In 1993, a guy I knew had a Linux server running in his dorm room. I think it was a 0.9x kernel. He dialed into the University network and I was able to telnet in through my own dial up connection to the University. He was running Slackware.

Within a couple months, I downloaded all 30+ 1.44 diskette images and built my own Slackware server. In that time I used Slackware and Red Hat (which then became Fedora before RHEL became a thing). Now I’ve pretty much settled on Debian for servers and Arch for desktop/laptop systems.

I started working for a video game company in 2000. It was dominated by Linux nerds (including the CEO) and they indoctrinated me into their cult. My first distro was SuSe, then Redhat for a while, then Gentoo for about a decade, then Arch, which is where I am now.

My last Windows “daily driver” was Windows 98se.

I dabbled in Linux for a while (since 2009, college). I did some distro hopping for a while ( Ubuntu, opensuse, mint, Debian). I finally mained Linux after windows 8 came out, ugh.

I mained Manjaro and then switched over to Endeavour. I couldn’t be happier. My opinion of Linux keeps getting better and better, but that’s probably because I have to fix my parents computers once in a while. They run windows 10 now. I hate it. Ads in the start menu?! Kill me now.

Back in 1996 I was studying computer science, and one of my courses required me to write programs in Prolog. Rather than go to the school to work on the computers there, I bought an enormous book (I think it was a printout of all the man pages) that had Yggdrasil Linux CD-ROM, and ran it on my home desktop.

In university in 2000. Now I am a Linux DevOps Engineer.

Currently writing some python so we can get a report out of our shiny new harbor docker registry.

Slackware in 93 or 94, on a 386DX40 with 4MiB ram and a 40MiB HDD. A friend and I split downloading the disk sets 1/2 disks a day on our limited ISP time.

When Netscape came out, I ran it on that machine. It took literally 30 minutes to start (with much swapping), but was actually usable thereafter.

During the pandemic in early 2021, I was bored and browsed Reddit too much. Some people talked about Linux as a way to avoid the problems of Windows (which I was planning to switch to from MacOS). I got curious and wanted to learn more, and discovered Linux was lightweight and could run on old hardware.

After much research, I settled on putting Linux Lite onto my family’s old laptop from around 2010. I used it for a while and it worked great, although it was still somewhat unresponsive, so I switched to Lubuntu. That worked even better and brought that laptop to speeds resembling my gaming laptop with Windows 11 on various categories of apps (file manager, basic text editor, moving around the desktop, etc.)

I was satisfied for a while, but recently I installed Linux on two other computers:

1. KDE Neon on the desktop purchased from my friend because I knew I didn’t need Windows for what I was doing, and I dislike Windows 11 enough for me to use Linux full time. I also wanted to try out KDE and avoid Snaps while being in the Ubuntu ecosystem.
2. Dual booting Ubuntu on my gaming laptop (on 2nd SSD), because one of my classes requires me to run Linux software. They had directions to run a VM or use WSL. I tried the latter but ran into a weird error and figured it was easier to just dual boot. Let’s see how this goes, as I installed Ubuntu yesterday.

It was at home on my first PC. The year was 1993, and it was a Slackware distro with a kernel 0.99.12.

Next to it I had an old Atari ST with MiNT, and it had the bigger harddisk and the nicer GUI, but the PC had more RAM and horsepower.

RealMedia once made a program called RealJukebox. It let me rip CDs and play music with minimal nonsense. One day I got online and RealJukebox forcibly converted itself to RealOne, which was useless garbage. No amount of restoring from backups or fighting registry settings would bring back the program I relied on.

This was where I learned to care about software freedom. Or rather, when I first demanded it, but could scarcely express the concept. I knew I was betrayed.

All of this went down on an eMachines 566i2 that shipped with Windows ME. It was my first computer. The prior family computer ran Windows 95, which despite being five years older, was plainly a better experience. So while I was never the guy calling Bill Gates the devil, I was already well aware that Microsoft was a lumbering giant that could easily fumble that big picture.

So it’s kind of bizarre my first Linux experience was through someone selling their SuSE 7 CDs at a boot sale on another continent. We’d moved to Germany (military brat) and I think I was running a Windows XP developer build that one ultranerd friend had burned for me. (I paid this back by making like seven copies of everything I pirated. CD-Rs were so beautifully cheap back then, and my entire hard drive fit on a dozen.) Some guy with a pile of ISA and PCI cards atop plastic milk-crates on a chilly sports field had a folding paper sleeve labeled “Linux,” which I’d vaguely heard of, and I figured yeah sure that’s worth a couple bucks to try. He tried gamely to explain that it wasn’t selling or buying, because it was “free software,” but even looking back now I think he was more confused than I was. Dude still took money for a professionally-made ordeal. I still have the stickers within arm’s reach. I ran that for a few months, I guess? Lots of nights on non-numeric roleplaying over IRC. Went back to some Windows after that, until the next move and my first laptop, a proper IBM T42 running XP.

