It's time for a poll. How long have you used Linux?

If I don't count the 3 or so months I didn't have my tower, maybe 3 months. I ditched Windows sometime in mid to late January?? We're at the end of June now, so yeah, 3 months of actually tinkering with Linux. 3 on that crappy laptop using it for nothing more than getting onto the internet and writing some documents. It was painful to look at the screen, so I didn't use it all that much.

I didn't learn anything when I was using that laptop for 3 months.
3 months actually holding someones hand trying to figure out problems with 2 laptops that ended up in the septic tank and that third I couldn't bring myself to bother with.

I guess take your pick, 3 months or 6 months
 


I started with SLS in the early 90s and switched to Slackware in perhaps the late 90s. I've been using Debian since 2020, though I plan to switch to Kali when I can get a couple of new hard drives.

Signed,

Matthew Campbell
 
There's some old CDs i got which actually look as fresh as new, namely Red Hat and Mandrake (6.0) going back to before Y2K, but their pristine state only results from being ignored this long, after i concluded their installation could be messy and/or almost pointless in days when Win9x ran the show. Linux had to wait until the LIVE frenzy became viable under the form of Slax, Pure OS, Nimble and more recently Porteus, a decade later i think. Yet, i only transitioned in a more permanent manner the year or so before Microsoft finally dumped me, once i had gotten used to Win10 Pro while there was more incentive to flush Win10 Fam on my former tablet now replaced by a Dull NoteBook quite capable of sustaining the comparison with a handful Plan-B's ready to boot (2 Linux OSes use as little space as 1 Windows, not to mention SSDs got considerably larger anyway)!
 
Started using Linux the moment that Unix suddenly wasn't the corporate solution anymore for big brand software. Not sure when I first used it, somewhere just after the year 2000 I think, 2000 to 2003, anytime in that area.
 
Jeg er forsigtig bruger af Linux, pga. jeg ikke har forståelsen af hele det at selv skal finde ud af ! jeg har tidligere brugt Windows, hvilket jeg har kvittet, men har dogen ældre bærbar hvor jeg har Windows 10 på, til brug for alle de gamle dyder, såsom coder til programmer som jeg engang brugte, Jeg er nu ved at være "dus" med linux/ubuntu så meget at jeg næsten ikke bruger de "gamle" programmer, svært er det når én som jeg har brugt Windows i 20 år . Men jeg ønsker for alt i verden ikke at gå tilbage til det "gamle" system dags dato "slås" jeg med Google som i dagens Danmark næsten har alle rettigheder, og når én som jeg er infiltreret i deres mail system så er det virkelig svært at få andet til at virke - det går virkelig lang tid, at få et nyt mailsystem op at stå når man har alle kontakter og hele omgangskredsen kender kun mig på G.mail. Er der nogen der har erfaring og gode råd da modtages de med taknemlighed.
 
That answer isn't clear for me. I installed redhat at work in 1996 and dropped it when it couldn't provide a driver for a token ring card. I tried it a bit later at home and it would boot and access the network but couldn't log into my wifi. And, as it was back then, all I got was that it was my fault not Linux drivers that wanted the degrade my security.

Next was when Ubuntu came out. It installed and ran great but my games broke on Ubuntu. So back to Windows.

Then when Linux Mint came out it ran like a charm and some of my games worked, but the one game I was testing would not run and so back to Windows.

And now ... we have all the work Valve did to make games run on Linux and their joint venture with Arch Linux. We have great work and progress in running games on Linux and making the interface more Windows-like. And we have Bottles which addresses other applications and may be my saviour for doing firmware updates to my HAM handheld radios. And after the announcement of EOL for Windows 10 along with forcing Recall and a Microsoft-owned ID upon us, I deleted Windows and ran Linux Mint for the past year.
 
aclund said:
Jeg er forsigtig bruger af Linux, pga. jeg ikke har forståelsen af hele det at selv skal finde ud af ! jeg har tidligere brugt Windows, hvilket jeg har kvittet, men har dogen ældre bærbar hvor jeg har Windows 10 på, til brug for alle de gamle dyder, såsom coder til programmer som jeg engang brugte, Jeg er nu ved at være "dus" med linux/ubuntu så meget at jeg næsten ikke bruger de "gamle" programmer, svært er det når én som jeg har brugt Windows i 20 år . Men jeg ønsker for alt i verden ikke at gå tilbage til det "gamle" system dags dato "slås" jeg med Google som i dagens Danmark næsten har alle rettigheder, og når én som jeg er infiltreret i deres mail system så er det virkelig svært at få andet til at virke - det går virkelig lang tid, at få et nyt mailsystem op at stå når man har alle kontakter og hele omgangskredsen kender kun mig på G.mail. Er der nogen der har erfaring og gode råd da modtages de med taknemlighed.
Click to expand...

