So, back in 1992, an IBM RS-6000 (not sure of the model, but it was a desktop machine running AIX, the all-out winner of the "worst unix" award.) was dumped in my office, for me to figure out how to use to teach calculus. I knew I needed to learn unix, so I found a student who could set me up with a linux box. This was a 486, running mcc-interim of some version, with a 0.96c kernal. I couldn't boot directly into linux, but had to boot first into Windows 3.1, then warm-boot into linux using the minix boot manager. Then it would load. After a while I managed to program the monitor settings to boot directly into linux, but I had to set the parameters by hand. I fiddled with the numbers, but eventually let the genie out. I could see him leave by the curl of smoke coming from the monitor.

Back then I was only 13 and my dad were heavily influenced by the money maketh value idea, so GNU/Linux was pretty much considered useless/insecure and it was forbidden. However, I still managed to get a blank CD from my English mentor (sorry for being weirdly specific) and burnt Debian Wheezy netinst that just came out that summer. The laptop I was installing uses a Wi-Fi card that requires proprietary firmware so it was very difficult to make Wi-Fi working only using CLI with which I by the time was not familiar (we don't have ethernet). I can also recall I managed to get GRUB to be chained loaded by Windows XP boot loader (NTLDR I believe) to hide my precious Debian from my family LOL.

I'm still using Debian at the moment and TBH it's never disappointed me.

It's foggy, but because I had an Apple Quadra 68040 in 98, I had to trash pick for a while, found and cleaned a 8088 (had a 10MG hard drive!) and 286 PCs before finding a 386. I didn't want to install 3.5 floppy after floppy like my wife's co-worker, who installed Yggdrasil. I finally found and bought a bootable Debian CD at the Boston Geek Pride show in '99. Funny, after all that scrounging... And I remember then getting a Red Hat book with a "lifetime subscription" lol. Many of you might get sentimental, but I'm kinda feeling bitter. Never led to paid work, much less a career, not even a fun web site.

That the distro I used (came on 3 cd's or dvd's) didn't show Linux in its best light. I'm glad I stumbled accross and tried Slackware. Slackware was the breath of fresh air I was looking for, and while I don't use it anymore, probably the reason Linux stuck.

1993 Slackware Watching the compile was fascinating, yet frightening. Constantly fiddled with everything Linux (Debian be next IIRC) and finally going full Linux with Red Hat around 98-99. Haven't gone back to Windows in our home since.

My first installation was RedHat 5.5 probably about 1998, from a disc that came with an "All about Linux" book. My most vivid recollection is that after making a couple of important configuration changes, I decided to back up my special config files to a floppy disk. Since I had never heard of the concept of "mounting" a disk and also was not aware of any useful sources of information beyond books and magazines, I floundered around for half a day before I finally stumbled on something in the book about how disks are mounted. After that, it was a snap. I realized that I was probably going to be OK, but it was definitely going to be an education. That's just what I was looking for, and it has been a good ride from then to now.

I seem to recall that the distro took up about a dozen or so 3.5 floppy disks.

Not much else that I can remember about it, I'm afraid. I remember that I ended up removing it and didn't come back to Linux until 1994, by which time there was Slackware.

I dual booted for many years, and as I upgraded my computer and/or hard drive, I always kept the Linux partition at about 25% of the disk.

I finally switched over to 100% Linux in 2005, and I haven't looked back. Tried several distributions since 1994, but I always come back to using Slackware.

RedHat 6 (with early Gnome, 1.??) on a P233MMX with 128mb RAM... dual-boot with Win95. This would have been early 1998, I think.

Now, Win95 on this box was very good (slick and stable; it ran 24/7, did all the heavy lifting, and NEVER crashed in its 15 years in service) so I had high expectations for RH6.

But OMG, RH6 was awful. Slow, laggy, slow, crashed a lot, slow, nothing worked right, slow, in fact pretty much nothing worked, slow, would only do 640x480, slow, did I mention it was slow? Eventually I gave up trying to use it for anything other than SameGnome (which I still play today). And one day it forgot its password, which was the obvious: "password". And that's when I made it go away. (Except for my SameGnome high score of 4996. I used some DOS util to retrieve that file!)

So I prefer to pretend my first linux install didn't exist, and remember much more fondly my next install, Mandrake 7.2/KDE 2.?? (on some midrange P3) -- it had its issues, but overall was much more congenial, and had decent performance. And to this day, I favor the Mandrake/KDE family above all others.

My first install of Linux was Slackware, around 1995 during spring break.

What I remember most:

1. Being terrified that I would fry the video card because of all the warnings that stressed that wrong settings could do just that.
2. Ignoring the clear directions to use NEW flopplies. I didn't and it cost me a couple of days.
3. After the install completed, I installed TeX. It ran so fast that I had to look to see if I had actually hit ENTER.

