In What Year Did You Start Using Linux?
 

The first semi-official LQ Poll, What Was Your First Linux Distro? now has almost 500 votes and based on feedback in this thread, the idea of regular polls seems popular. Based on that, here's the next poll in the series; In What Year Did You Start Using Linux?

--jeremy

There's no option for someone who started using Linux before 1991.... I know that Chuck Norris did.

I first tried it in 1999, but started using it regularly in 2000, so selected the 2000-2001 option.

Thanks. I've seen it before.

I selected 2004-2005 because that's when I first started using it. I had a one-day experience with Linux (from some computer magazine) around 2000 but that doesn't count as I gave it up after one day.

Weird. I had almost the same experience. I saw some *nix in a "Boot Magazine" article and the desktop looked like HR Giger had made it.

I wanted that so bad, but,.. wow it was difficult for me to understand back then. So I did what any motivated person would do in that situation... I gave up and promptly forgot about Linux.

2009 with slackware and PCBSD

1997 here. I knew nothing of it until I was in school learning to code in C++. I wanted to be able to work on code at home but found I had to buy compilers that worked in Windows. I decided to try Slackware instead, after buying a Linux book that included Slack v3.3. I continued to use it after the course was completed.

I think it was 1993 - but it could have been 1994. The kernel version was 0.99 p4, but not certain now (the SLS 1.2 floppy distribution are long gone).

1994/95 - I was introduced to Linux on a job site where I found I needed to modify/use C code for a remote motion control system - all Unix based. The head genius on the project introduced me to a new thing called Linux as a path forward. I ordered a new notebook computer and had it delivered to my hotel room, then spent a few days figuring out how to install and find my way around several distros - Slackware included.

It was a baptism by fire, but I had a strong CP/M and assembler background, and within about a week, with some excellent guidance from some very nice people, I was up to sufficient speed to work with their existing systems, and went on to a successful project completion. Have been a full time Linux user ever since!

I used SuSE mostly until about 1999/2000 when I went with Mandrake 7.1... stayed with Mandrake/Mandriva until about 2005, during which time I converted all family and associates as well.

When Mandriva became an early adopter of KDE 4 I took refuge with Slackware, and beacme a real Linux user! ;)

I played with it as early as 1998 but didn't start using it full-time until 2003 when Mandrake 9.2 Powerpack came out. It had the best installer at the time and the powerpack came with all the CDs I needed so I didn't have to waste a week downloading stuff with a 33.6 kb/sec modem. Stopped using Mandrake about the time the French government took over and company became Mandriva. After that tried just about everything, including BSD.

Anywho, I voted 2003 since playing doesn't count as using. ;) Had my first Windows program publish in 1992 though. :o

I started learning my way around Linux in 1998 while I was at Uni. I've always used it on home PCs because I don't want to pay for windows. I've worked with Linux in embedded systems, and now I'm learning about web development on Linux.

'08, during northern hemisphere summer.

Around 2006. :)

2001. Slackware 7.1. Single installation CD bought from the local bookstore in Montpellier.

I know exactly when I started using Linux, as I was just doing some tidying up and found the original install disc. The label says:

The Internet's Favorite
32-bit Operating System

L I N U X

Slackware 3.2

April 1997

The label also says "In MSDOS type view to start". I did, and things were never the same again.

It came bundled with the book "Slackware Linux Unleashed" (Sams Publishing, ISBN 13: 9780672310126). The book was OK, but I had a hard time getting my head around the fact that this free OS could do routing and NAT just as well as the expensive Cisco routers I usually worked with.

Late 2004 or early 2005. More details (if anybody can bear to read it) in the first entry in my LQ blog.

Initially in 2002 with RedHat 8.0. Never could get it to work as it was supposed to so drifted back to the OEM Windows (back when Acer supplied an install disk). Found Ubuntu in April 2007 just after the release of Feisty Fawn (7.04 and it is still my sentimental favourite from Ubuntu) and have been a Linux user ever since. So I put 2007 because the 2002 efforts were unsuccessful.

In early 2007. Our college's UNIX lab assistant who was pretty uninformed about the difference/relation between UNIX and Linux and the history, kept calling one RHEL 4 box a UNIX box and told us not to ask any questions and GTFO right after some command line practices.
My best friend and I got pissed and installed RHEL 4 on our home PCs and started fiddling to configure Firefox with flash to watch p0rn. Tough times those were, but later on I got love in Fedora till 2011-12 till I found Slackware 13.37.

