Been using Linux since the 00s. Took until maybe 2014 or 2015 until it got to the point where I no longer had Windows even on dual boot.

My first experience was with Red Hat 5.x back in the late 90's, I got ahold of a huge book that came with it on CD. Since then I've used several distros both on my PC as dual boot, but also running a server. I've always defaulted to Windows again because of gaming mainly, and I'm honestly not a big fan of booting back and forth between different systems.

I've currently got EndeavourOS installed and am playing around seeing if I can get everything to work, and so far it seems this may be the time I actually switch for good.

Some version of kubuntu on some kind of hardware around 2001, it was a PC my parents built for windows 98

Or maybe a different distro but it had kde

2016 for me. I wanted a music production suite, and was given a new laptop for starting college (uk college, I was 15 at the time). I decided to try out Ububtu Studio, a media/art-centered branch of Ubuntu. I found that the incredibly slow laptop that I used to have just.... worked? It was somehow faster at doing day to day tasks than my much newer laptop. I also found the visual aesthetics (Ubuntu Studio was pre-Unity Ubuntu) really appealing.

As I kept using it, I found that more and more my time was being spent on my older laptop rather than the newer one. I started disteo hopping nefore setttling on Manjaro in early 2017. Then I went for i3 and dwm, which led to me using gentoo for a few years. In my last year of uni I found that my time maintaining my set-up was getting impractical on top of all the work so I went back to Windows briefly. Very quickly realised I couldn't use it anymore and so set myself back up with Manjaro.

Currently giving Ubuntu a go because my current laptop has dual amd/nvidia graphics and out of the box it just works much better on Ubuntu. There's been some frustrations but I can't see myself going back to Windows. I use it for work on my work laptop and the little things frustrate me to no end

I was in high school and decided to use Lubuntu as my daily driver while in my network engineering class. It was a novelty to me but I didn't really take Linux seriously.

My first experience with Linux was Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. I dual-booted for over a decade and even went back to just using Windows for a while before finally making the full switch. I think I spent two or three years without using my Windows partition before deciding to give Windows one last chance, which lasted a month, then wiping it and sticking to EndeavourOS for my daily driver/gaming desktop and vanilla Arch Linux on my laptop.

Accidentally fried the windows install on my first laptop in 2005 or 2006. My friend told me to try Ubuntu and I loved it. A few years later I had an art school GF and she introduced me to Macs. I wanted to be cool so I upgraded to a 2008 unibody MacBook. I used Mac OS for a while until apple started to really wall off the garden and the laptop was no longer supported. Got a new Dell XPS around 2016 and got back on the Linux train. Not hopping off again except maybe for a BSD.

I installed Ubuntu back in 2012 to get the Tux TF2 item when they made Steam available for Linux. After that, I just kind of tinkered with it on the side until recently when I switched completely.

Ubuntu when I was 14, although I needed a lot of help from someone who was already familiar with the system. because I didn't have yet much of an idea how things were relating to each other and why some things weren't just as with windows. Didn't also really use it properly and switched back to Windows after a few months. Instead of an opportunity to explore my way of using the system anew I just saw hurdles of doing things just like I did with Windows.

I know it was some time in 2002. IDK what my first Linux distro was TBH, but I quickly returned to windows. Then Shortly after I took a dive off the deep end to try to really learn Linux some and spent days installing Gentoo on some probably 400-600 MHz single core box (was in college at the time). That, while being pretty painful overall, was a good learning experience. I was in school for computer aided drafting, got my associates, and here I am 20 years later as a DevOps engineer. I am comfortable with the big 3 OSes, tho mac would be my weakest. Gaming keeps bringing me back to a home Windows desktop, tho. Actually just set up a USB stick with nix plasma to check out this weekend as I think I'm missing the train on nix.
Edits: mostly spelling, originally posted on phone, typos galore

I discovered Linux when I was learning programming in my childhood. I used it side-by-side with Windows all the way through college where I started daily driving only Linux. I hopped this order mainly: Ubuntu > Elementary > Debian > Arch > Gentoo > Arch > Fedora > Nix. Probably not right when I started programming in 2007 when I was 8, but before I was doing Arduino development at 11, so like 2009-2010ish. Started daily driving in 2018 or 2019

I never went back and forth as I wanted to get away from Windows ASAP since it's such a terrible line of operating systems that do things the most backwards way possible. For a long time I was in the "I need to have Windows for my games" camp, which is why I maintained a dual boot or a computer with Windows installed, but then Proton happened, and there was no longer any need, and I could fully wipe my hands of that filth

SuSE @ 1999, then Slackware in the same year.

