It was back in early 2008. I had an old VAIO machine with no OS. I was determined to get that thing useful somehow, and I had no copy of windows anywhere, so first I managed to try out Damn Small Linux, then Ubuntu 8.04. I liked it so much I made the move of migrating all my machines within a week. I learned quick enough, and eventually became bored with Ubuntu. I slowly migrated to Fedora, and have been using it ever since. Fedora, to me, is a balance of ease of use and advanced capabilities. It is my ideal distro. I never believed one should use a minimalist distro like Arch on an adequately powerful machine, and Gentoo users are usually snots. Mandriva is somewhat OK, OpenSusE has it's merits, but in the end, none are as clear and straightforward as fedora, a quality I require in Linux distros. I also use CentOS on older machines. It's essentially fedora 6/EL5 with Wifi drivers, lol.

It's not about being made for low-power machines, it's about the user being in control.

Among other things. I started with Fedora 3, quickly grew frustrated with it, then moved to Slackware and was never happier. Particularly because all the headers (which are less than 300MB) are included with the packages so that you don't need the worthless -devel packages.

Arch also includes headers, and I really like that. I used to hate having to install all those -devel packages.

Started using Linux over ideological issues with Microsoft, that locus of evil. Only later did i come to appreciate the pragmatic advantages of running Linux. This occurred some years ago, before even connecting to the internet. I think my acquaintance with Linux helped me to understand the internet as a sort of big unix os. The structure of the internet felt familiar from the beginning, which would not have been the case had i still been living within the proprietary MS world.

My company was building industrial instruments. We needed many of the features supplied by a real-time operating system (RTOS). Linux provided those features. RTOS was expensive. Linux was "free".

Write a couple of character device drivers, add some "special sauce",
plug in the magic hardware. Viola!