Regards.

I don't remember, 2001 or 2002 with Slackware

In 1997, was a Unix workstation during a practical class.
First scientific computing experience and never stop since then.
Thanks for remaining me that.

I made my first *nix installation in 1983. Im not sure when my first Linux installation was; late 90's, but I can't remember it. I was using SCO Unix at the time. Yes I am that old.

I bought NetBook that had linpuslight which failed much like x xp2 did on my HP 1230 NetBook got fedora 10 laptop got xubuntu 9.04. Now I'm just using Slackware on my desktop though my NetBook boots off the laptop harddrive lubuntu 12.04

2011

I was writing code for Unix at college in 1998, and looking after a VAX (not the vacuum cleaner!) at work, but never left Windows at home until I tried Mandrake in 2004. Soon moved on to Ubuntu and been there ever since, with forays into Puppy, Knoppix, Fedora and others.

I scraped the money together to mount my own PC in 2000, with a Duron CPU, but no way could I afford to buy THE system! I bought a book at the super market with a Mandrake installation included. Internet was out of the question then, and very slow too, where I live.
Best thing that ever happened to me, although times were hard! :D
The book was great, really going into Linux in depth.
When I had internet, eventually, ADSL had arrived here! I tried other systems of Linux, and now I use Puppy Linux, but I'm thinking about taking a tour into the Arch world for a server I've built recently. Or Ubuntu, as my Puppy is Ubuntu based.
Never been so pleased about being broke, and I've never used windoz since I started on Linux. ;)

I started in 2008 with Ubuntu 7.10 it was I think and in dualboot with WinXP. I've been moving on since and tried at least 14 Linuxes and Solaris and PCBSD as well. Just love it and don't use WinXP that much anymore but still keep it as a backup.

1994 - Slackware, then moved to FreeBSD until RedHat came out.

The first Linux I used was RedHat in end of 2007 and start of 2008, can't really remember.

First time...
 

Back in the day, there only a few distros around. The one I chose was RedHat (it was still free back then). I still have the media I got it on. Since then, I have installed so many, it's hard to remember them all. I was working with UNIX at the time (HPUX, AIX,& Solaris) and wanted something to hone my skills on, so then, RedHat fit the bill. I have had a distro of one sort or another up and running ever since.

1993

Slackware, all 32, then 33 floppies worth!

When a bunch of FIDOnet sysops got together to figure out a method to get "real" internet email, we ended up creating an ISP.

If we only knew what was going to happen next . . .

The same time I registered for this forum, October 2005.

1991

2012-13

Living in a trailer with only an iPhone 4S for a link. Tried to use a Mac G5, that Apple no longer supported. Ordered Debian Distro, but the wifi would not work properly. The USB connection from the 4S never would work with the OS, kernel panic. Was stuck taking my machine to a friends home to get packages. Finally, my wife in desperation purchased me a new motherboard and an Intel i-3450 CPU and 32G memory. What a sweetie, now I use Wheezy with all parts working. I still read about others and the wifi woes. Need to move to open hardware to get satisfaction...

Jack

1st year using linux
 

I voted as using around 2010 but really first had red hat 5.1 or 5.2 installed on a
pentium machine that had a asus sp97 motherboard around 1999 I think. I overheard
a guy talking about being sick and tired or re-installing windows over and over again and
was talking about Ghost (not Norton yet) and red hat 5.2 had just come out and he handed
me a copied burnt cd of Red Hat Linux and said "It's legal to copy and burn these". he gave
me a well used red hat book that he was finished with and I somehow mounted a cd and somehow
entered in all the hardware, and somehow partitioned my hard disk and could never really
figure out how to do anything without hours of constant mistakes and starting all over.
I gave up many times and then started to look into Ubuntu as the cd's were free and they mailed them to you. I am guessing around 2006, but I didn't really use linux completely
until 2010 with Ubuntu and Debian which I also unsuccessfully screwed around with for some
years. Also the first "live cd" to stay up and running for almost a day at a time was Pc
Linux maybe about 5 years ago (guessing) and from there I progressed to Newbie. Maybe some
day I will be an intermediate if I keep on keeping on and alzheimers doesn't set in.
Oh yeah, that same guy that gave me the cd, talked about multiple desktops and that totally blew me away. He said at the time, "you can have 15 desktops at once, try that windows" and I was impressed.

first year to use linux
 

got my first distro in 2001. Been using linux ever since.

