Hi all,

Now that I feel I'm old enough to admit my age (20 btw), I have been wondering this for a while - who's been in Linux and its community since a young age (<~18), and what's your experience been?

In 6th grade, after tweaking with the now boring guts of Windows for a few years, I started off with a BrainShare SLE 10 Linux start kit in late 2007, and in early 2009 joined LQ. It's been a fun ride so far, even if we've lost inittab, GNOME 2, and Sun Microsystems along the way. The Linux Community has been mostly welcoming and helpful here and on my occasional ventures into the openSUSE forums.

In the first few months I had to become confident enough to even install it, and ended up completely breaking my partition table (and crying) long before I knew of testdisk and photorec. I have always been with SUSE/openSUSE, although I often dual boot and VBox other major distros.

In late Middle School YaST, VirtualBox and wine were my toys; High School afternoons were spent playing with bash, and breaking the system in every way possible. Since late High School and into undergrad times I have spent almost all of my personal computing time under Linux, and being a notorious Linux man has opened doors for me in the science world.

So, who else grew up with Linux? What's your story?

I have matured on it.
Learned from it.
and Adapted to it.

So, if that's growing up on Linux, sign me up.
1992, I started.
Broke the first computer loaned to me. Fixed it.
It's been "Fix more than you break" ever since.

#OldGuysRule

You should make this a poll.

Unfortunately for me:

I pre-date Linux.

I pre-date Unix.

I am mildly amused by the fact that SUSE and I were born the same year.

Hi...

Wow, I would have never guessed you were 20. Your vocabulary and style of writing led me to believe you were someone quite a bit older.

I predate Linux as well (I'm in my 40's) and I really didn't start getting involved with it until 2001, so I can't really offer anything to your thread.

Regards...

I grew up with mainframe systems. It was all command line in those days.

No brought up on DOS and windows.
I was not too bad with the apple II

I was once curious and fired up simh to see what UNIXes of the olden days looked like before the oldest i386 VBoxable ones. Life seemed tough before the days of vi.

I have a friend who was given an original Macintosh. We need to fire it up one day this summer

@ aardvark71 - I had some intense but inspiring English teachers a few years ago, and enjoy studying other languages. Learning how to better interface my thoughts and ideas with the world is another passion I have.

And it shows.

Regards...

Here's an interesting article I found.

I started my computer beginning's with DOS and windows 3.1. I also use the prodigy online service. I came to unix first via a shell account. It was a bit expensive at that time. You paid by the minute you were on their service. They had no discount plans or anything like we have today. Anyway, it was fun using telnet to jump to other computers, using search tools like gopher, wais, www and more.

I tried linux in 1995, but it was to young to do much like it does today. So, I stay with boring microsoft windows until windows xp. I dabble back and forth with linux at this point. Today, linux is my only operating system on my computer. I <3 linux.

I've heard about DES and interfaces built for kids - it's an interesting concept being brought up by a parent from that young of an age, although even I'm too young to have played on it as a 3 year old... KDE 1 would've been the best it got

I'm growing old with linux (I can't remember 20). Does that count?

ditto

At what age would you have had to start using Linux to consider growing up with it? I was in the 3rd grade when the first version of Linux was released. I didn't get my first taste of Linux until 1999 (I was 16 then).