My first linux was something one of my IT guys me on a floppy around Y2K when I was an IT administrator on a contract job. He gave me a post-note with what to do with it after inserting floppy and booting on it. Was trying to work on some hack to speed up my modest home built frakenputer on a dial up connection on windows 98 but required getting into some inner workings that were "protected from users" by Uncle Bill.

My first GUI distro hard drive install was Lindows (later known as Linspire) a little bit later 2001 or 02. It didn't inspire me enough to pay them for neat little packages of video and sound drivers only available for paying customers. But I was petrified to resize windows so one of the guys at my new gig dug up an ancient spinny disk of a couple of GBs for me. I was quite the chicken for a while, always had to be a separate disk. Oooh I hated lilo. Generating mode lines for X came next. No wonder my eyesight gave out. Then on to debian Sid, kanotix, siddux. Linux life on the wild side.

After moving to Mesa AZ in 2005, I joined a computer group in my community. I also began attending monthly meetings with the Phoenix Linux User Group (PLUG). Up until then I was unaware of Linux. One of the PLUG members lived near my community and agreed to join our computer group for monthly meetings. I had an old laptop and he loaded Ubuntu for me. We met in a neighbors home and began learning ubuntu which was rough around the edges in 2007. The fact that the operating system was free and would work on my old laptop was great. Since about 2013 I started a monthly meeting for those interested in ubuntu. One of our members was employed as a linux system administrator and really helped the group along. I offered to load Ubuntu on computers for those interested to try and a few did. Attendance varies from 4 to 7 members. I also attended PLUG meetings.
I use Ubuntu for all my computing. I do have one laptop with Windows that gets turned on monthly, updated and shut down. I am 88 and retired 35 years ago from Western Electric in semiconductor engineering.

In the late 1990's, I tried to install Suse on an Amd k6-2 450mhz with Via chipset. The Suse I purchased at a computer show because my analog modem was too slow to download a whole distro before any phone calls broke the connection.

I only tried to install Suse, because it could not make it through the install. It did not properly support the hardware.

I tried installing it a few times, same result.

Well... since I was in Graduate School, I guess I was a smart guy, as my end goal was a PhD {in Mathematics}.
Actually, I was good at every subject, but since Mathematics {Real Mathematics} tends to cause non-math-guys to freak out.

I started with Slackware, I had no problem when I installed it with FLOPPY DISCS!
Ahhh... those were the good old days

Then I eventually moved to Debian in 2005 after a few years of "distro-hopping".

Then I had a stroke in 2011, and everything went to {crap}.
Well.... as they say, that's life. I still use Debian, and I stopped using "testing" version, and am now sticking with "stable" version

Never the less, have yourself a wonderful day!

Not my first install but I still remember when I decided to try Linux Mint out. I had successful installed several dual boots so I figured "I know what I'm doing" and didn't look up any guides or resources. I ended up wiping the Windows partition on my laptop. Whoops!

That is the story of how I finally quit Windows for good. I want to say it was Linux Mint Elyse? One of the early versions of the distro for sure.

I did that once, then I found the System Rescue organization. System Rescue is a live image containing tools to help the user do just what it's name says. I've kept the latest copy on hand ever since. The tool I use the most is GPartEd, with test-disk in second place. To know all it offers, go to the webpage.

Ernie

You know, in the fifteen years since that experience, I've never had to rescue a system. It got me to completely change my data habits. I now keep data backups locally with contingency and via the Cloud. I treat the computers themselves as disposable products. If I break an OS (which I've done because I like to play with things), it's no big deal because I can just fresh install and my data's all sitting on a big old thunderbolt array.

I run a home server to centralize all the files in my house. I'd be kind of boned if I ever had a fire since I'm using third party services for my remote backups and those aren't neat and tidy like my home setup. But it's so freeing to not have to worry about losing all of my data because I had a hardware issue on a laptop or something. Looking back I am glad I ruined a bunch of stuff for myself as a newbie because it really taught me to have some better data practices.

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I've never had to rescue a system again either (I started with GNU/Linux in the late 1990s), but I still keep my System Rescue image around, just in case. I've also found that a few of the utilities on that image are useful for system management, for example, I use GPartEd to manage my system partitions when I want/need to make any changes, and test-disk when I want/need to recover an accidentally deleted file/directory (I can be a bit fumble-fingered sometimes).

Ernie