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

2002, I was 11. My dad had bunch of Linux install CDs that came with Dr. Dobbs. I fucked up my XP MBR and asked him to bring home a XP install disk cause i lost all mine.

By the time he got home I had installed Mandrake Dolphin Linux on my PC.

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 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.

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.

Built my first PC in High School from scraps. Decided to try Ubuntu 10.04 (current at the time).

I was very impressed with how much performance a free OS could get out of my awful hardware. Have been using Linux in some form as my OS ever since.

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.

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 …

as a teenager somewhere between 1996 and 1998.

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.

Just to put you all on notice: I started my kids on Linux from day 1 of their computing lives. I’m playing the long game here. In another 80 years they’re going to be in the longest living users category.

They mostly use Linux as their daily drivers. Any time they have to use windows for school work they also rage at the terrible UI and lack of ease of use. <Insert evil laughter here>

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.

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.

i thought i was old for lemmy till i saw the dates in these comments.