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Okay, little poll to entertain me while I work. It also will (somewhat) demonstrate just how exponential Linux's growth has been.

When did you start using Linux? Was it years ago? What was your first distro, kernel, etc... and was it a success? The meaning of the last question is pretty simple, a lot of people fail the first time they try Linux and don't come back till much later.

Edit: Round down. So if you first used Linux in 1995, chose 1994.

Okay, with me it was 1995 (see I said round down to make me look even cooler) and was Slackware. I believe it was 2.something and the default kernel was 1.2.1

It was very successful and I have been addicted since. Maybe it was too successful as I am VERY single. lol

In 2000 I became mad as Hell and would not take rebooting anymore. I had 5 old PCs running Lose95 in my classroom and one of them crashed every hour, taking five minutes to reboot. I put Caldera eDesktop 2.4 on all of them and never had another crash.

About a year and a half ago, i almost got RSI from entering serial-keys, so I decided to boycot m$, and join the revolution. ;-)

I started 8 months ago, with MDK, then Redhad then SuSE. I used SuSE for about 4 months, very smooth disto! But now i'm using Gentoo and i'm not changing anymore ! (:

lol, figures. Okay, I made a mistake. I forgot to select poll when I originally posted this. That is why there are two threads (one with a poll). You don't have to repost your story but can you at least hop over and plug yourselves in.

lmb[um]o -- I love how this thread took off.

Dabbled sometime around 1998 but I couldn't count myself a user until fairly recently (2002 I think) simply because until then Linux didn't do what I needed for a home PC.

In the last couple of months.
[rant on]Fed up with Windoze crashing all the time and being lied to by Microshaft when they said that "XP is more stable and reliable than Win98". Fed up of constantly patching my system and then having it not work properly because the patch knocked out my mouse/graphics/modem drivers (and associated other hassles with M$ patches and updates). Fed up of having to spend countless hours re-installing stuff when XP gets in a snit over a device driver, viewing a web page or playing an mp3 file and crashes, eats it own MBR and having the recovery console lie to me when it says 'MBR repaired'.
So Billy boy can stuff his OS where the sun don't shine coz I won't be using any of his products ever again.[/rant off]

I can tell you the exact day May 25, 1999, I still have the receipt and everything else for the Redhat 5.2 I bought, it installed perfectly and did something Windows 98 never could do make my damn expensive at the time AWE 64 Gold card actually play sound I have never looked back since.

Unix: 1990
Linux: 1999

I started using Linux about five months ago. First I tried slackware, then mandrake, gentoo, knoppix. Slackware didn't recognized my hard drive. Mandrake instaliation was so slow! It took ~30 minutes to load the GUI (I'm using athlon xp barton 2500+, 256 ram, 52x cdrom) until I lost my patience and rebooted. Gentoo installation was too hard to understand (i could not set up grub, at least i think so). The knoppix fitted perfectly . Also I had to use 2.6.6 kernel because i have SATA hard disk (now I know the difference between SATA and IDE ). Now I am very happy with my instaliation and planning to install debian unstable soon.

Near the end of 2001.
I played around with Mandrake, then SuSE, off and on while sticking mostly with Windows. About a year ago I started taking it seriously (using Slackware and SuSE), and haven't used Windows since last October.

i started in the last 6-8 months

(small rant here)
it was because i got a Pentium pro laptop and i didn't want a crashing OS that could barley run on a new computer.. .... (not that i ever used linux, or UNIX before in my life ///.. but anything must be better then windows on a Pentium)

anyways, my first distro was core linux, (my first install attempt failed, i think i compiled the kernel wrong ... i was surprised how fairly easy linux was compared to windows)

from there i tried to get lots of distros (the only one i could download was debian, installed was soooo much easier then in core linux , but all in all some package was corrupt, and so i deleted it .... then i tried LFS and that failed (when i asked the irc chatrooms why they said it was because i did the compiling as root user .. strange, but owell... i just forgot that distro) and went back to using core linux and used LFS as instructions on how to update the system (i learned a lot trying to install LFS over 10-20 times .. so by now i knew linux pretty well compared to windows that i used for over a few years) [[shows that even total newbies to linux can learn and use what is supposed to be a distro not for more experts]]

anyways,... now that my parents decided to et a computer upgrade (almost a new computer in itself, i hooked up the sound to go thru a stereo system to sue its speakers, and salvaged the drives from the old computer (except one, it didn't label its jumper settings.. so i tossed it )

anyways, i use gentoo with the new computer. and after get mad over it (i was to used to core linux and how EVERYTHING was my way) i learned to really like it, installation of software is rather easy (and automated, no need to keep checking up on the computer every hours or so )
(rant can end here i supose)

I got bored of my semi-stable customized-to-oblivion Windows 2k machine sometime in the beginning of last year. I had heard of Linux and a friend got me started on Mandrake 9. I then moved to Redhat. At this point I decided I was going to make testing new distros a hobby so I bought lots of harddrives and some LianLi removable drive bays. (I have been slowly lending out harddrives and my 8 harddrives have dwendled down to 4 recently).

I tried Mandrake 9.1 and Slackware 9 dual-boot with lilo. Then I moved to SuSE 9.0 and got stuck on that for a while. I tried Libranet and could never get College Linux or Knoppix 3 to install on a harddrive correctly. I tried Fedora C1 and Mandrake 10 (on a seperate removable drive). I managed to corrupt the Fedora package manager within a week and find a freezing problem in Mandrake 10. I am now using Fedora Core 2 and I hope to try Slackware 10 soon and then when I get time make a Linux From Scratch system. I'm about to build a GeexBox Shuttle comp for my home entertainment system.

I currently have these CDs in my possesion:
Mozilla Firefox (the OS)
PCLinuxOS Preview 5 1.20.04
Onebase Linux 2004
Lunar Linux 1.3.3
CRUX 1.3
PHLAK 0.2
FreeBSD 5.2.1 Disk 1 and 2
ArkLinux 1.0 Alpha 10.1
Vector Linux 2
Gentoo 1.4 Disk 1 and 2
Debian 3.0r2 Disk 1,2,6,7
SuSE 9.0 Boot
Libranet 2.7
Slackware Linux 9.1 Disk 1 and 2