Linux operating system



I started in 2006 with Ubuntu and still use Linux every day.;)
 
My friend installed Ubuntu 10.04 13 years ago on my old desktop.

Been using Devuan, Debian, Slackware, Manjaro, MX Linux and so many Linux os's over the years and will to the end of time.
 
How did you start using the Linux operating system?

I really didn't just want to know how long you've been using Linux, but I'd also like to know how you got to know Linux.
For example, I used Windoze until 2015, then I no longer had time to use the computer because I worked about 16 hours a day. This break was a real miracle of the skies for me, because in 2018 (September) while the workers were renovating the house and I didn’t have much to do, I turned on the computer and I thought "I don't like Windoze at all" I surfed the web, and while browsing I discovered LInux (the first installation was Fedora, but for me it was a real disaster).
Then I immediately searched on the web again, and I found by chance Linux Mint, which was like a miracle for me and I have been using Linux ever since. I learned everything on my own (with the help of tutorials) and today I'm very happy to use Linux.
Linux forever <3
 
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I don't recall the "how" of how I first found out about Linux. I can say it was because of Windows "improvements" that I made the switch (in 2014). Like you, I also started with Mint. I bumbled my way through with help via Mint's forums.
 
@hacktheworld :-

I, too, had "had enough" when EOL for Win XP rolled around. I'd been using it on and off since 3.1, back in the 1980s.

April 2014, I decided to Google "free operating systems"....just for the hell of it, and just to see what came up. What DID come up utterly astonished me....

I started with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, the "Trusty Tahr". Within a day, XP was but a distant memory; I'd wiped it out of my life, installed Ubuntu in its place, and dived head-first into the murky waters of the Linux eco-system. It helped that I had no 'ties' of any sort to Windows....never needed it for work, in any way.

I found the learning-curve wasn't that steep. I followed a lot of tutorials, asked a lot of questions on the old Ubuntu Forums, joined a few others.....the usual stuff. I'm mostly self-taught, assisted by an enquiring mind!

I distro-hopped for a few months, though I kept the Ubuntu install, so's I had summat to fall back on if everything else went pear-shaped. Six months down the line, Canonical arbitrarily dropped support for my ancient Radeon graphics; desktop freeze-ups became a regular daily occurrence. An acquaintance suggested I take a look at Puppy; their 'take' on Trusty had just been released. Accordingly, I installed Tahrpup to a USB stick (the recommended Puppy way, as it turned out).....and experimented.

Didn't take me long to realise I'd found the one for me. Within 2 days, Ubuntu was consigned to the bin of mistakes and Puppy had taken its place on both my machines.

I've been active on the Puppy Forums pretty much from day one; first, learning my way around....after 18 months or so, I was helping others out. I found I had an aptitude for packaging - AND RE-packaging - so began contributing stuff to the community.

I've been instrumental in helping to establish an entire collection of 'portable' apps for the Puppy community; they suit 'our Pup's' oddball way of doing stuff very well. I moderate on the forum; help out with the noobs, etc; build and publish various small utilities, sometimes collaborating with others on bigger projects. In short, I've had more fun this last decade than I'd had for the whole of the previous three!

Linux encourages freedom in how ya do things....and Puppy positively encourages experimentation with all sorts of crazy stuff, largely down to the ease with which you can back 'er up.

I'm having fun, mate..! :D


Mike. ;)
 
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There is similar topic somewhere here. Newertheless, my first personal computer was running FreeBSD and this was in mid 90'. I switched to linux because I had some hardware issues with latest devices and BSD (in general). In early 2000' I was multibooting BSDs and several Linux distros. After getting my first laptop only linux offered full (more or less) compatibility so I am running linux only on the laptops.
Why I selected BSD first? Because I got FreeBSD installation floppies from a friend. I really wanted Sun but these machines were expensive.
 
I used UNIX back in the day. I dabbled with Linux quite early on but switched to it completely when I retired.
 
