Linux

I started using Linux before you were born, but i also was 20, so you win😄

Linux didn't exist until I was 25.

But are we talking earliest age, or length of time using it? I've been running Linux on PCs for over 30 years.

Here's what I started with. The release of Windows 95 lured me away from Amiga, but as the Amiga was a very customisable environment, I had this for an escape plan :D

In the Amiga days I was ridiculously lucky and bagged a Silicon Graphics Indy system for pennies, so Unix was no stranger at this point.

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.

in 2002 when my windows me computer start looping on the blue screen of death, with all of my college papers/essays/tests/assignments trapped in it.

the recovery media refused to work because i had upgraded the computer several times and i couldn't afford the $180 windows xp cd. so i bought a linux magazine for $5 that included a copy of mandrake linux installation media and used paper printouts from my college's computer labs to help me rescue my work from the computer.

Debian and Mandrake in the late 1990s. And I was already almost three times as old as you were when you started. These days I'm happy with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for daily use. I tried NixOS but it threatened to break my old brain.

a month ago, never goin back...so much power, so much free ram. im in love

I first dipped my toes in when I was probably around 14, messed with Ubuntu and damn small Linux but that was about it. I stuck with Mac as I didn’t enjoy windows and needed something “mainstream” back then. It wasn’t until apple made hackintosh’s somewhat obsolete and Microsoft started cramming AI into windows that I made the switch. I now run NixOS on my gaming rig and personal laptop

I started using linux Slackware in 1996. First time I was paid to install linux on a server in 1998. It was Red Hat 5.2 way before they switch to Enterprise Linux.

Been my desktop daily driver since 1999.

Yes, I'm old.

I first experimented with Linux in 1999, but didn't stay with it for long as I never got X11 working. I started using it more seriously in 2001 / 2002 and by the time Windows XP was established, I was a full time Linux user. I was a lot older than you though being in my mid-thirties.

Fedora 2. It's been a while.

My first laptop was an Ubuntu machine with no battery when I was 4. I had no idea what Linux was, I just played the games my uncle had pre-loaded onto it.

In 2006 my university used Ubuntu, I thought 'Wow, this is different!' Tried it out on my own computer but I was a heavy gamer so windows was the best option (hey, Win7 pretty alright anyway!)

Fast forward to about 2022, I try it again but it's not getting incorporated well with my program usage in school (as a teacher).

Fast forward to 2024, worked out that Tencent software is on AUR (teacher in Mainland China) and I figure I'm doing another dive. So far, so good. Little itty bitty glitches especially with Libreoffice but I'm getting by without touching Win10.

Slackware. 1993.

I'm old lol.

Been through:

Slackware

Mandrake

Debian

Ubuntu

Redhat , old and new

Fedora

Arch

Knoppix

Pop!

CentOS

Enlightenment

Etc etc..

Right now I'm living on KDE Neon.

as a teenager somewhere between 1996 and 1998.

I have a physical CD of Ubuntu 6.10, back then they were distributing those over the mail and a friend of mine ordered some and gave me. I still keep it.

about 20 years ago. Early 2000s I started messing around with Redhat and was suprised that a full OS that did most of the windows things was available for free. when Ubuntu gained traction I jumped on that and tried distro hopping a bit before landing aolidly on Debian derivatives as my linux of choice. I remember catching a ban in WoW because WINE was detected by their anti cheat for a while.

My dad had a Knoppix boot CD in a case with all the games, of course I messed with it as a curious child, I have no idea how old I was, but it was my first foray into the wonderful world of not Windows.

Only since last July. It's Arch btw. I love it, but wifey doesn't understand it and therefore I still have windows. ☹️

I was always curious about this linux thing, from when I was in 7th grade, I only knew Kali linux then, and I thought one could hack anything if you had kali linux :), But I seriously started using linux in 10th grade, fell into the rabbit hole of ricing, and to this day still cant get over it although it has become more stable and I know what I am doing.

My first new computer was an Acer Aspire One netbook with Windows 7 starters. I quickly realized what “starter” meant and discovered Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Remix. The rest is history.

