I started fairly recently (probably somewhere between nine and seven years ago; time isn’t my strong suit, cut me some slack) on Debian. Now I’m on Arch Linux.
2004 (Ubuntu) - 2024 (Arch)
Datamining thread
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.
I started dualbooting 12 years ago, never used linux. Started again dualbooting 9 years ago, never used linux. Purged windows 2-3 years ago
I’m on silverblue and I don’t care about the system anymore because I don’t interact with it. It auto updates and I’ve got a fedora distrobox. I’d probably do the same if I were on opensuse or arch, meaning nothing would change for me if I would distro hop.
I started in the mid to late 90s when my dad brought home old redhat CDs. I don’t really use Linux consistently unless you count my Android phone or my Steam Deck, but the last OS I used was Linux Mint on a Thinkpad W520 maybe
Started out with Mandrake in 1998 and got into Debian shortly after. I moved to Gentoo in 2002. In the later 2000s I only used my desktop for gaming and stopped dual booting for many years. My home server runs BSD and I was using a 2010 MacBook as my laptop. The only Linux box in my home was my HTPC, running Ubuntu.
When I heard of Proton I started dual booting again. In 2020 I got rid of Windows and the aging MacBook. Since then my desktop, laptop and HTPC run on Arch. The server is still FreeBSD.
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
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.
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.
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.
Valve with Proton also helped a lot. Playing games on Linux is easy as pushing play. If I have any problems, I just wait for a glorious egg roll to drop.
I started using linux as my mac got unusable with macOS First touch with Linux I had in Work, i test our products which run on an embedded Linux yocto build.
Now, my phone and my buisness windows are now the only proprietary OSs I use (have a pinePhone, bit it is not daily drivable for me)
Now I have the old macbookpro5,2 running Arch and my iMac running openSuse TW. For my smart home, I have a pi Zero 2W running hombridge via hoobs. Ah yea and a router on a board that I got from a friend running on OpnSense. With him I have a proxmox server running.
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.
About 3 years. I wasn’t good with computers because I mostly just didn’t want to mess with them, due to Microsoft being who they are. I started with Ubuntu, went to Arch, Nixos, and now Gentoo is my standard. I got into it because my brother who’s a security programmer recommended it to me. I use much, much more linux than my brother does now. I don’t have any proprietary systems in my home now. All is FOSS.
14 years old with mint. Didn’t wuite understand anything and switched back to Windows. Still a teen now but have been using Artix for a year now and mint for about a year before tha.t
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.