Tried SuSE (bought as a box) as an alternative to the annoying, unstable and insecure Windows 9x, it was also the time when Linux as an alternative desktop OS was starting to get hyped in the media. Especially in regards to stability and security. Well, it wasn't hard to beat Win9x in those areas. Tried it a bit, didn't like it that much (I think it was KDE 1.x) and also didn't understand much of it. I was still intrigued though and wanted to really learn it starting from the commandline, but I felt I couldn't with all the SuSE stuff like YaST being preinstalled.

So I bought a big book (by Michael Kofler), it was the de facto standard book for really learning Linux from the ground up back then. And I chose a distribution which would be much more minimalistic (because I felt that makes it easier to learn). So I installed Slackware. I used it for like 3 years and learned a lot (all the basics), it was a hard journey though and other distros started appearing and they promised to be more modern or better than Slackware.

So I tried Debian next, then Crux, then Arch. This was all around 2002-2006. I can't remember exactly how long I used each, but I do know I've used Slack for quite a lot, then Debian rather shortly, then Crux also not very long (basically I just wanted to test a source based distro but compile times were annoyingly long back in the day), and then it was Arch all the way. Arch was fast, rather simple, always up to date, and it had the great AUR. I didn't ever look back.

I did take a break from Linux as my primary OS from approximately 2009 to 2017, mostly due to playing a ton of video games (Windows only, not runnable at all on Linux back then) and also due to my career path making me work with lots of Windows Servers, Powershell and other Microsoft stuff.

Since about 2017/2018 I'm back to Linux as primary OS (Arch, again) and haven't looked back since. Even managed to fully delete all physical Windows partitions now (I only keep it in a VM in case I need to test something).

I'm testing NixOS on my notebook currently, it seems to be "the future", but my main desktop will probably stay Arch for a bit longer still.

Looking back at using Slackware early on, I don't regret it, since I learned a ton, but it was tough using Slackware around the 2000s. I still remember a lot of fighting with programs which wouldn't compile due to dependency errors or other compilation errors. And a lot of Google searches for various compilation errors leading to rare and hard to understand solutions found in random forum posts. Compared to that, any Linux distro feels like mainstream these days. But it was an efficient way to learn.

That would have been Slackware, which in those days came on a stack of 3.5" floppy disks. So early 90's (and hence I was in my mid-30s) but I was still mainly using Windows 3.1 and Trumpet Winsock to connect to the Internet.

I think the first time I really took it seriously was in the mid 90's with Debian, a copy of which was posted to me, on CD-ROM I think, by Ian Murdock himself (back in the days when he was still with Debra 😏).

1998 - Mandrake Linux

I bought a random Linux magazine that came with a Mandrake CD, I installed it, struggled with everything, but fell in love with the idea of Linux. So, I kept trying distros until last year, when I finally settled on an Arch based distro called Crystal Linux.

When I was about 11 roughly two decades ago, on the first PC I got to actively use. I think it was OpenSuSe. My father had unix at work back then and saw no reason to use anything but a -ix system.

I liked it a lot, back then so was mainly reading things on the internet, no gaming needed.

Haven’t cycled back yet, since I play a few games that don’t run well on linux at all and use some proprietary software. I do find myself trying to use linux commands on windows from time to time, getting annoyed with it not working before remembering.

I think it was about 1995. I was going to the university and was looking for something Unix compatible I could use at my home computer to perform assignments instead of needing to go into school computer lab. Remote work basically. Think I was using LessTif instead of Motif for some coding task.

