As far as I remember, Windows 3.x was just an add-on to msdos (sold separately), not a real operating system. From the msdos command prompt one had to run "WIN" to enter the windows frontend. Linux o.s. is older than mswindows o.s.

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Ah now you mention that my SCSI CD burner needed new controller card for it to be compatible with Linux, almost forgot that one...

And there was no network stack for the TCP/IP only their MS network garbage until they adapted the BSD stuff they eventually used. And if you were smart you did not use the windows until the 3.11 arrived as the rest of it was total junk.

Edit: Plus the fun of the autoexec.bat and the lines to maximize the memory so you could load the every more bloated pieces of junk programs that were eating up the lower regions of the memory, your if lucky 512kb or so of it and those massive hard drives that had a good 10mb of space if you were lucky and were four or five inches high and took a good day or so to format by the cryptic commands you entered to maximize the interleaving of the drive so it would have better performance. I am not sure if I still have that full height 10mb upstairs with the old 286 it was in or if I have thrown it away, still have the Redhat 5.2 I bought though, dug it out last night but the picture I took to post on my phone had errors in it for some reason and was not viewable. Never installed the Linux on the 286 though it was the Celeron 300a that replaced it that got that privilege. Lovely chip it ran at the overclock of 450 mhz just by upping the crippled bus the greedy SOBs at Intel did to it along with the other parts of the chip they crippled, scumbags then scumbags now nothing changes in the computer industry it is full of them.

Edit2: Though now it hits me it was the config.sys where the memory settings and stuff were done if my memory serves me.

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My first Linux distro was Red Hat 5.0 I got from a CD in the back of a paperback book titled "Learn Linux in 24 Hours", by Bill Brush, on May 1, 1998. I was looking for a copy of OS/2 at Barns & Nobel, which was where OS's were sold back in the day. I had been running Win3.11FWG in an OS/2 DOS box on a PC I was using before I bought a new Sony VAIO desktop for Xmas in 1997. It came with Win95 preinstalled. Between Win95 and the hardware was a layer of software Sony called "Sony-MediKit", IIRC. A fact which I found out about after I bought the desktop. Believing that MS could write a good OS, or as least as good as Win3.11FWG was (for me) I came to believe that the medi-kit was to prevent Sony hardware problems from crashing Win95, using a sort of "phantom reboot". Win95 would crash about every 5 minutes and I had to save every minute or so to avoid losing lots of code and having to re-write it.

Between Jan 1, 1998 and May 1, 1998 I had to re-install Win95 FIVE times, and finally got fed up with it, which was why I went to buy a new copy of OS/2, which cost $250 at the time. The paperback with RH5 cost $25 and the license said I could install it on as many machines I wanted. After I installed RH5.0 that Sony was rock solid stable and RH never crashed. I replaced it with SuSE 5.3 in Sept of 1998 because that distro featured KDE 1.0 beta, which had the look and feel of Windows. That was important because my client machines were Windows and working back and forth between Win and Linux created mental dissonance.

I used SuSE until Novell's CEO confessed that Linux was guilty of stealing MS IP and started paying royalties to MS. Novell's job after that was primarily replacing RH servers with SuSE servers, even though the SuSE servers were never allowed to be Master Browser Controllers of the networks. After SuSE I tried several distros that included KDE. Some based on the RPM and some based on DPKG. I decided that I liked the dpkg package manager more than RPM and in Feb of 2009 I installed Kubuntu 9.04. I have stayed with it every since. With Kubuntu 16.04 I began using BTRFS and now I will never use an OS that doesn't give me the option of making BTRFS the root file system.

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I think most of the business users had to buy the Novel network software.
I remember a BNC-coaxial cable network in a job, early to mid 1990s: one of the network cards failed and the entire network was down.

I worked around 1990 in a company where people used Acer XTs and 80286 ATs with msdos 3. The PCs were about 5 year old and the 20MB hard drives of the 286's began to fail. The word "backup" was totally unknown in the company, although they owned a big VAX system too for engineering calculations with quite regular backups by the admin. Hopefully the XTs of the secretaries never had any problem.

Yes, config.sys and the high memory nightmare!