In 1999 I switched on my computer with Windows 98, having upgraded from Windows 95 recently. It was a Pentium machine. As usual, I downloaded my email and began to read it, opening the attachments as I normally would. Unexpectedly, one of the attachments "exploded" on the screen in a beautiful fountain of fireworks. It was quite pretty to watch, colourful and quite unusual ... until shortly after, I realised that I couldn't get rid of it. Every time I opened email, it invaded the screen. It also generated error messages I couldn't understand and I feared that it had infected not only all my email but the operating system.

Fortunately, in the family, there was an IT graduate who was trained in lots of computer specialisations whom I was able to call upon. He was able to identify the problem and access the antidote online to get rid of it. It turned out to be the "Ska" worm, also called "Happy99". It had ripped around the world and may have been the first worm to generate itself and pass itself on through email.

Having read about the linux free operating system probably about a year earlier, I asked my family relative about it. He'd been trained in UNIX, was familiar with linux and so directed me to a book: "Red Hat Linux for Dummies" by Jon "maddog" Hall which came out in 1999 with CDs for Red Hat 6.2. Shortly after acquiring the book, Red Hat 6.2 was installed ending relations with MS OSs.

It turned out that John "maddog" Hall was an interesting player in early linux developments which he describes in an interview on youtube titled "Interview with Jon "maddog" Hall, a true LEGEND of Linux" in case anyone's interested in that history.
 
I was running windoze 7...then in 2012 I got this notice saying...you must move to windoze 10.
1735430858366.gif


Of cause I said...like Hell I will...so I typed...alternatives to windows and switched to Linux permanalty in 2015...
the rest is history.
1735431346484.gif

 
i got into computers back in the early 90s, around the time linux was developed - I heard about it in the mid 90s but didnt think much of it. fast forward ~20 years and we were decomming a server room in prep to move to a new building and one of the guys mentioned that we should keep one of the old 1u proliant's and toss linux on it for fun - so I did. played around with RHEL and Ubuntu for a bit and lost interest.

fast forward 10 years (last year) and one of my laptops died so I replaced it but figured I'd try linux again. I now have 4x linux boxes - mint on a laptop (backup/failover), mint on a mini desktop (test bench mostly), MX on my main rig, and dietpi on a nanopi neo3 (pihole/ad blocker). only have 1x winOS unit now, a mini desktop that I use for VOIP when I'm working from home.
 
I seem to remember it was a 'Mandrake' CD from the front of a computer magazine around the turn of the century. It was just before ADSL became available in my area to try alternative distros. Used Gentoo for a few years before moving on to Ubuntu then finally Xubuntu.
 
I'd taken a "Unix" class (taught using linux, not Unix) at college and had discovered, amongst other things, the beauty of shell scripting vs. "batch" scripting. I really wanted play around with linux some more and had picked up the installation media for Redhat 6 ("Hedwig") but hadn't really done anything with it for lack of a spare computer to try it on. Then a friend who was a network admin was asked by his employer to "clear out that (huge) room full of junk" and I was the recipient of three complete retired Windows 98 systems. I installed Redhat and played with it for a while then upgraded to Redhat 7.3 ("Valhalla"), still in console only mode (no GUI). Even then (1999 - 2004) I was wanting to escape the MS mess.

Not surprisingly, the more I used MS Windows, the more I wanted an alternative.

Remember when the "dot-com bubble" burst in 2000-2001? In 2004 I was a "programmer fixing lawn mowers" and got an opportunity to for a programming job for which I had to learn a new (to me) programming language. One tool I downloaded toward tht end was an "acculturation disk" - a bootable CD containing the target programming language and all the goodies that went along with it. That disk booted to Damn Small Linux and I was immediately hooked on miniature linux distros because in the processing of cutting out the bloat, DSL also cut out a -huge- amount of complexity - here was a linux OS I could (mostly wrap my head around). (I did get the programming job, too, though I stayed there for an unduly long time which, unfortunately, pretty much derailed my career. My bad.).

DSL was fun but then it all went in the toilet when the lead DSL dev left (long story there) and founded an even smaller and in pretty much every way "better" distro. I went along for that ride and have been using Tiny Core Linux ever since. I've tried other distros here and there but, for me, nothing else even comes close.