Reminder: This is an English-only site. Thanks.
 
KGIII said:
Reminder: This is an English-only site. Thanks.
Click to expand...
En påmindelse: Dette er en side, der kun findes på engelsk. Tak skal du have.

(Ignore my weird sense of humour)
 
aclund said:
Jeg er forsigtig bruger af Linux, pga. jeg ikke har forståelsen af hele det at selv skal finde ud af ! jeg har tidligere brugt Windows, hvilket jeg har kvittet, men har dogen ældre bærbar hvor jeg har Windows 10 på, til brug for alle de gamle dyder, såsom coder til programmer som jeg engang brugte, Jeg er nu ved at være "dus" med linux/ubuntu så meget at jeg næsten ikke bruger de "gamle" programmer, svært er det når én som jeg har brugt Windows i 20 år . Men jeg ønsker for alt i verden ikke at gå tilbage til det "gamle" system dags dato "slås" jeg med Google som i dagens Danmark næsten har alle rettigheder, og når én som jeg er infiltreret i deres mail system så er det virkelig svært at få andet til at virke - det går virkelig lang tid, at få et nyt mailsystem op at stå når man har alle kontakter og hele omgangskredsen kender kun mig på G.mail. Er der nogen der har erfaring og gode råd da modtages de med taknemlighed.
Click to expand...
Setup a GMX accont. They've been around forever and the only time they annoy you is the adverts on the login screen. The app never sends my phone pop-ups and I never get spam. You can have 10 alias email addresses. So when you want to sign up for something but don't want to keep using it and getting adverts, you use an alias to sign up, then when done, delete the alias.

Contacts:
1. Set an email signature in your GMX account that says something like "Please note that this is my new email address: <your-new-email>@gmx.com. I'm closing my Gmail account some time in the future."
2. Set you Gmail address to forward emails to your new GMX address.
3. Reply to emails only from your GMX account.
4. Log into your Gmail account at least once a month to keep it active (I think this is Google's new policy)
5. If you have an Android smartphone, don't worry about #4 (if you use that Gmail address for your phone).
Notes:
  • You can export your contacts in many different formats from Gmail.
  • You can open a fresh Gmail account for your Andoird phone if you want to clear away most of the targeted adverts.

A little off-topic regarding the rest of your post:
Linux & "Older Programs"
You can run these progams with WINE or on a VM. Neither is necessarily more convenient, and it depends on your available memory, storage, and CPU resources as to whether you can run a VM. Generally, for Windows 7, 2GB RAM, and you can get by on a total of 40GB (as to my recollection, my Win7 VM was running on 7GB in qcow format -- you may need to use qcow to trick the installer...open a topic on VMs if interested), and allocate 2-4 threads and you're good to go. You don't need anything fancy to share files, just a 10GB image file formatted to Fat32 or a network share (I use the former, it works fine).

Being a "Cautious Linux User"
Don't be cautious. I'll bet that 9/10 people on this forum's journey was like mine: started playing with Linux. Then used it on one or more daily machines but held onto at least one Windows machine for software/games that were Windows only. Woke up one day and said, "Why am I doing this?" and formatted the last Windows disk/partition, and dived in and just learned through trial and error, found alternative software for most stuff, and sucked it up and learned to use WINE or VMs for the rest. Then years down the line realised, "When did I last use my VM? Did I even copy my WINE prefix when I reinstalled?" because there's some amazing open source stuff out there. I think most people here will agree.

Coding/Development:
On the whole, the best environment for most development is Linux/Unix, especially C/C++ and Python, but really anything not relying on proprietary runtimes. And it's worth noting that VS Code runs on Linux. And it is the best IDE, and I say this as someone never too fond ow IDEs.
So for your development needs, I can guarantee you'll be happy on Linux, so give it a try for coding. I see that Win10 install being erased in under a year!
Anyway, hope that was of use to you and any other users with similar issues or reservations. Peace out.
 
Fanboi said:
En påmindelse: Dette er en side, der kun findes på engelsk. Tak skal du have.

(Ignore my weird sense of humour)
Click to expand...

English only, thanks.

(Even if you're joking, etc...)
 
Diputs said:
Started using Linux the moment that Unix suddenly wasn't the corporate solution anymore for big brand software. Not sure when I first used it, somewhere just after the year 2000 I think, 2000 to 2003, anytime in that area.
Click to expand...

