MS Dos 5.0 on my first PC was a bit short on features and I had not enough money for Windows 3.1… I heard that American students were using something called Unix and that their was something close available through mail-order CDs. Yggdrasil CDs were cheap too!
Windows 11 was so buggy that simply plugging in a USB device caused it to crash, I joked about installing Linux then I actually did. I have not looked back since.
I borrowed an installation CD from the local library around 1998. It was RedHat 5.x, and I started messing around with it due to me being interested in alternative operating systems. Before it, I had OS/2 Warp 3.0 in our IBM Pentium 100 MHz family computer which didn’t really do it for me to be honest.
It took weeks to get anything working with Linux. I went to the library, borrowing books. In our middle school we had an internet connection, so I utilized it to learn how to configure modelines correctly to get X11 running.
When it did finally run, the default window manager was FVWM95, almost like Windows 95!
I used OSX a few years in the power PC times, just to switch back to Linux around 2008.
Edit: my real love for Linux started when I got Debian running. RedHat didn’t have anything comparable to apt those days. You needed to download RPM packages manually with all the dependencies, while apt just worked with one command.
It was two decades ago, when someone gave us the CDs of Fedora. It was so very different than Windows XP. I came back to Linux when my school library had Ubuntu on their computer. I'm gonna ask someone to gift me Steam Deck upon graduating from college.
Up until February this year, I was still using a 14 year old DDR2 desktop. Windows 10 started to get quite slow and had some annoying crashes (mainly the fault of my goofy old hardware, of course)
I learned about Linux as an alternative through a Linux Tech Tips video about gaming on Linux, and Valve’s announcement of the Steam Deck, I was also interested in FOSS apps as alternative to proprietary ones.
Decided to try Linux Mint. With no prior experience with Linux, lack of luck finding good tutorials, and some weird thing happening with my games not launching, I had a very rough start.
But thanks to Mint, suddenly my DDR2 desktop got a lot smoother :D also, all of my drivers worked out of the box, and I got very surprised with Linux’s plug-and-play hardware capabilities.
So I decided to learn how to use it, tinkered alot with my system, and broken it alot! It was kind of frustrating, but fun at same time.
And without noticing, I had already learned lots about Linux from a more technical, and then, philosophical point of view.
Now I’m a great fan of Linux and FOSS, and have been helping friends to move to it by giving support with issues I had in the past.
Windows ME came out. After installing it and wasting a bunch of time trying to get it to work reliably, I wiped the HDD and installed Debian potato instead. That was 23 years ago.
Just curiosity really, it was when I first started learning Java from my father’s old textbook. The “Getting your environment setup” had instructions for both Windows, OS X, and Linux/Ubuntu.
Of them all, the instructions for Ubuntu were the simplest (sudo apt-get install openjdk or a similar package), in order to get the Java dev tools installed.
Ended up giving Ubuntu a look in a VM since I hadn’t heard of “Linux/Ubuntu” (which was also the first time I used a VM) during the 8.04 days!
Funnily enough I actually put Java down for a bit since I just couldn’t get into it. IIRC though, my first project on my GitHub had something to do with Python+GTK. Then eventually I got back into Java when I discovered I could make Minecraft plugins/mods.
Of course I was pretty young at the time, maybe 13 or 14? So I didn’t know (or would’ve cared) about the whole privacy aspect of Linux - that came much later. But ever since then, like many others, I’ve always maintained that Linux is the best development environment for me.
I didn’t have a lot of money and went dumpster diving for parts. Changed out a bad capacitor and got a system booting. This was back in Pentium 3 and 4 days. I found a 512MB stick of memory that had some bad areas. Linux was able to map around it with some kernel options at boot. Since I had limited storage I used knoppix and had a print out of the needed kernel options and memory addresses.
Once it was up and running I was able to do anything and everything I wanted. I did built a better system and got gentoo going a year or so later.
Eventually I got gaming mostly working with the project that eventually became crossover. First software I ever purchased too. I started dual booting less.
I bounced back and forth between windows and Linux and when I built a system around 2010 I didn’t even bother configuring it for dual booting.
I haven’t really touched anything windows since around the release of Windows 10 and only used windows 7 for work reasons prior. These days I’m pretty useless with anything on that end.
So I’m an evangelical fan of Linux. I use it everywhere I can and the FOSS philosophy resonates with me. I advocate for it where it makes sense and works. I’ll go out of my way and spend time & money helping people move into it too.
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