What has your experience with Linux been like so far? How long has been your Linux journey? Mine began while I was studying computer science, and I’ve been in love with Linux since.

    • I had a Pentium I 120 MHz Packard Hell machine. It came with Win95 OSR 1 and I loved that beast. I upgraded the disk (1.1 GB to 3.1GB!) and the RAM up to 40MB. The screen was a 13" fishbowl so I get a Sony Trinitron 15" screen eventually.

      The combo modem/fax/sound ISA card wasn’t worth keeping, but I got a PCI Sound blaster as well as a 3Com 3c905 fast 10/100 Ethernet card. I had one of the best machines in the dorm for a while. Warcraft II played so very good.

      The Linux support in RedHat 5.2, then through 6.2, and sometimes Mandrake, OpenBSD, and some other distros was great. As long as you set the IRQs in the bios right it worked like a dream.

  • I started with a book about Red Hat 5.x that included a cd with the OS. I generally went back to Windows after a while (except i did run a server on an old pc for quite a while), but tried I again every few years.

    I always liked the idea of Linux, but gaming kept making me go back to Windows. Early last year I tried installing EndeavourOS alongside windows and have stuck with it since. My new PC that I got later that same year has never seen windows.

    I’m loving it, and don’t foresee a return to Windows.

  • I’ve started several decades ago, with some ancient Slackware (?) version, downloaded using 56k line modem as 1.44 floppy images. Meanwhile I had a period of a difficult relationship with Windows (2000 was the least bad) and a longish affair with MacOS. Now Linux-only everywhere, for the last ~5 years.

  • I bought a copy of Corel Linux in 2001 at a USAF base exchange because I was a broke airman and was building my first homebuilt PC and didn’t want to shell out money for Windows, and I didn’t have Internet to pirate it in the dorms (this was the days of no wifi and pay as you go Internet cafes). I thought it’d be JUST like Windows, and I could get shit done, and the differences were just like those between Mac/PC. Just a different interface.

    Boy was I wrong. It sucked balls. I didn’t pick up Linux again until Ubuntu in 2006. Now I daily drive Debian. Oh well, at least it came with an inflatable penguin.

    • I think in 2001 I was making a Linux from scratch system having not gotten enough from red hat and Debian with home configured and compiled kernels

      Fun times and no, nothing like the commercial home operating systems back then

  • I remember seeing that on the shelf next to a copy of SuSe during my regular visits to CompUSA. I had just barely developed an interest in computer gaming at the time, still a few years prior to my first experience with LiGNUx. I always wondered when it turned into Fedora and Red Hat went exclusively enterprise.