Couple of years later I ran multiboot on my PC, so that I can install big database software tools on my "server" and to my surprise, it worked. Mind you, couple of years before that, you needed HP/IBM/Sun hardware to do the same. But then you could suddenly do that on a PC !
 
Since Sarge 3.1. About 2005. Before that it was Redhat 7.x to 9.0. And previous to that was some version of Slackware but just on a leftover machine as I tested this new OS. (And downloaded on a half-speed dial up connection to floppy disks, no less. I would say that times have changed.) I had an advantage as I was trained on Unix in my job in the early 90's.
 
Off and on since the 2000's

Started with Ubuntu, did some Gentoo, a little SUSE, tried Fedora, dabbled here and there with some other stuff. Often had an older machine setup with Linux and have ISO's still have an ISO burned to disc for Ubuntu 8.04 in my case along with a ton of other stuff.

Used MonoWall for a router at one point. Used a few other RouterOS' based on Linux as well till I settled on OpnSense which I have used for about 10 years now. Had a drive die in my Win media server so started searching for something where a drive death doesn't mean a total loss and ended up with FreeNAS around 2015.
 
Since 2006 I start with Ubuntu...
 
One of these days, I need to close this thread and create a new one.

After a while, the forum decides to kill off the poll and that data is more or less lost to the ether. That's disappointing but I have no idea how to change that - and don't have the access to change it even if I did know.

There is some commentary (which you'd be forgiven for not reading as there are nearly 20 pages of posts) that indicates the results. There were a surprising (to me) number of people who had used Linux for an extended period of time. I'd expected a bell curve but we ended up with something closer to sigmoidal with a bump on the lower end.
 
KGIII said:
One of these days, I need to close this thread and create a new one.

After a while, the forum decides to kill off the poll and that data is more or less lost to the ether. That's disappointing but I have no idea how to change that - and don't have the access to change it even if I did know.

There is some commentary (which you'd be forgiven for not reading as there are nearly 20 pages of posts) that indicates the results. There were a surprising (to me) number of people who had used Linux for an extended period of time. I'd expected a bell curve but we ended up with something closer to sigmoidal with a bump on the lower end.
Click to expand...


Yeah, never dealt with polls much on forums and such. Actually ended up at this one due to a link in your signature, lol.

As far as use I know I suggest it to people a lot even if it's just to keep a fairly recent ISO around on disc so that if there is an issue you have a way to test it. Did that a lot when I was running a small ISP like setup in an apartment building. Had one guy who kept having issues due to Norton AV or something like that. Would bring my laptop to check the connection in his apartment and everything was fine, he said something to the effect of, Well it must be something you have setup on your computer that makes it work right. I grabbed an ISO out of my apartment put it in his computer and it booted and accessed internet without issue.

For a lot of people they just want things to work when they click on an icon or insert a disc (well now it's download a program but you get the idea.) I don't mind tinkering but seem to always have things I am dealing with and at a certain point get frustrated and would end up back on windows. I like to game and Proton has made that possible, in fact I finally made the switch after I installed ChimeraOS on my stepson's computer and saw that it just worked with minimal issues.
 
Found some free linux cds back 1995-1996. Tried Debian, Redhat 5.2 and Mandrake 7.0 . Found that Mandrake had the best spanish localization (I am mexican). Since then using at home some Mandrake derivative, currently Mageia 9. Tried apply linux at work at desktops but folks didn´t like it. Only at servers with Centos/RedHat.
 
KGIII said:
I had to just establish some arbitrary numbers.

Just pick the category to which you belong.

For fun, I've made it so that you can't see the poll results unless you have also voted.

Also for fun, you can not change your vote.

(I may sticky this for a few days. I want to give folks a chance to respond.)

If you need to add a caveat, do so in the thread. Note that this is in "General Linux" and not "Off-Topic", so please try to keep it on
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KGIII said:
My answer isn't really "right". I used Unix for years. When Linux came out, I played with it a number of times. I was playing with Linux when RedHat was still something you could buy a CD for at Best Buy.

But, I didn't use Linux exclusively until about 2007 or 2008. That's less than 15 years. So, that's what I picked.
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The funny thing is that you posted it on April 1st. Was it supposed to be a prank in some way? Fortunately or Unfortunately, I'm 13 so I'm not really sure how old software and OSs work. I started using Linux a few months ago, made a CLI based OS based on Linux and I'm currently doing projects with the Pi 5. Just out of curiosity, if you could choose between having an old PC with old hardware or a new PC with the latest tech, which one would you choose?
 
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