Oh!? ... and it was 1995. (grinning)
~~~ 0;-Dan

IN the days of Windows 98/2000, I was tired of having the same thing as everyone else, so when I got internet access, I started downloading linux distro's and buying a few at the store when they had them to try them out. For years I never really got very far (have never gotten dial-up to work in linux), but then about 8 years ago I moved to where I had broadband, and started slowly moving more and more towards Linux being my primary OS. Today, I use Windows primarily on only 1 machine, and only because the sound card is completely linux unfriendly and I like to listen to music while I do everything.

add to the long list

I was using MinGW and CygWin on XP for about 3 years and found that 90%+ of the programs i was using i built in mingw and cygiwn
including Gimp,celestia, and a KDE 2 cygwin build .

so i looked around tried a few and found that the fedora fourm was one of the better ( along with LQ)
installed the then current fedora 4 , the rest is history .
before installing ( the then fc4) i did a BUNCH of research and new exactly what i was getting into with fedora - a R&D testing distro

so fixing alsa in 5 then pulse audio in 8 was a "learning" experience and a challenge .
There have been just " a few" to fix , but that IS WHAT fedora is .

I started using Linux around 2000. It took some time for me to get use to it. Once I got past the issues with winmodems (got broadband,) I started using it more and more. Now MS Windows for me is nothing more the a platform to play a few games. I do everything else in Linux.

I remember going to a local computer store right across the street from me. I went there often and he gave me a floppy disk of SuSe 6.4 trial which opened up a while new world for me. Then I got the boxed version of SuSe 7.0.

The reason why I like Linux in general is it is stable, more secure, I can customize Linux the way I want. There is a huge amount of programs available. I am just more comfortable and feel more secure online with Linux.

About 12 years back, my son attended a one semester course on Unix that involved learning about shell scripting and C. Since I was working as a DBA on Solaris at that time and knew C and shell scripting, I set up a RedHat dual boot. Later, I moved to OpenOffice on Ubuntu since I didn't want to pay tax for using MS-Office and was evangelising OpenOffice at that time. Recently, with the recession and all, one of my customers migrated to OpenOffice just to avoid this cost of MS-Office on their desktops. You'd be surprised at the number of file type MS-Excel opens by default. This really contributes to the dumbing down of knowledge about file types and data storage.

I heard about it on ZDTV back in 2000 and thought it sounded interesting. I found a box set of Mandrake 7.0. After figuring out how to partition my hard drive I got it installed. It worked ok, the only problem was the fact that I was on dial up and couldn't get it working. I left Linux alone for a little while and then about 2004, I was working on a research paper and Windows crashed and I lost the whole thing. Being fed up with Windows crap, I decided to give Linux another shot. I started out messing around with Knoppix, which was great. The next year I gave Xandros a try and wasn't that impressed. Then, I discovered Ubuntu. I installed Ubuntu 5.04 and it was what I was looking for. In 2006, I found Linux Mint, which was Ubuntu but even better. I gave Slackware a run on an old box I had, it worked flawlessly. I still distro-hop from time to time, but my main laptop always has the latest Mint running.

in the early 90's i saw and bought a book with a cd (linux) in it: i think it was 'red hat linux' as it was known then. was very excited about the possibility of a free OS, started plying with it. Eventually setup a LAMP server at home about 10 years ago... now my home lamp server is also a digital picture frame (its a tablet pc) and a streaming music server (ampache) as well as file, print web database server.. all on a small low powered machine that probably couldnt run windows speedily enough even to browse the web. such power and efficiency.. and open source all of it!

Around the time when Windows XP was released I got my first PC with Internet connection. I had Windows XP installed but it was too bloated for my old computer. My PC was simply too slow to run all the things like firewall, antivirus and all the programs I used back then. (Due to this, I never really used an antivirus.) I wanted some more powerful and my Dad had a Red Hat Box (I don't remember the version number) and I wanted to know what it is. But I was unable to install it, I don't know why. It just didn't install.
Some weeks later my Dad suprised my by giving me a SuSE 9.0 CD. I was so happy to try out "Linux 9.0" (haha, this is great, I thought of Linux (SuSE in this case) as a Windows-like operating system). Everything was new and I was really amazed about it.
Somehow, it didn't last long. There were simply too much difference to Windows and I wasn't able to find a the documentation(s) about Linux (which was said on the not-working Red Hat box) nor installing or running games.
Since Windows XP tend to break very fast if you're playing with the system (this is my experience.... Some people are able to run the same installation for years!) I had to reinstall it very often (since then, I think I installed Windows XP about 100 to 150 times).
I wasn't really happy with Windows but I was able to run all my games. But I hated the way Windows distributed software (proprietary, free- or shareware) and I tried many distros -> openSUSE, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, Arch, Gentoo and also some BSDs.

I somehow stopped hopping with Archlinux. It was great. I got the control over the system, I knew what the system was doing and I knew what the system installed on my hd. After a year of using Arch I tried out Slackware 13.0 -- the first try ended with a keyboard that wasn't working, I don't remember which version of Slackware it was, but I think it was a 2.4 Kernel. I liked it. It was similar to Arch and I got even more control. I wasn't forced to run updates I didn't want. I don't like all this update things. (This doesn't count for security updates or updates of the ICQ protocol -> pidgin update..)
After some time of Slackware/Arch/Windows XP dual boot I decided to delete Arch finally. Now I got my new EeePC and also my new PC and on both run Slackware (13.1) as primary system. I even killed Windows 7 from my Netbook and on my PC there is only Windows XP left for gaming purposes. I do everything else on Linux.

I think, this is my story. I probably left some things, I don't remember everything because I killed my systems really often.

I started in about 1998 or earlier. Redhat 5.1> Fedora core 5. Before that it was unix at companies.

The other engineers said be careful if you push the wrong button and then it will be all gone.
At the moment am using Mandriva 2010.1 which very good, but the company might be going broke whether the distro will keep going..

Before there was linux, I was using unix via a shell account. I started with linux in 1995 (Caldera eDesktop from SCO).

After that, I tested other distros.

blah blah blah...

- Cheers

Linux Rules !!!