It's only been this year that I got all my day-to-day stuff off of MS Windows. For whatever reason, or perhaps no reason at all, I kept my email, even using thunderbird, on the old Win7 box but, other than that, all my important stuff has been on linux for at least a couple of years. Now the Windows box gets fired up only when I want to play a flash game, so I'm not going to count that. :)
 
I started out on a new "UNIX like" operating system called Solaris for the military in 1992.
At the time, it only ran on very expen$ive Sparc based computers. But by the time I was done
with that contract, there was this newfangled operating system that ran on x86 computers.

About that time, the first dial up ISP appeared in the town I was living in. There was this new thing
called the "internet". Nobody seemed to know very much about it, but we had some contacts
in the military and at a few colleges. We just called people up and asked them how to do things.

There was no Google, or O'Reilly books, or stackoverflow or even a linux.org, we just had to figure it out on our own.
It seemed most of them were using this new operating system made by some guy named Linus Torvalds.

There really were no browsers, or ftp servers, or dns servers, or even web servers for windows, or Mac out quite
yet. It was Linux or nothing for a while.
 
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How did you start using the Linux operating system?
I started maybe a very different way from most others: I bought a Win11 compatible machine second hand, foreseeing the possibilities for the near future, replaced the pitiful 256GB nvme with 1TB nvme and after a brief asking around I tried LMDE. LMDE is still my main consideration for my more modern systems, but since then I also revamped my 2007 Asus laptop, did some basic hardware upgrades and cleaning, repasting (thanks to youtube guys showing me how), and played around... I firstly thought it can only run 32bit system, but soon I realised 64bit is also an option and I have noticed the limitations of a spinning HDD for youtube performance, so SSD sata drive will go there to get the max out of the old hardware. Might put back Wilma distro on SSD, because even Linux MX struggles with youtube on HDD, despite RAM upgrade to 4GB. Now I am preparing to switch my Win10 computer to LMDE as well, and will probably just clone my set up from the Win11 laptop, where I also have a virtual machine and Win11 installed in it, my Win10 supposedly compatible with Win11, if I needed this OS for some rare software that doesn't have a support in Linux. I just need to set up that Win11 in the VM to stay on the 23 version, not to upgrade to 24. Too many people have problems with it to my taste. Microsoft is becoming a joke.

So 2024 has been a year of computing for me, learned a lot of new and very useful stuff. Also thanks to this community here. AI chatbot has been also very useful in setting complex things up and troubleshooting, answering my questions before I did some things, and helping me to decide against them after getting a fuller picture. It sometimes advices wrong, but most of the time it is correct and very helpful. Without the bot I would be struggling to do more advanced stuff when things often don't look like in walkthroughs so I often get stuck, also in other instances, like looking for some settings in excel, for example. Things almost never seem to look on my screen the way they advice me to click on this and that, perhaps for different versions of software and the past advice it was based on. The bot is priceless in this to find the ways around. Even copying and pasting the output from the terminal to help me understand what might be wrong and how exactly tackling it. Totally priceless. I don't have time to struggle with things that have a simple solution for days to figure things out. I just want a stable and functioning system without much drama.
 
because even Linux MX struggles with youtube on HDD, despite RAM upgrade to 4GB
That is more likely to be the onboard GPU not good enough for modern HD format, [try reducing the quality of the download stream] to say 144p
 
I firstly thought it can only run 32bit system, but soon I realised 64bit is also an option and I have noticed the limitations of a spinning HDD for youtube performance, so SSD sata drive will go there to get the max out of the old hardware.
I did the same on an old machine, the difference was definitely noticeable, if you feel LMDE is a tad slow on this machine , try Linux-Lite
 
That is more likely to be the onboard GPU not good enough for modern HD format, [try reducing the quality of the download stream] to say 144p
I did that, it is too blurry for me. I have Wilma on an ssd sata and I remember youtube worked well on that one, even without significantly reducing the quality of the video. Just that was 1TB sata drive, which I consider unreasonable for this machine, so planning a smaller one for that purpose and using the 1TB as a storage for backups in an enclosure.
 

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