this was close to when the 2020 m1 Mac came out so no asahilinux). I have used pop, manjaro, arch and alpine Linux. I have been using it for a few years now and never plan on going back to windows though I do occasionally use macOS for nonfree/closed source apps. When I first switched the only game I played was Minecraft which worked just as well as windows. Now almost all the games I play are free software like Minetest and super tux kart.

I got a Karmic Koala (ubuntu 09.10) CD from my friend kn my high school days, I install it on my Pentium 4 PC then freaked out because there are no codec and I can't install it because I have no Internet at all, lol. Going back to windows until I have Laptop on my second year of uni. I still needs to use my uni's wifi to install any apps, but it is workable and I use Linux almost exclusively since then. (sometimes dual boot-ing if there are Lecture that needs me to use windows.)

Can't remember why I looked into it but my very first experience was using Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04.4) on VirtualBox. At some point I also used Wubi to install either that one or one or two versions later on a desktop PC. Honestly I didn't really "get it", it was difficult to do anything (tar.gz files utterly defeated me), I really didn't understand the concept of the apt package manager. I was curious but ultimately didn't really know why anyone would bother using it.

A few years later I installed one of the versions of Ubuntu when they moved to the Unity DE (again on Virtualbox). I remember really liking it (only later found out how controversial it was) but yet again didn't really understand why I would want to use it instead of Windows.

It wasn't until around maybe 2018 or 2019 that I installed Linux Mint on a spare SSD in my computer and actually began using it. However yet again I still didn't have a reason to use it - that was until I got involved with an open source project and trying to set up a dev environment on Windows completely melted my melon. The instructions to get the dev environment going on Linux looked so much easier, and it was. I've barely looked back since.

Slackware 1998. I spent 6 months in a text only freebsd install in 1999. Because of a dram issue I wasn't able to run windows without blue screens. Text based internet wasn't that bad in 1999. I could load up xwindows if I wanted to see a picture but rarely did. Talking on irc somebody mentioned memtest and my memory had a very long warranty so I took it back to the store. Then I spent the next several years addicted to quake/quake2

1993 or so with some Slackware CDs, i bought, because I had no internet back then. Took ages to compile, and never got past the black x on the checkered background when I tried to startx. Console worked nicely though and I loved the bash (?) experience with command history and all that. However, no games, very little software, and I didn't program back than. It took quite some time to be able to use those things productively as a user.

I have installed Ubuntu in I think at the beginning of 2020 at the end of my first semester as dual boot, because I wanted to learn it a bit while studying engineering informatics. Later I have installed it as my only distro on my Laptop to have more reasons to learn it since I use my PC mostly for gaming. After some time I was so confident with it that I wanted to try something new and installed Garuda on my PC and learned about proton. Then I learned about how many games I can actually play with it and used it as my daily driver for about half a year. Then I was distro hopping frequently, trying pure Arch, Gentoo and Void, wiped Windows completely at the beginning of 2022 because I didn't use it anyways if I remember correctly and sticked with Void since about mid 2022 until today for my Laptop, PC and Server.

At approximately 11 or 12 years I started with SUSE Linux 10.0 on KDE. Got it from a DVD included in a computer magazine. Felt truly great, although I fully made the switch only 10 years later. Also in 2005, I fiddled around with Knoppix.

When I was 16 I was working at a grocery store and another worker around my age talked me into trying it out. I had heard of it from a high school class I had taken, so I figured I'd give it a try. I called him on the phone and he talked me through installing Ubuntu Dapper Drake on my laptop. The biggest issue back then was getting the WiFi to work, which required ndiswrapper to used the Windows drivers. We eventually got it working and then played Tremulous together.

I dual booted for a while, occasionally got angry at Windows and nuked the partition to go fully Linux. Occasionally got angry at Linux and nuked the partition to go fully Windows. Eventually settled fully on Linux. I did have a separate drive with Windows installed in my desktop at one point to play around with VR, but I'm not much of a gamer so the only time I use Windows now is in a VM if I need to interface with some device that only provides Windows drivers. Pretty rare at this point.

My experience was Slackware in 1993. Some kid in another dorm was running it on his computer and he gave me an account on it. I'd dial into the University network and telnet to his server to mess around. I believe the kernel was 0.9x something.

Over the years I'd used Linux in various forms: built a router using Linux at a job, installed Slackware on my desktop at home using floppy disks, ran Redhat on most of our infrastructure (web, samba, ftp, sendmail, openvpn, ...) at another job, run Arch Linux on my desktop at home along with Debian in my home lab.