Ahh. Those were the days. Used modem to connect to school and connect remotely to the network using Linux. :)

Linux was kinda sketchy on the hardware I had available so my first experience was installing NetBSD on an '040 Mac with a stack of floppy disks. I was able to get WindowMaker running at 16bits, 640x480. I was pretty slick, with my 'transparent' eterm.

My dad got me a Raspberry Pi for my 10th birthday. I used Ubuntu Mate 16.04 and was amazed by the customizability. Switched my laptop in 2019, never looked back.

Oh gosh, it must have been 1999? 2000ish? I have no idea what distro it was or if distros were even a thing. It took me 3-4 days to get all of my driver's working. I clunked along with it for a week or two until an update borked the system and I didn't know how to fix it, so I went back to Windows. I tried many more times over the following decades, usually with similar results. About 6 years ago I really learned a lot more about Unix servers and therefore about Linux itself. So I installed it again and I've had it on at least one computer in the house ever since then.

I started community college in 2007 with no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I don’t remember how, but I came across Linux and spent that year brining ISOs to cds, testing different distros, customizing my DE, etc… By my second year I decided that computers was what I wanted to do and specifically something involving Linux. Fast forward 16 years and I’m still working in tech with 7+ Linux machine between my homelab and my cloud providers and dozens of FOSS services. Funny enough, I just recently moved and found a stack of like 30 bootable ISO cds as old as Ubuntu 7.10.

I installed Ubuntu, ran it for a few hours on a pentium 4 box. Thought it was neat but not neat enough to switch over after I realized I couldn't play the games I wanted.

I eventually got fed up with windows updates and instability with random shit and developers shitting in the registry and weird permissions issues and all that and switched. Now a days I run pop os on my laptops and desktop with a side rig just for finicky games and windows only shit id rather not configure for my main systems. I have a steam deck too. I'm 👌 close to giving up windows all together but I still like having trash box I can format at anytime.

I had an eccentric roommate around 2008 that was crazy enthusiastic about a computer he built that had a desktop with multiple workspaces he could access on a cube. I only cared if it could play Counter Strike; so not at all. It was my first exposure to the idea of something other than Windows. I had a problem with a Windows 8 license on a laptop I only used for Arduino stuff in 2014. I put Lubuntu on it and never looked back. I've been slowly grinding my way into Linux ever since.

I got a Karmic Koala (ubuntu 09.10) CD from my friend kn my high school days, I install it on my Pentium 4 PC then freaked out because there are no codec and I can't install it because I have no Internet at all, lol. Going back to windows until I have Laptop on my second year of uni. I still needs to use my uni's wifi to install any apps, but it is workable and I use Linux almost exclusively since then. (sometimes dual boot-ing if there are Lecture that needs me to use windows.)

A friend loaned me a CD set of Mandrake which had an early version of KDE. I was floored away by something as simple as the level of customization you could do with the taskbar. And having this alien operating system running on an alien EXT3 partition format instead of FAT32 or NTFS that you didn't need to defragment. It seemed pretty fantastical.

I loved tweaking the desktop environment on Windows by replacing explorer.exe with LiteStep and Blackbox so likewise I did this on Linux. Over time I had fun discovering Gnome2, Fluxbox, XFCE, etc. you name it. Eventually I got a desktop I really liked and felt productive on and as Windows XP approached end of life I had no intention of using Vista so I transitioned to exclusively Linux at that point.

I did play with different distros and running servers at the time, hosted VMs back in the day you had to take whatever distro they offered. But for my desktop I basically went Mandrake, Arch (didn't know how to make everything work), Debian, Ubuntu, back to Arch.

Ubuntu ~2005/2006. I was introduced to Linux by my friend's older brother in highschool, then proceeded to nuke the windows install on my parents' PC.

That's when they decided to buy me a laptop, which I dualbooted ubuntu on. Now almost two decades later, I'm a devops engineer working professionally with Linux

I've been a Mac guy since 1985 but I've always had additional machines running other OSes (including Windows). My first Linux experience was with Yggdrasil, which my small company was trying out. We never got it to boot. After that, it was early Red Hat, which I ran for years until the hardware I was using died. After that, it was various versions of Ubuntu on machines at work. Now I've got a couple of Raspberry Pis running Raspian.

