Yes, I came away from windows originally for the reasons given throughout this thread, but Linux systems have a characteristic that is both a strength and a weakness- without a mental image of the fundamentals of computers it is difficult to make the shift. Windows and Mac present a closed up user interface outside which the user should not stray- that has to be left to the engineers. Linux systems are fluid, some more than others, but almost all users will need to know at some stage what is happening when, say, an app is updated, or a new repository added. We have seen a post above from someone who found this too difficult and this is in my experience familiar, even with, say, a user interface distro like Zorin.

This however became a strength when, with massive help from this forum, I learned to get back outside the user interface and appreciate the processes that I had been using without needing to understand them. For those familiar with The Matrix I started to see through the visual world to the binary code behind it. This was not entirely new, as my first experiences were from the 1970s with what we now call command line.

If I have serious coding to do, I design it within my Linux home, where even if a system gets damaged it is very easy and usually beneficial to replace it with a modern distro. Fortunately the learning curve on my Debian Etch (2007) crossed over into Windows and even Android (triple boot now) so if I need to build the code into a Windows system it is easy to do so.

I have always been impressed by the inclusion within this forum of newbies (in 2007 I was trying a build from source, before a forum contributor introduced me to apt!) , IT engineers happy to spare some time to get an aspiring user onto the right track, and everyone in between.

Thanks again for intensive help during 2007 to 2009 and being a reassuring presence in the background thereafter����

Maybe it was my fairly early introduction to PCs but I always wonder when people are afraid of any Linux installer. My first real Desktop Environment OpSys, after a shell on DOS, was OS/2 2.1. That was initially quite difficult but more about how new I was and how little new gear I owned and OS/2's hardware requirements were really rigid. Some time later I wanted to install Windows 3 so I had to learn how to dual boot and back then Windows would seek and destroy OS/2 so that was quite a learning curve. It took a lot of work to get OS/2 to dual boot with Win3 because Win3 demanded to go on first.

My first Linux install was Mandrake in 1998 and it was dead easy. Keeping it working back then wasn't so easy but IRC Linux channels led me to Slackware and it was the easiest multiboot install I'd ever done, easier than Win3, easier than Mandrake because by then I understood partitioning and boot managers and Slackware and 2 floppy DOS disks for PQMagic gave me all the tools to empower me to do what I wanted. Most other systems I've tried at the very least lean toward installing on an empty drive. For me that's not likely to ever happen, so deep control installers just suit me best and Slackware is one of the deepest if not THE deepest. "Now you're playing with POWER!" indeed!.

as I did begin with Linux, about no internet was available at home in Germany (and probably less in other countries excepted perhaps divers part of USA and UK but I am not certain. We did get a lot of software from PC publications as well as CD sets published with fast tempo. My first install was probably Debian 0.93R6 or Slackware 2.3.0 (but I can remember, that I did have difficulties with that one and did not use it at all). I have the old installations CD's at home (including the Official Red Hat Commercial 3.0.3).

But my first fantastic contact with linux was Basic Linux, baslin, started on DOS compatible computers from DOS, and available on 2 Floppy Disc 1,5 MB (the first one full 1,5 MB, the second, additional software, not completely!), and,

this linux continues to be on line and is since years available also as ISO file at https://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/ . A Linux tutor for beginner based exactly on baslin did also exist but I can actually not find it any more.

there where in baslin only 3 app's really in graphic mode: the desktop JWM (in the actual last version; in other releases it was not so performant), the calculator and the presentations tool magic point adapted to permit to draw with the mouse, a fantastic idea I find. so did baslin have about all functions from biggest linux'es including draw from hand but, of course, at minimal level. I did not use it really as I did have no success to realize the connection with internet. It was possible to install it so it can run with very old hardware with extrem low RAM and the author did offer a lot of interesting package derivate from an old Slackware release.

Though I applaud the local PC repair guy for his gutsy approach to getting linux converts, wiping previous OS and replacing with linux -- without prior permission -- is a bit of a stretch. Surprised he didn't get more blow-back. I wonder which distro he chose to introduce them to? Since he's the only repair guy in town, I guess they don't have to worry about having their questions answered.

We had a Gateway 2000 with 2.5GB running Windows 95. I had to repartition the HD (using fdisk on a floppy, I think). The Linux itself (oh, the embarrassment, given subsequent events) was Caldera (3.0? I've still got the CD somewhere, in a moving box as we're in transition). But no-one had heard of Darl McBride back then. I remember it came with a 'Learn Linux' book from Que but can't remember much about my level of success after installing. I recall that the book also had a 'free' version of Boot Magic and I could use both OS afterwards.

