Started with Red Hat - tried SCO, Slackware, various flavors. Good grounding in systems work.

Mainthing that still carries over - go fishing for multiple sources of "how to" and combine them. There's always some step or condition missing in any of the articles, but combining can often fill in the gaps.

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It was around 1993 when I first bought a desktop. It was a very cheap, out-of-the-box Compaq pizza box that had everything! I was in College at the time and, naturally, started transporting my study related work from the College's lab to my PC and, within a week, I got my first computer virus. In the process of dealing with the virus, I found out that according to Compaq the sale of that desktop was illegal and I ended up with no disks
for a fresh installation. I was left with no choice but to buy more proprietary stuff! I started getting books about security, reparation and upgrading computers and one of them included a CD with the complete Slackware distribution. That opened my eyes to the wonderful world of Linux and open source. I have since then, migrated totally to Linux and yes, I still use Slackware! Thanks to all the people involved in driving me thru this wonderful experience!

I took a job where I had to test enterprise software that could run on Linux. At first I just used Gnome and it was like Windows, but as I time went on I just kept learning stuff and moved to command line.

I bought the Mandrake 8-1 package including user manual in the box, back in 2001,

good for the basic command line options, even an how to use vi included. Got Slackware 8.1 not that much later, through a Linux magazine, what hooked me was the humorous captions in opening the terminals.

These days on account of renovations i had to get rid of my old machine, running Debian Wheezy on old laptop. Have a good day.
Gaétan

I started with Redhat 4 or 5 (I forgot) because a friend had heard about it and I had a cd burner to make him a copy.
Had a spare 486 that I tried it on and I couldn't figure out anything useful to do with it (only dialup internet and no linux games)
Always wrecked the system when trying to custom compile a kernel to make it run smoother.

Tried again with RH6 but no spare computer to keep it running on, also still no proper internet or popular games so no use for it.
Then got cable internet, installed a RH 7.1 server-ish system with 2 nic's and a nifty read only ethernet cable to sniff my cable modem traffic to run snort on and that was my first actual linux machine that kept running for more then a few days.
Since then I've always had a linux server running in the house 24/7 handling my internal network.

Found it in a book by Timothy Parker circa 1994 after looking for a PC based UNIX-like OS to improve my skills during college. A Slackware CD came with the book. Have tried various other distros over the years but always come back to Slack. Can't stand the startup spaghetti-code of the Redhat/Debian class. Now I'm focusing on Slackware on Raspberry Pi's; DNS servers, NTP servers, NAT-Routers on-a-stick using VLANs, etc. There really are no limitations with Linux.

Fed up with windoz and found this alternative. Ubuntu

I have been interested in microcomputers since the early 80's, starting with a Sinclair ZX81 and progressing to a BBC model B and an Apple II. I decided to retrain as a teacher of Computing Studies and gained experience on a variety of machines including Nimbus (MSDOS) and Macintosh LC. Part of my work involved Hardware maintenance and Network Management. Eventually, my employer decided that the World used Windows and I was forced to change to bog-standard PCs. When the World Wide Web and Internet came along, the nature of computing changed and I became bored with bland PC boxes that used an operating system that kept on crashing. After retirement, I continued to manage with Windows 7, the best product that MS ever made, but my daughter bought me a book "Ubuntu Unleashed" by Matthew Helmke, which included a DVD with Ubuntu 11.10. This must have been about the year 2010. Now I am running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and I experience faster startup (not that I switch the computer off every night since it is so stable). Even Windows 7 needed rebooting every so often. I am now an evangelist for Ubuntu amongst my friends and acquaintances. There are so many reasons to abandon Windows but people on this forum will not thank me for going into detail.

I was an OS/2 adopter, and I was so disappointed in OS/2's lack of acceptance after Windows 95 was released (an inferior product), that I looked elsewhere and found Slackware. I created a bridge/router product in 1996 that ran on a Cyrix MIII CPU at (I think) 48MHz and 512Mb Ram, loaded off a floppy. I bridged dialup and ethernet, and later also Token ring for travel agencies.

Since that time, I have "lived in linux" almost 100% (there have always been a couple of games, or special software that wouldn't work well in VM or Wine).

Coworker came in all excited back around 1998 because he had just used RedHat at home to create a DHCP server that could hand out over 8 million addresses! (10.x.x.x) I tried it myself, didn't like the CLI so dropped interest.

Couple of years later, different job, coworker handed me Mandrake CD's. Loaded fine, but wouldn't find the WLAN adapter on my laptop. Dropped it again.
Another couple of years, Ubuntu 6.04 arrives and works flawlessly right out of the sleeve. Now using only Linux as everyday desktop at work and home. Windows 10 runs in a VM so I can stay functionally up-to-date with the folks I support.

Installed Linux on a refurbished IBM laptop for my octogenarian mother, added the Windows 98 green field background and a Start button like Windows. Put on TeamViewer for remote support. Added only the necessary icons for her needs. Explained that if she ever got stuck, to hold down the power button and count to 10. Best part was when she told me some friends came over to "help her out" with her computer by loading some *.exe-type program only to find out they had no idea what they were dealing with. Mission accomplished! The laptop still works flawlessly as built.

Fed up with windoz and found this alternative. Debian, late 90's. Presently migrating to devuan.

My father used to talk about trying it when I was a teen and I knew a few people using it when in university. The final push came when I got bedbugs and I wanted to stay in my room as much as possible to limit how much they spread in the apartment. If their source of food stayed mostly in the same area, they would probably do too and be easier to exterminate XD . I figured installing Ubuntu would be a good occupation. I stayed with Linux ever since .

After 30+ years in IT working in Windows, AIX, Novell Netware, Banyan VINES, etc., I had "heard about" Linux so I investigated it further. Then, while running Windows Vista Ultimate x64, I discovered VirtualBox and installed that. Then downloaded and ran a number of different Linux distributions before finally settling on Linux Mint Cinnamon x64, which I then installed alongside Vista. Vista is on Drive C (/dev/sda) while Linux versions are on /dev/sdb# - currently running Linux Mint 18 Sarah Cinnamon 3.0.7 x64.

Was running a Novell file server from version 3.12 up to version 5 and needed to retire it in order to upgrade to newer, faster server with more storage. First tried Linux Mint which was good but not well suited as a business file server. Settled on CentOS and have been very pleased with the results and functionality. Combined with Webmin to make administrative tasks easier it has proven to be an excellent replacement for our old Novell server. Also installed OpenNMS and use it for network monitoring and alerts via email and text. And as another bonus the CentOS server is setup to provide time and DNS services for our network. All this for $0 (not counting the cost of the hardware of course).

Admin: How do I switch off the e-mailing of everyone else's responses? I don't want my inbox filled with numerous replies.
Thanks.