In college I was enamored with Ubuntu’s initial promises (and any form of ‘e-mail us to get free discs’) and handed out a bunch of earth-tone paper sleeves for an OS I guess I was dual-booting. I still used XP throughout school, on that laptop and on a tiny little desktop my long-distance boyfriend sent me so we could play City Of Villains together. I’m a little fuzzy now - but I was using Ubuntu for a while after school (and after that boyfriend), until Mark Shuttleworth declared all windows would be left-handed, and I felt that familiar sense of betrayal. I switched to Mint for a while and then decided I cared too much about video games to bother dual-booting all the time.

I was on Windows 7 from about 2010, and exclusively from about 2013, until about the end of 2020. When I built my new machine - the one I’m typing this on - I knew I was going all-in on Mint. It still has problems, believe you me. But they’re all my problems, and potentially fixable. They’re not locked into a decade-old OS that was honestly the pinnacle of Microsoft’s oeuvre. They’re not ever-shifting betrayals of a product where you are not the customer. They’re plain ridiculous technical goofs, plus the occasional conflict between user demand and common sense.

I wholeheartedly recommend Linux Mint with Cinnamon to anyone who gives a shit about their computer’s operating system. It is good software. It runs with negligible bullshit on my at-one-point higher-end desktop with a dozen cores, and my thirdhand beater laptop with Windows Vista stickers. I’m still using Foobar from my late Windows days and IrfanView from my early Windows days. It is the least bullshit solution, for someone who is prone to call bullshit on just about anything.

I am also fairly new to the game. I had an iMac from around 2010 that was starting to show its age. Newer macOS versions were glacial on it. I eventually realized they were meant to boot off SSDs, but my options in that regard weren’t great. I would either have to take the whole thing apart to replace the internal drive or live with USB2 speeds on an external SSD. Then it dawned on me I could just put Ubuntu on there and call it a day. This worked great and bought me a few more years out of that machine.

More recently, we started buying threadripper workstations at the office for scientific modelling. These have since migrated into a server room where they are currently acting as a small compute cluster.

And most recently, I’ve been tinkering around a bit on my Steam Deck. It’s a little walled-garden-ish but it let me put VSCode and a few tools on there so I’m playing around.

2001, I was 19 in USAF tech school in Biloxi, Mississippi, just bought a second hand computer from someone else in the dorm and needed a budget OS, and the local BX/PX had a copy of Corel Linux for $30. I had no idea WTF it was at the time, I thought it was just some kinda cheap bootleg Windows or something, something with half-ass compatibility like OS/2. I had no clue how to use it and I couldn’t get any familiar programs to work, so I just paid another dude like $20 to burn me his copy of Windows 2000 for me.

Didn’t even realize its potential until later, 2004 when I got a civilian IT job. Now Debian has been my daily driver for ten years.

Edit: oh yeah, the box came with an inflatable penguin, which I gave to the dorm guard on duty when I got back because he recognized it and I didn’t think anything of it. If you ever see this post I want my penguin back now, dude.

I started around 2018, using crouton to run Ubuntu on a Chromebook so I could have better functionality. I went back to Windows for a while, then I started using Pop!OS as my daily driver last year. I still don’t know if I love it, but I’m sticking with Linux of some flavor going forward.

First experience was trying to dual boot Slackware and Windows ME on the family computer in 2003 after getting a magazine with the install disc on. Nuked the Windows install and got banned from the family PC for a while.

Then I got my own laptop with Windows 98 on it at 18. I’d just found dyne:bolic which was one of the first Linux live CDs if I recall correctly and was designed to work on older hardware (this was mid 00s). That machine served me well for 2 or 3 years.

A few years of bouncing between various distros and Windows followed. Eventually I made the full switch in about 2012 first to Ubuntu then Debian which I’ve been using for the last 5 years or so.

I used Unix for the first time 1989 in university. Windows was hardly even a thing then and Linux certainly wasn’t. Then I used both Windows and various Unix flavors throughout my working life. In the late nineties we first started using SUSE Linux in a project so that was my first direct hand-on experience with it. I wasn’t terribly impressed. In my last job before my current one we had AIX so I had to use that. Then I exclusively used Windows for a couple of years after changing jobs. But I’ve been growing increasingly frustrated with the enshittification so about two years ago I finally made the jump and all my private systems are on Linux Mint now. I’m never going back, unless they open source the whole thing or something.

Mid 90s at work as a project support technician in Sony Broadcast R&D in the UK. Slackware, then red hat mostly. Installed Linux boxes in various digital TV stations in London in 1999/2000, used to insert interactive games into the broadcast stream.

I was a sysadmin from 99 to about 2018, from then onwards I’m more DevOps. Done a bunch of stuff with CentOS too, including migrating 500k email accounts to our hosted solution. Other cool stuff included a VMware based development environment using Foreman + FreeIPA to auto provision dev VMs with all sorts of puppet code.

Now at home I run Fedora and work on macOS, writing Terraform and Python. And some nodejs too.

Been at it a long ass time now lol