I had either a 486sx33 or K6-188 (i.e., overclocked) and found a book at college about Slackware GNU/Linux, with a CD that was probably version 2.0 but version 3.4 was probably out that academic year (1997 - '8.) As a DOS user, it was easy to install, and had some conveniences for DOS users such as maybe if you typed 'dir' it asked if you meant 'ls.' However when I typed 'edit,' nothing happened, and it was hard to find a similar editor described in the book, so I went back to DOS for a few months until I tried other GNU/Linux and BSD Unix next school year. Of course, I was already using FreeBSD Unix in a computer lab, as an undergraduate mathematician-/computer-scientist.

Well, well, I remember I was a student in Helsinki University of Technology (now Aalto University) and while having a break downloaded all the diskette images onto a pile of diskettes. I suppose the downloading took a lot longer than the installation and anyway way longer than my break!

long ago - I started to learn Linux a very very long time ago.. 1996 ...from the use of Redhat 4.1 - link to remaining redhat archived site was:
<http://www.ru.j-npcs.org/usoft/WWW/www_redhat.com/news/rhl4_1.html>
Currently, I do have a site on the use of Linux if the above site is not relevant now - Note: I had nothing to do with that site above.

A history of progress to this current day is found here:
<https://www.jenalabs.com/computers/linux.html> with many old and broken links but most do work - I just do not write the most current history due to time.

I am a power user and used aptosid until it was unable to keep up with the rate of change...
the site I have is out of date because I am a manufacture of electronics and keep current enough to remain a power user.

So the history presented there is not very current.

However, the still running aposid system... (amazingly)
read this output:
This computer as of 11-04-15:

michael@Eyland0:~$ infobash -v3
Host/Kernel/OS "Eyland0" running Linux 4.3.0-0.slh.1-aptosid-amd64 x86_64 [ aptosid 2013-01 ????????? - kde-lite - (201305050307) ]
CPU Info 8x AMD FX-8120 Eight-Core 2048 KB cache flags( sse3 ht nx lm svm ) clocked at [ 1900.000 MHz ]
Videocard NVIDIA G86 [GeForce 8500 GT] X.Org 1.17.3 [ 1920x1080@60.00hz ]
Network cards D-Link System Inc DGE-560T PCI Express Gigabit
Processes 198 | Uptime 5:18 | Memory 3984.5/7971.5MB | HDD WDC WD6000HLHX-0,WDC WD6000HLHX-0,AS2105 Size 1520GB (13%used) | GLX Renderer Gallium 0.4 on NV86 | GLX Version Yes | Client Shell | Infobash v3.50
michael@Eyland0:~$

I keep it around just because it is still running <http://aptosid.com/> but barely as I was on the edge in big surf at the time and it was very hard to pull the daily upgrade addiction needle out of my brain... If the forums can be found I was "vinur" member #98


My next planed upgrade of the user Linux will keep that drive plugged into a AMD Ryzen™ 3000 Series Processor
and will have copious capabilities.

I used to work at Intel ( Jones farm bld. 6 - processor design and compatibility test lab, botany bay 4) and it were the engineers I worked with that promoted the use of Linux and my job as such was crash testing MS Windows in order to preemptively predict crashes and write flag errata internal to P6 pro processors.
long story as I was good at it - and when I left knowing AMD was 64 bit, hyper-threaded - found the future of my use of Linux and never looked back.

the truth is out there:
Linux runs the world today and all is well no matter how commercial it seems to be currently.

I use a mix of Linux versions including Mint with a KDE desktop:
KDE Frameworks 5.36.0
Qt 5.6.1 (built against 5.6.1)
The xcb windowing system

thanks for asking
I will always be a Linux user

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The quote above reflects my first Linux non-experience. At that time, my computer was an economy model running Win98, which also had a winmodem. Unfortunately, I was unaware of the LinModem drivers, which would have given me another crack at it.

Winmodem was also at the center of other hardware compatibility issues in Windows 98 as well. Some users were attributing such issues to winmodem's proprietary nature. Back then, the term proprietary had a more negative connotation than it does now.

Here is what Indiana University published (kb.iu.edu/d/aepb) about winmodems:

It was not until Ubuntu and Linux Mint came along that I was able to connect to the Internet with Linux in 2006.

In the late nineties I played a bit with coherent and searched for something more 'complete'. A hint from a colleague pointed to SuSE. At that time suddenly my priorities had to change, so it had to last until 2002, when I came back to this topic again.
Since that time I almost completely work with Linux, starting with SuSE followed by Kubuntu until I was lucky to arrive at Arch, which is - and I think will be - my workhorse. But the 'child in me' sometimes demands something to play. So there is a SUSE tumbleweed and a FreeBSD system also running on some older hardware here.

Never got it to work.