First experimented around 2005/6 but didn't have the time needed to 'get it', so kept suffering Mac OS breakdowns until 2009.
Have now tried various releases of various flavours (depending on machine). Writing on a Mint LXDE.
Keep up the good work.

I started using Linux when Ubuntu Fiesty came out in 2004 I believe. A big thank you to my baby brother!!!

I have (still!) the Slackware Linux CDs from March 1995, when I first dipped my toes into Lake Linux. I voted 1996 (Slackware '96) because then I knew I was hooked and jumped in.

I started 2006 while I was doing a T.A.F.E. course on Microsoft Office. One of the other students made me aware of the existence of Linux. I started with Ubuntu 6, then tried out many more; but Ubuntu is still my main distro. I like to thank all the nerds who helped me solving the many questions I encountered on my Linux path. Tux rules!
fen

Fiddled around with Linux here and there since 2005. Installed varioud distro's and bought several reference guides. Been in info security all that time so it was handy doing audits. When I work with one of my clients who is a Linux admin and I'm always impressed with his skills. It has motivated me to actually obtain some real skills with Linux. So I joined this site for the great resources.

I started with Mandrake 7.1 in 1999 when I wanted a file server for home Windows' machines and did not want to buy another MS OS. The graphical screen was gross but I did not need it to run Samba anyway so it stayed in text mode.

First time I got my hands on a Linux distro was back in 1997. when I got Slackware on a magazine's CD. I've already used Solaris on a university server, so I found it quite interesting to have a unix at my pc too. Unfortunately, all I got was a similar experience to telneting the Solaris server since I couldn't bring up X on my Tseng ET4000 videocard, no matter the amount of fiddling by me and a friend who has already been using Linux.

About the next year, I got Redhat the same way, but I didn't like it - with KDE it seemed too much Windoze-like, and too little Unix-like to interest me :P

In 2000 I was introduced to Debian and I started regularly playing with Linux afterwards. For the next several years I've made several experimental installs mostly on laptops (it was a pain to set up the soundcard on them because practically all of them had some dreadful ISAPNP ones). From that time I mostly remember configuring and compiling kernels most of the time. :) During that time I also registered myself as a Linux user on The Linux Counter. ;) Distributions I used were still Slack and Debian.

In 2007 I've made my first Linux install for daily use, I had another elderly laptop at work which had only 192 MB RAM. It originally had Windoze 98 which was quite unusable these days, so I installed Xubuntu on it. It worked perfectly! I dare say it was more pleasant to use than some newer machines with much more RAM and newer distros. The next year I got a new laptop with Vista, which I tried for a few months and then, in disgust installed and started using Linux on it. From that time on, I very rarely dual-booted to Vista, until some day I destroyed it completely. :) My primary OS is Linux since then.

I'd like to say thank you, Micro$oft! Had you not released Vista, perhaps I'd still be too lazy to convert to Linux for daily use, as it has been when I had 2000 and XP. :)

So, what year should I put in the poll? Was it 2007/08 when I started using Linux regularly? Or should I say 1997. when I installed it for the first time? I believe 1997 will do, since then there never was a year without doing at least something with Linux. All that time I have been quite confortable working in the shell, and compiling kernels, so I guess that counts. ;)

I first started using Linux on 25 October, 2001 -- the same day Winodze Yechs Pee was released, I installed Mandrake -- 8.1, I guess it was. I tried a bunch of distros: Libranet, Debian, Red Hat, ELX (experimental from India, 'Drake based) Linaire (corporate distro like Bohdi) Gentoo, Evil Entity, Slackware. I went with Slack I guess about 2005, and have been with it ever since. I stick Enlightenment on it instead of going with the default KDE.

Wow, there are quite a lot of people who started GNU in 90s!...
I first tried GNU in 2009 in VirtualBox; installed Debian on a real machine several days before 2010.

My First Linux Distro
 

I remember that it was at a Staples store in Clarion, PA that I first bought a copy (so I was new to this)of TurboLinux 4.0. I then dabbled with Linux for several years, but when I went back to school in 2009, I really started getting hooked on Linux (because my IT classes were introducing it to us) and my first distro I started using with any great regularity was LinuxMint 5. Currently I run CentOS 6.4 on an HP notebook. Love it!

I believe it was around 2005 with fedora. Not certain what version though

1992-93 here.

Steven

2001
 

I started in 2001 using Red Hat as packaged with "Linux for Dummies" :-D.