Early pandemic. Probably ragequit and went back to windows weekly for like a few months until sticking to it for good.

Once you accept it's something new and you will have to learn some new things it's smooth sailing.

Downloaded Slackware at univ lab and split it on endless amount of floppy disks.
This was probably in ..-93 or 94? .. or thereabouts. I was in my early 20s.
Went home and had to come back 3 times, because one floppy was always corrupted.

Then I tried to compile kernel for 24 hours and it just kept failing. . struggled with it for a week or so and got it running - then formatted the disc and started over. Ah good times.

Started using Linux "for real" after Debian 1.3 was released in -97 (I think?). Haven't really stopped using it.

Mandrake... In the 90's... I will never ever forget the pain of tulip

Mine was back in 1999 courtesy of this:

https://ia800600.us.archive.org/35/items/TheLinuxPocketbook/TheLinuxPocketbookfrontCover.jpg

The Linux Pocketbook from APCMag, which included a full copy of Red Hat 5.2 (according to this image, I vaguely recall the copy I had had a slightly different cover so they might have updated it). Having it on CD was a big deal back when we still had dial up! I remember how daunting the command line was at that point - like I had grown up on DOS and then Win 3.11, but a full blown Unix system was not something I was used to at that point.

For some extra context, my PC at that stage was a Packard Bell desktop 😅

Ubuntu was my first. I got a copy of 7.04 from the IT instructor at a local tech school during a field trip back in high school. I had no idea what linux was before then. I would boot the live cd on the family computer and mess around with it since I didn't have one of my own. I was finally able to get a hand-me-down windows 98 PC from my aunt and installed my copy of 7.04 on that right away. Got my dad to run some ethernet up to my room and I was living like royalty after that.

I've tried about every distro under the sun since those days, but Ubuntu always feels like home

I read The Jargon File before I touched much of anything aside from DOS, and I was hooked. My first starry-eyed actual experience with Unix was at my first programming job: On a Unix system writing C (neither of which I had ever used). They gave me and my coworker a single copy of Kernighan and Ritchie's book and told us to get up to speed. The people assigned to us as mentors were more or less useless as far as figuring out how to do anything, so we struggled a lot. In the end we did okay.

We also an excellent computer science teacher who gave us an old SGI system to play with, which she said "fell off a truck." It couldn't really do much of anything interesting because we didn't have any internet to connect it to and we already had compilers on our own more-capable computers by that point, but it was a super cool little artifact to have.

My first actual Linux experience was downloading Mandrake when it came out, and starting to use it for my everyday personal computing. Multiple people saw that I had this super-weird science fiction computer and heard how I talked about it, tried to install Linux for themselves even when I told them they probably didn't want to, and then suffered as a result because it wasn't super capable (for normal computer tasks) or easy to use at that time in history.

For a while I lived in a big rented house with other young layabouts with my computer (Debian by that point) being totally inscrutable. E.g. it would bring up just a grub command line when booted, which you had to type the right super-cryptic commands into in order to boot the actual system. It was effectively alien technology to everyone else. It was also permanently hooked to an always-on boom box's headphone jack and had a cron job to record Howard Stern every morning to a low-bitrate MP3, which was shared via Samba to the rest of the network, by request of my housemate so he could listen to Stern any time he wanted to.

It was great days. There were kings on the land, there was magic in the world. Aside from work environments, I used Linux pretty much exclusively from that point forward, up until the modern day when Chromebook+crostini and MacOS have become civilized environments to operate in.

i probably first got started with linux back when i was around 12 or 13. would make a bunch of usb flash drives and install a new distro every week or two

longest i'd go with one distro was like a month and then i'd make some stupid move and break my system and re-install again.

after a while i went back to windows and then in my early 20s i went back to linux. used arch linux for a bit but then tried fedora and have been using fedora for years

right now my main OS is macos because I have apple silicon but as soon as asahi is more mature i'm gonna switch over back to linux. i do have windows & fedora installation through parallels