Hello, my friends. I see a lot of people coming in here and saying "My experience with linux..." so I've decided it would be interesting to do this, too.

This is my experience with linux.

My interest in Linux began while I was browsing a forum I used to visit around March 2005. Someone had made a thread called "Linux: sucks or rocks?" and people were discussing it.

Of course, I had known what linux was for several years before that; it's pretty famous. A few years before this, my brother (a cool guy) had tried installing linux on his computer, and I even remember seeing him tinkering with it. I wasn't paying great attention to it, though. I asked him recently about it and he said something like "I tried it, but gave up. It was a bit odd and hard to do."

Anyway, I casually started reading the thread. People were discussing what they though, their own experiences, and etc. Some people said it was good. Another person said he used it a lot. This got me thinking about it. Someone had recommended Mandrake (as it was called at the time) as a good distribution for people starting out with Linux, so I looked on the Mandrake website.

I copied some text from the mandrake website into a text to speech program, then I got into my bed and listened to it read. (I do this all the time. It's very nice, you should try it.) As it read, I felt more and more interested. I began thinking "Hey... This seems to do most of what I need. If I could duel boot this with windows, I could avoid the trouble of viruses and junk like that. What have I got to loose, anyway."

The next day, I began downloading Mandrake 10.1. It took a whole day. Then couldn't burn it because my CD burner was really crap and the burn process would always fail for some reason. Eventually I got tired of that, and bought Mandrake 10.1 Discovery, so I wouldn't need to burn the CDs myself.

Soon it arrived in the mail, and I decided I would install it onto my second HDD. (I had two hard disks in the computer I was using at the time.) I put the CD into the drive and restarted the computer, and tried to start the installation. Too bad the bad CD drive came back to annoy me again. It kept failing while trying to load the program into memory. After a long while of searching on google, Linuxquestions.org helped me. It turned out I needed to start it with this command:

linux ide=nodma

And then it would start the installer with no problems. I installed Linux onto my second hard disk, and everything was good. I booted up the new linux installation and looked around at the stuff. Straight away I was able to browse the internet and talk to people using Kopete, access stuff from my NTFS and FAT partition on my main hard disk, listen to music, just about everything worked. Though, now I had a problem. I didn't have a text to speech program on linux. I can't live without that! I began looking around on the internet for such a thing, but didn't find anything. I found the Festival site, but they didn't provide an RPM. After awhile, I was losing my patience. I decided to look and see if a text to speech program came on one of the mandrake CDs... Luckily, it did. Using the mandrake linux control center's software management thing, I installed Festival and Kmouth.
Then I noticed Kmouth wouldn't make any sound. After awhile, google helped me find out that you had to give it the command for speaking text. It was...

/usr/bin/festival --tts

After I specified this to Kmouth, it made sound, and I was incredibly happy. Over a space of some weeks, I tinkered with all sorts of things. I found replacements for all sorts of stuff I used in Windows. Kolourpaint, SNES9x for Linux, Kmouth/Festival, and other things. It was an overall interesting experience.

Sadly, that computer died just last month. The motherboard had died. My brother built me a new computer as a birthday present (he's a cool guy). I've had this new computer since June 23, but I haven't installed Linux on it yet. I've just been using Windows 2000. I'm eager to get linux on it, but I'm considering if I should try another distribution. Ubuntu looks good.

That's my experience with linux.
Sorry if this post was too long or boring.

Hi Patrik, my experience with Linux is very similar, but have some differences.
I first installed a Linux Distribution 9 months ago, it was mandrake 10.1, and the main reason for doing this is that I'm developing a program for Structural Engineering (I'm a civil engineer) and I was advised for many people and also goggling in the Internet that Linux is an OS much more flexible and stable, and gives you more control of your programs, it happened that my program needs a lot of memory, and Linux was the right choice, specially if you are a developer.
I have two HDD so I decided to install it in the second one, leaving the first for XP (just in case). The installation was quite simple, I was very happy with that, in an hour I had my first Linux OS!, everything was right but ..... unfortunately I have an nvidia graphic card (Geforce4) and from time to time the OS just crashed! with no other solution but to reboot. I felt very sad, and for three weeks I just couldn't make work the graphic driver, It was very frustrating, but I was so pleased with Linux, that I was determined to make it work!, finally I reinstalled but this time I choose Suse 9.2, again the installation very simple, and luckily Suse 9.2 had the famous Nvidia graphic driver in yast, so in ten minutes the problem was solved!. The solution to my problem.. compile the Nvidia graphic driver.. Since then I became a huge fanatic of Linux, I formatted my two HDDs and I left an small partition on FAT32 for the XP, the rest is Linux land, what I can tell you is that I'm learning something every day and I just love it! Right now I have 6 distributions in my PC, the purpose is to try the mainstream distributions so I'll decide after this which I think is more suitable for me. I have Suse 9.3, Mandriva 10.2 LE 2005, Ubuntu Hoary, Fedora Core 4, Debian Sarge, Debian Sid and Slackware is ready to be installed!, I also tried Kubuntu. Well it's not advisable to have so many OS in your PC, but I like the idea of learning something for every distribution, every one has something to teach!
As for Ubuntu, it's extremely easy to install and use, even more easy than Mandriva, but It's based in Gnome, if you like more KDE you should try Kubuntu. It's a fantastic distribution and you'll have a lot of fun with it, just try it if you don't like it there are other distributions (Mandriva, Suse) in that order.
My experience with Linux....