Way, way back in the mid '80's quite by chance I came across Red Hat via a website whilst trawling for something else. Getting p....d off with Microsoft thought I'd give it a try. Been on Linux ever since, although had to use MAC for work. In the early days it was a fast learning curve. No gui for setting up, just the console and all commands had to be typed in. Bit by bit it became more user friendly, then I moved on to Suse. Now I'm on Linux Mint which seems to suit my needs at present. The only program I wish I could use easily is a database. I used FileMaker on MAC and nothing I've found so far on Linux comes anywhere near it. Other than that, everything I need is available on Linux. I would probably struggle to use Windows now, not having used it for well over ten years.

Saw Linux mag in bookstore I was curious tried SUSE first then discovered ubuntu and have been using it for several years now.

I was looking for an operating system that would work on a couple of old computers. A customer mentioned that he used linux. I googled the word and found an offer for a free Ubuntu 9.10 disk among other things. I ordered it and treasure it to this day. My wife thought I was nuts using such an odd looking system just to keep the antiques functioning. A few years later, a nasty virus infected my work computer and I had no luck getting rid of the virus that crippled the Toshiba. I had to run Windows programs so I purchased a cheap hp laptop with Windows 7. I was not about to toss the Toshiba on which I am typing this note. Linux 14.04 came to the rescue. The Toshiba was in the way later that month when my wife went to check her email. Rather than move the Toshiba to get to her desktop monitor, keyboard, and mouse, she fired up the laptop. A few days later she asked me to take the old XP desktop to the basement for storage. I retired and put 16.04 on that cheap hp laptop after giving Windows 10 a trial run. We now are dedicated Ubuntu users and have no plans to use anything but linux in the future.

I learned about it from a friend.

Hi yorksquirrel. Did you mean the 1990s? RH was setup in 1993.

Almost 20 years ago I had an old PC that I was not using and I tried a couple of Linux flavor: Red Hat and Debian. It was not very easy at the time since the installation was completely manual and the network connection was always a sticky point. At the same time, I took a SysAdmin course on Solaris, and I did install it on that same PC, but UNIX was a lot easier to install. Now these days with Virtual machines and graphical interfaces it's a lot easier. In the last couple of years I installed and tested about 20 different flavors of Linux, UNIX (Solaris) and a few flavors of BSD, just for the fun of it, now that I have a lot of free time.

Looking through CDs in a computer store around 1995, I found & bought a slackware CD.
Looking through the documentation on the CD, I became intrigued about Linux. Didn't do much with Linux until 1997, when I bought RedHat Linux in a box in some computer store, & started exploring Linux seriously. Later started using Linux regularly with Mandrake, which became Mandriva, & made switch to Mageia when it started. Almost exclusively on Linux since several years.

Linux users are a breed apart: people who are at least as interested in the computer hardware and software as they are in using it for unrelated work. Windows and the Mac OSs are meant for those who regard computers only as tools to let them write, figure or draw, at which not so strangely the Microsoft and Apple applications are generally superior. Though many Linux word processors approach it, none quite matches Microsoft Word, and nowhere on Linux can you find speech-to-text as competent as Dragon Naturally Speaking. Yes, I know about Wine but don't need the extra complexity.

I use Linux whenever I want to create a new application because its development support is better, at least for everything but graphics, where the high-priestly attitudes prevalent at Microsoft have pretty much saturated Linux as well.

For 20 years I was a programmer for IBM, before it had discovered the stack register. I left that company in 1983 and switched to UNIX. In the mid-Nineties I retired and adopted Linux, beginning with Slackware. Just now I write programs under Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi and carefully stay within X-Windows for graphics, but my novels are created on Windows machines.

The first time that I bought a PC from a retail store (BestBuy) was a Compaq Presario back in '00. It came with Windows ME that was so terrible and crashed so much I was looking for an alternative. I found Debian and installed it and KDE over a 56K dial up modem. Been a Linux user ever since, although about 2 years ago I switched from Debian to Slackware.

early 90's linux
 

My friend introduced me to Linux when I was working for an IT company back in the mid 90's or so. It was a little to complicated at the time for me to really make use of it. Around 2010 I really started to get into it with all the ready to go distributions that came out.

No going back.

In the 1990's, I worked as a science editor.
(I'm retired now.) One of my authors wrote
an article about a computer application which
ran under Linux. A couple of years later, I
acquired a Red Hat distro and installed it.
And so it began.
Dynosaw.
--

On and Off again user.
 

Started using Slackware and Debian back in the early 90's for work. The sad thing is over the last 20 some odd years I have used it for work on projects for a year or 2 then didn't touch it for a few years then back to using it for a year then didn't touch it etc.. so by no means am I an expert but I am happy to say over the last year and a half I am back to using it and learning more than any other time in my history of using Linux.

I worked with Linux when I was employed by the FAA a long time ago.

I've been a programmer by hobby since the early 90s. I had my first computer with DOS and was really comfortable with it. When people started switching to Windows, I didn't like it because it seemed to me like... uhm... "unscientific", so I didn't switch. With time, Internet became so important at home and I wasn't able to access it from DOS, that I had to install Windows 95 on another partition and switch when I wanted to use the Internet or burn a CD, for example, but my main OS was still DOS. I hated having to use Windows.

One day at work, a workmate told me she was using a distro called "Ubuntu". First time I heard of it was that time, but I had heard of "Linux". No idea of what "GNU" meant. I thought I would be able to learn to use that system too. She gave me a Live CD and I tried it. It took me about a year to get really used to it, to install it and be able to use the Internet and burn CDs with it, so I replaced Windows with that version of Ubuntu. I kept on learning and now GNU/Linux is my main OS and I have FreeDOS for my geeky projects. I've tried a few distros, learnt the philosophy behind free software, and I like it. It'd be easier today for somebody to start using GNU/Linux than it was then.

Hod did you discover Linux
 

Introduced to Linux by a work colleague. I have stayed with Fedora throughout.