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

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 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 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.

In University. In the 90s we used commercial un*x (HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, Solaris/SunOS, SCO) and some others like SVR4, BSD, Minix. Then a guy on usenet talked about making is own kernel running on a 386. My first real full linux install was kernel 0.99 on a 486DX50, around 1993, came in multiple floppies, then to install X11 that was like 10 more floppies! Configuring things was a bit nighmarish.

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.

I’d say I was around that age. Maybe earlier, 10? But only because my dad was into linux. This was back in 1998 to 2000 though. I wasn’t actually allowed access to a computer’s hardware (and therefore the ability to install an OS, given my extremely restricted access) until I started uni with an old computer that didn’t even have onboard sound.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve been daily driving Ubuntu for at least 16 years. I miss when Ubuntu had Windows style Start Menus and barely functional entertainment software.

I don’t care about specific distros, I chose Ubuntu because I liek purple

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)

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.

2005

Fedora Core 5

At some point in 2006, I switched to Ubuntu. Jumped to Debian after Canonical thought it would be cute to send our data to Jeff Bezos and show is ads.

Fuck Canonical.

Been on Debian ever since, except for 1 netbook that I keep using Kali - which I used in the Backtrack days.