Your First Experience

[vhane]

My first encounter with Unix was HP-UX at uni. I remember thinking that it was extremely cool to be able to connect to the lab and use CDE via a remote X session from my room on campus.

My first distro was Redhat 6.1 in the year 2000. I bought it from a book shop and it came in this big box:

It was great fun trying out all the different desktop environments and window managers.

I went through a phase where I'd try different distros for a while. Distros that I ended up using as my main OS for any significant length of time were Redhat, Madrake, Debian, openSUSE, FreeBSD (okay, this is not a Linux distro), Fedora, Arch, and Ubuntu.

These days all my computers are on OS X. I haven't used Linux as my main client OS for maybe 6 to 7 years now. My servers are on FreeBSD, Debian or Ubuntu LTS.

[Xahid]

My first experience with Linux was Redhat 5 back in 1999 (I guess) & then I search for the easier or user friendly distro, came up with Mandrake & SUSE Linux.

Now running CentOS on Servers, & Windows on the desktop.

[Haggis Veteran]

I had used Mandrake and Redhat years and years ago

I am 29 now and first used linux when i was around 15 so 14 years ago (1999)

The first distro name and version i mind of using was Fedora core 4 which was released in 2004

It was a major pain in the ass lol

[(Account no longer active)]

I started with Red Hat Linux 9/KNOPPIX, then Fedora Core/Fedora, and now I'm on openSUSE/Haiku. For my media setup, I use Linux Mint.

I like to stay up to date with the latest developments by trying out various Live CDs in my spare time.

[Teebor]

My first experiences with Linux were all bad, I even crashed unbuntu several times

Now I have a Laptop, an atom pc, and a raspberry pi all running linux and I intend in the next year/2 years to learn more and even go for the LPIC certification

I can't say I love linux though, and I am always forgetting commands but it is a fun challenge to learn something new especially since I've used windows for years

[Guth]

My first one was ubuntu on a VPS i rented, i actually quite liked using it so i downloaded it and put it on my own pc

but it wouldn't load video drivers correctly and after 5 days of messing around i gave up and went back to win

Will try it out again some day though.

[Chicane-UK Veteran]

My first experience of Linux was.. phew.. quite a few years ago. Must have been about 1998 or 1999 and the distribution was Red Hat. A friend of mine had started to get into it and consequently do did I... I used to feel like the man when I had my desktop all up and running, with Window Maker complete with a suitably cheese Matrix style theme.

I remember when I first started, simply having no idea how to use it.. and this was before we could really access the internet at home (before broadband got widely available here) so information was a little less easy to come by when we were having a little LAN party at his house. I'd complete an install of Red Hat, realise I didn't have the pico editor installed - and consequently not knowing how to handle package management, would just do a complete reinstall in the hope I installed the right options to include it! Forget about using VI or anything like that.. was far too much of a noob.

Happy days though - I was really into it all then. Not quite so excited these days :)

[Lee G. Veteran]

My first experience with Linux was using SUSE Linux, and shortly afterwards I tried Red Hat Linux and Fedora Core.

[+Frank B. Subscriber²]

The first UNIX experience? AIX 3.something on IBM RS/6000 workstations back in April 1993.

First Linux experience: Installing Slackware on an UMSDOS file system on top of MS-DOS 6.22. Late 1994/early 1995. Text mode worked, X refused to run,

Kernel version: 1.2.something. Hardware it ran on: 486 DX 33 MHz, 8 MB RAM.

[REM2000]

Slackware in 1995 that was on the front of a computer magazine. It gave me a command prompt and not much else and i didn't touch linux until SUSE in about 97/98.

Over the years ive played with a few, my fravourite has to be Debian and then Ubuntu. I generally use Linux as a server thought and don't really use it as a desktop that often.

[tim_s]

Linux for sure is a great OS to act as a server.

[Karl L.]

Hmm, I think my first ever experience was with Mandrake. I would have been 11 or 12. I remember looking for longhorn leaks, and the website I found them on also had a Mandrake support section. So I checked it out, and tried it but the internet wouldn't work on it. After that I tried various distros and broke them all.

Currently Arch is my go-to Linux that I have running on a plethora of virtual machines (and primary on my PI) at home and work.

My first experience with Linux was somewhat similar: I tried Mandrake. A friend told me it was the easiest distro to use for beginners. KDE was supposed to be super-simple to use. Unfortunately, I didn't really take the time to understand how things worked, got frustrated, and moved back to Windows XP.

I was encouraged to try Ubuntu 9.04 by a coworker at my first job during college. That time I installed it on my desktop, and began dual-booting with Windows Vista. Over time I started using Ubuntu more and more, but I never uninstalled Windows because I still wanted to play PC games. I was very happy dual-booting Windows and Ubuntu on my desktop and laptop for several years. Although I used Ubuntu the vast majority of the time, I still occasionally booted Windows to play games (mostly on my desktop). When Canonical decided to switch to Unity, I moved to Debian 6 because it still had GNOME 2. Since that time I have retired my desktop and bought a new laptop, which has never run anything but Debian natively since I wiped the Windows 7 installation from the factory. I have been an extremely satisfied Debian user for several years.

[Fish]

Like others here, mine was Mandrake around 2000. I remember struggling with the installation but I think I got it installed eventually. I went on to try Debian and Suse around that time as well. I never really got into Linux though. By that I mean if I came across a problem that just seemed to difficult to overcome I would take the easy route and boot into Windows instead.

And that was always the problem for me - I enjoyed tinkering and finding out how it works, but if I ran into too much trouble I would just dump it and return to my comfort zone, Windows. It wasn't until I tried early releases of Ubuntu (Warty and Hoary) and things actually started to work out of the box (for me anyway) that I started to take a greater interest in Linux. I stuck with Ubuntu for a while, then moved on to Arch as my interest and knowledge grew. I helped out a bit here on Neowin with Shift, but really it was just testing new builds.

Personal life took over, and Linux took a back seat. Computers became less and less "toys" to me, and more tools to get a job done. I found myself using Windows more and more just for the convenience of having things work without issues. But recently I'm dipping my toes again. I'm happy to say that things have really moved forward in the last few years and I can easily see me moving back to Linux full time again.

[+longgonebn Subscriber²]

Yea back then that was the main issue for me, the installation was such a hassle I would give up half the time.