I first started Ubuntu as a minecraft server, then last year I actually started using it as a desktop.

I initially tried linux mint and ubuntu when i was like 13 on my laptop, which is almost 15 years ago now. At the time it wasn't because i hated windows, but my monkey brain was just interested in it because it looked so much different. After i realized that i couldn't just use all my windows programs like usual (and especially gaming wasn't nearly as good back then), i quickly went back to windows. Fast forward to 2020, at this point i had started disliking windows mainly because all of it's creepy questions when you install it, like wanting your handwriting information and all that, but at the same time i thought "well what can you do about it?". Then i saw the LinusTechTips video about trying linux instead of windows 11. This was the first time i had actually thought of linux again in all those years. The video convinced me to give it a try and i started with PopOS. After a few months i moved to arch cause i liked the idea of customizing my distro more from the ground up. Stayed with arch for 2 years, then i got the distro hop virus. Tried a lot of them, fedora, opensuse, ended up staying on Void linux for over a year in total. Now i'm using NixOS and very happy with it, and i think i'm finally settling down on a distro. I know LTT gets a lot of flack for how they handled the linux challenge, but if it wasn't for that initial video back in 2020, i would have probably never given linux another try. And with valve investing so much into improving wine and dxvk and all that, it was viable for me to switch as a gamer.

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

I think it was about year 2000 +/- I was about 23 yrs old... I've tried a most of the big distros, and was using Ubuntu for the longest time. Now it's Mint I use...

Back at the university, sometime around 1995 when I needed a Unix for the exams. Downloaded on 1.4 Mb floppies

I first tried Linux Mint when I was 12, eventually changed to Ubuntu when I was 13 or 14 because I saw the Windows 11 copilot button, installed

Can totally relate, lol. Except I first tried Ubuntu at around 12 (at the time it was considered the best for beginners), then nearly 20 years passed until I saw the same copilot button pop up, uninvited, in my task bar. That was the last straw for me.

Now I run OpenSUSE as a daily driver.

I was 7 when I first properly used Linux. My dad somehow found a prebuilt which came with SuSE - I assume version 7 or thereabouts. It didn't last long, sadly, before we switched over to Windows XP.

Then at age 14/15, I ran Ubuntu 10 as my daily driver on my netbook. Then #! for a bit.

Used Windows 7 and 10 until... I guess age 26/27 since that's what we're doing, when I switched to Debian full-time. (Via MX-Linux, which didn't quite work out)

I tried xubuntu when I was 14 on a live cd to get students admin access on our school laptops. Once I got my own machine, I kept it on windows 10 until it became unstable so I moved to Bunsenlabs, then Pop OS due to it's dgpu. (Intel igpu, amd dgpu)

Started with Ubuntu at 12. Did a LAN boot to my mom’s laptop somehow, I couldn’t explain it if I tried. It was supposed to be on my PC. Didn’t work in the end and got grounded for “hacking” went back to it though a few years later at 16 and dived around Ubuntu and Gentoo. Never installed gentoo but I certainly kept trying.

I had a Linux beginners class at my HS in 10th grade but I've forgot about Linux, until 12th grade when 2 of my really nerdie friends started shilling Linux to me, especially pointing out that now you can play windows games on Linux, and not too long after I eventually did the jump when starting my comp sci uni (19 years old) with Manjaro as a first, but I have found happiness in EndevaorOS due to Manjaro being unstable.

I messed around trying to get Redhat 7.2 or 7.3 working but gave up (Q1 or Q2 2002). I later experimented with SuSe (or however it was stylised in Q1 2005), messed about with Knoppix and a few other distros, before properly going all-in on Ubuntu 5.04 when I was 18.

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

About the time that Windows 10 came out. I was just messing around and ended up liking it.

14. Slackware from like 40 3.5 floppy disks.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

1997, it was a wonderous year 🥰 i was 16 at the time.

Linux came in big boxes with a large book and CD's!

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

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

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.

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.

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.