I took an "old" laptop that had been sold running Windows-95(!) and started playing around with it. First, a free Red Hat until they started asking for money. Then, I went through "LFS = Linux From Scratch," which is an exercise that I would recommend to everyone. (Use a VM ...) That took me to the source-code based distro, Gentoo. All of the sudden, my "slow, old" laptop was positively zippy! (I kept "Ol' Dobbin" for many years, and I still have the disk drive.)

Typically, I use Ubuntu these days just because it's easy and familiar to me. It's an arbitrary choice that works.

I normally run Linux now in a [VirtualBox ...] virtual machine. Or, as the case may be, "in the cloud" under VMWare. Where I used to deploy multiple VMs, I now deploy just one "big phat" one and use containers – sometimes Docker, but more often lxd/lxc. This reduces my deployment's exposure to the vagaries of VMWare, which are not within my control and are sometimes ... shall we say politely ... "sketchy." (Cloud hosting companies sometimes make contractual promises that they can't keep.)

It has been an adventure – much more of an adventure than I had expected. I can quite-candidly say that "Linux started out for me as 'being hit in the face with a cast-iron skillet,'" even though I had been working with mainframe operating systems (VM/SP, VM/XA, Amdahl UTS) for many years ... more than twenty, at that time. Yes, I knew how to navigate in such waters, but the experience was much harder than I had expected. It has considerably improved since then. Linux itself has grown by leaps and bounds since I first encountered it.

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2014+

In 2006 I installed Ubuntu 6.06 "Dapper Drake" and never looked back.

On the very day XP went EOL, I downloaded the initial release of Ubuntu 14.04 "Trusty". I simultaneously wiped Windoze out of my life, and jumped in at the deep end. That lasted 5 months or so - maybe 6 - until I d'ld & installed my first "Puppy".

Fell for it - hard! - and haven't looked back since.

Mike.

2002-2003

i think it were Slackware, i could install it but didnt have skills to make it work properly.

I had technically been poking at linux in '94. I was the nerd who ran the school's tech department back then and I was running an alpha with digital unix and CDE as my main machine (lucky score from a donation to the school) and was interested. I didn't start using linux as a daily driver until '96-98 or so.

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2009

I migrated to Linux from unix.

My first distribution was Ubuntu in the year 2014

It was in 1991. But I think they are not called "Linux" as is but something like *nix. It was launched from floppy disks. No GUI. No Ethernet.

2001, Mandriva, downloaded the CD image over a 56kbps dial-up modem, IIRC took around 24 hours.

Greetings to all! Someone buys a convertible at 50 and packs a 20-year-old girlfriend. At the age of 50, I decided to end up with Win and start a new adventurous and harrowing journey to the land of Linux from night to morning. It was in 2020. I do not regret it for a second.

Started out in the late 1980's using and administrating Unix.
Sometime around 1995 installed Linux to be my workstation to Administrate all of the Unix machines.
My company found out and may be erase the software because I, or they did not pay for it.
Had to go back to Windows desktop.

I do not remember exactly when I started using Linux, but my guess would be 2004. It had to be when Ubuntu started.