About 12 years ago I was having a lot of grief with Microsoft XP2000...the program was always being updated with anti-hack downloads and I was getting to believe that MS were not programming the correct systems to avoid hacking problems..Then there were some huge fiascos eg. US Government and other Government programs were being hacked...And so that caused a bad advertisement...I then Yahoo'd for hack-free desk top software and Ubuntu 3 or 4 looked good so I down loaded...used that program with Open Office utilities for about three years... I then dabbled with a friends Fedora 11 with Apache utilities....I am currently using Windows 7 with Apache utes. simply because the Fed 16 is out of date and I haven't got time to download Fed 24..............Dickidido

I'm a daily user of Ubantu on Stanford University's FarmShare system (machine-clusters called "corn, barley and rye"). Linux is like Unix and Darwin (Mac system).

I was forced to use AIX then linux through work, and even though I loathe the cryptic commands, I like the fact that it doesn't hang (at least not yet after years and years of work). I recently found aliases, which I can use to customize the linux commands, which is quite enjoyable. Long live Linux!

How did I get onto Linux
 

A friend was using Ubuntu and suggested I try it. Started with Ubuntu and went on to Mint.

Was a intern youth pastor at a church in the Ottawa area (Canada) back in 1996. The father of the family that I was staying introduced me to Linux. He installed it on my 486 laptop (that had 8 MB RAM) next to DOS and Windows 3.1. I was impressed that Linux had a free C compiler and was Unix-like. I kept the Linux install for as long as I could before I deleted it because I was running out of HD space. It was only in 2009/2010 that I was reintroduced to Linux (Ubuntu and OpenSuse) by a friend.

I was beginning to get interested in the Internet and communities in general and a fellow member of our “citizen's network” suggested that I try SuSE Linux 5.0 which was brand new and just beginning to be sold in the book-shops in town (Nuremberg, then new domicile of SuSE GmbH). This version of the distribution was said to be the “best Linux ever” but unfortunately I heard that from people who, just like me, did not yet have had opportunity to test it. So, even if I removed it again after a week or so, it was this short local hype which got me interested in Linux.

How I discovered Linux
 

Started with the book "Linux For Dummies", bought Christmas 2000 with Red Hat Linux 6.2 on 2 CD–ROMs bound into the back cover.
Christmas 2004 bought a boxed version (CDs and manuals) of SUSE Linux 9.2 and then received Ubuntu 4.10 on a CD through Canonical's free ShipIt offer followed by twelve years of upgrades, initially every six months but now only LTS.

A friend got me in to it..
 

A friend who was already into Linux, got me into it. We both agreed windows is horrible, and he recommended Linux.
I previously dabbled with Ubuntu about a year ago but never really used it much. Eventually he persuaded me to download Linux. So I went ahead, and downloaded ubuntu to a external hdd and gave it 56 Gigabytes to use.. It became my main Operating System, and I rarely booted up windows. Eventually I started to run out of space, and I decided I should get something new.. and for some reason I didn't want to just add a bigger partition, or just Google how to resize a partition.. I went ahead and bought a 1 TB hdd for my laptop, and put my friends recommendation on it, Debian. (Though I came close to OpenSUSE, Fedora, pretty much any popular one..) and swapped out the Win and Linux HDDs.
I am sure I would have ended up using Linux if it weren't for him, though it would have probably been a year or two from here, and I would be likely using Ubuntu for a much longer time.
I suppose I am doing good for how new I am.

Email Was Dead!
 

I had recently taken over a small IT department in a law school in 2000, and there was a Red Hat 5.2 server that handled the student email system. The server had been hacked and was being used as a spam relay, among other things. To top it off, the company that sold the email software went out of business. With the help of a sysadmin at our parent university, I installed a new server and an open source email system called Open WebMail. In the process, I learned a lot about Linux and was able to use it on many other projects. Sixteen years on, I'm a Linux sysadmin at another university.

My son is a software engineer and introduced me to it when I was utterly frustrated with Windows. I've never looked back!

a friend gave my 9 yr daughter an old thinkpad that her college professor was gonna throw away. It had ubuntu on it...none of us had any experience with linux but my daughter was able to teach herself how to use it....fast forward 10 yrs later and she's a computer science major teaching kids this summer at Standford..It took me a few years later to cross over to the linux side. In 2011 I inadvertently purchased an Asus Eee pc netbook without an operating system, after many weeks of dabbling, and countless hours on the ubuntu forum I was able to get it up and running, I never looked back.

First found Linux
 

I first encountered linux with Fedora, and/or Red Hat v2 in the middle 90s. I could barely get my apple classic and external 20mb hard drive to turn on at the same time. I thought i could find something easier than the apple os6 something. I was wrong
It took about 20more years and I was disgusted with the changes that windows7 had been going though and never got windows 8 . But this time i found Linux Mint 17 and I was hooked. I first did a live usb for months, then a dual boot and very shortly built a linux Mint 17 x64 Mate only machine. I had put my old toshiba laptop, 64bit 2core 1.8gb processor on mint 17 cinnamon -meta -mate and it began to work again. it had been mired with windows vista home version. i could not use it for 2yrs, then linux made it a viable machine
since that ltr mint 17 came about i have tried to talk everyone i know for whom i've built computers for into linux change overs. for some reason there is a huge fear to switch, hard to convince people till i set up a look alike linux using a mac or windows appearance theme. that usually gets the ball rolling , at least for the hesitant ones.

I got a job on a Linux based site as a Windows support officer. As part of the IT team I had to use Linux. Some years later it's all I use, at home as well... (though I still support win machines)

Linux on floppies
 

I read an article in PC Magazine about Linus and Linux. I didn't have the Internet so I called a lady that copied Linux to floppies and mailed them out. That was a long time ago!

Hi,
I've been nibbling at the edges, then when MS ditched XP a lot of the folks in my retirement community were left stranded. I checked out Ubuntu (mostly 16.04 installs now). It was a no-brainer to just install Ubuntu- Libre Office, Firefox, all the software needed for everyday use.
The learning curve is minimal. Most of the conversions have taken hold and my fellow retirees are happily using open source apps and an OS that works on even the oldest machines, routers and printers.
Now that linuxquestions has floated into sight, I'm bookmarking it on all the machines I'm converting to the Linux OS. Thank you for a wonderful resource for all of us newbies!
pete