What really got me going was a live CD of SuSE 7.1 from Linux Format magazine. Worked a charm, with a sort of 'live store' of my setup in a file under Windows. I liked it so much I actually bought a boxed set of SuSE 9.0 and it became my default system for a while - first of many install dual-booting with which ever Windows I still needed to have for the few programs I couldn't run under Linux (not many of those left nowadays, thankfully!).

After year of having a good time with Linux and KDE, I found and purchased a copy of the exact same book/cd of Mandrake linux 7.0
I might make a live usb from it and put it away sealed in a box as a memento. lol

Back in 2001 is when I came across of this version of linux.
At the time I was working at an airline back home in El Salvador.
I did risk it all installing it on my office computer, but it advertised dual boot.
The install process was SO EASY! and the graphics as I said it before, were OFF THE HOOK, I was in love with Linux from that point on.
Previous experiences came from college, we did use some type of unix/linux but I have no idea what it was. it was all terminal usage.

My first Linux install was Mandrake in 2001 (can't remember what version it was). I liked it very much but the documentation was lacking in professionalism (there were a lot of colloquialism's and just plain bad English). I loved the KDE2 desktop environment back then too. But too many things didn't work for me in Linux so I continued using Windows for a few years after this until I tried Ubuntu (8.04 I think) and was very impressed how far Linux had come since 2001. I've been using Linux exclusively ever since 2010 or so (currently using Manjaro KDE).

They were French so I think their translations would not be the best, though English is mostly French pronounced differently. The translation likely suffered from them not being proficient in the English way of writing it.

Edit: for example "a red coat" in English literally translated from French would be "a coat red", the adjective is always after the noun not before like English.

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I think you are right!

With almost a year of experience in the Linux world, I'm considered a newbie relative to other users. But I definitely remember that day, Sept 23, 2020, which left sort of mixed feelings in me. On the one side, I had a system, which ran well out-of-the-box with almost all the tools I needed, without the bloatware of the Windows era, low memory usage, high speed, pleasant desktop interface, etc. But on the other hand - I was completely disconnected from the web without a chance to get the latest updates, to communicate with the outer world, you know... After hours and even days of research on Reddit, these forums, and my own system (dmesg was the name of the tool!), I could finally identify my wi-fi dongle as the culprit; actually the kernel didn't recognise its driver as it was from an unknown (suspicious?) manufacturer. Strangely, I'd been using the same dongle for a couple of years on Windows and it used to work well. Anyway, I had to replace the piece. But thanks God this didn't make me hate Linux from the very start. I'm a happy user and will hopefully stay the same in the years to come...

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I remember that day too only because it is my birthday. Hardware has always been the sticking point with Linux, though Windows and its treatment of the hardware was my way to Linux. It was Windows 98SE that made my Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold the top of the line sound card at the time only play a midi file and nothing else, downgrade to the 98 only version sorry about your luck still only midi. Well I had heard of this Linux thing in the computer magazines I read and while at the local computer store seen this Redhat 5.2 for sale and bought it. Got home installed on spare hard drive ran the sndconfig utility to put in my irq and dma settings and presto I had sound again, that was the last time I used windows for my daily driver.

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This disc was my first introduction to Debian, obtained from an open LUG meeting at BCIT in Burnaby BC in 1999. Though I was impressed by the apt program for its amazing dependency resolution ability, I could not get my Xwindows to configure properly (on a 486 PC) so ultimately kept trying other distros (early Caldera, Redhat, Turbolinux) and finally settled on Mandrake 7.0. Since others on this forum have named Mandrake as their first successful distro, my conclusion is they offered one of the earliest reliable automated Xwindows configurations during the install process. However, subsequent upgrades proved problematic so eventually I made the transition to later versions of Debian and finally Slackware.

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The installation took three months. Dual boot SuSE Linux 5.0 (June 1997) with Windows 3.11.

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I remember that I had a helluva time finding a driver for my proprietary Mitsumi CD Rom. And that rawrite refused to run on DRdos. Other than those glitches, installation went pretty smoothly. I think I was loading Slackware 3.

S.u.S.E 5.0 (in this thread), was rather quickly installed, impossible to configure and I did not hold out a single week.