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Yes that is what we did at the time networking installs and a video rental program we had for video stores plus local sales and service of machines. The old Netware 2.11 I think it was running the coax and making your own cables fun times trying to figure out the connection problems when it did not go right. Then fighting with the damn suppliers to not pay for a MS-DOS license for the computers as we were just installing the Netware which did not need it. Ended up it was cheaper to build from the parts so we did that later getting tired of it.

Edit: And the lovely monitors of the time, the amber or green until finally in heaven with a paper white, black and white one with a massive 640x480 pixel display. It only costed an arm and leg plus the rights to your first born child...

Edit2: Or now it pops into my mind trying to actually use all the memory slots on the motherboard without dancing naked in the moonlight sacrificing a few chickens to the computer gods, to ensure compatibility of the two let alone four sticks you had..

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I've only replaced Windows for about a year, but my first Linux distro was release in 2013. I booted it first at least three years ago and at most five (from 2021).

I remember being excited it loaded, but I couldn't make much sense of it. I didn't know how to get online (which has been made much easier), install apps, customize the desktop, etc.

So I put it on the shelf until my Windows netbook crashed and both Redmond and oem restricted access to recovery media.

Booting Linux again, a newer version, was borne out of both animosity and necessity.

I worked on terminals from windows for 3-4 years and I loved the fact that I could do everything from a terminal, not needing to use the mouse to go from window to window. In ~2003 a friend, more knowledgeable than me, brought a CD and installed it, Mandrake I think. I was amazed by how smoothly the installation went. For about 2 years I had Linux in dual boot with Windows, but only for security really, in case I needed to run some software that I could not install in Windows. I soon realized that there was nothing such.
Since then I wipe out Windows whenever I have a new computer I work on, and I usually install multiple distros in the same PC. For about a decade I have settled with Linux Mint, but I still try new distro flavours. One thing I completely disliked was Ubuntu, which after some point I think ~10 years ago reminded me of Windows, in the ads and the graphical environment.
I have proselytized my surrounding to Linux, and although scared in the beginning, they are happy with the outcome. I have no intention to ever go back Windows, and I get annoyed when some software is needed for certain bureaucratic works that assume we ought to have Windows on (like virtual meetings with Microsoft Teams). I agree with an LQ friend above: I wish I could get rid of Google as easily.

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I'm glad that someone on LQ mentioned that they had been bothered by a Linux "distro." install, not setting up various things automatically, of the type that an MS-Windows install, did set up. As someone who has done a lot of software development, I suppose it can sometimes be too easy for me to get stuck thinking from the perspective of software development.

Somewhat separately, I've often wondered, if the cost of some other types of hardware, beyond that of the x86 variety, had been much less expensive years ago, could "desktop PC's" have evolved a good deal faster?

Years ago I worked on some Unix Kernels on National Semiconductor brand CPU chips. Those CPU's tended to have a so called symmetric instruction set; if an instruction addressed data, generally it could address data directly, anywhere in the CPU or memory. I feel the various addressing limitations of the x86 stuff, slowly over time, effectively spawned a variety of kludges, that somewhat worked around the limitations. I feel they were inspired kludges, but kludges nonetheless. Over quite a bit of time, the addressing limitations were worked around.

Unfortunately, I believe the higher cost of the National Semiconductor brand CPU chips, and the other hardware that tended to be used with them, resulted in the machines built with them, being less popular.

It was Mandrake 6 PPC on an Amiga 1200 built into a tower. The Amiga loaded a special Kernel into RAM, rebooted and started linux. I didn't know what all those Files and folders in linux were for. And so I deleted some very necessary Files. You can imagine what then happend

Yeah, I mean who needs all those files in /dev, /etc and /lib anyway?
The more practice installing from scratch, the better.

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My first installation was on a desktop with XP: I installed Ubuntu Hardy with Wubi. And I was stunned. I loved the aesthetics and ease of use.

And with the arrogance that comes from ignorance, I started installing it on every device I could find. It's now when I sweat when installing any distro. I've never had any problems though, except for the usual hardware compatibility issues.

1993 for me. Linus was active on various newsgroups at the time. Since I was living in the Netherlands, saw him live quite a few times. I remember thinking to myself, "I wish that this would really take off, it makes so much sense!" At work I was using AIX, so Linux wasn't a completely new thing.

It took forever! And crashed repeatedly until I could patch and recompile the kernel. Thank Stallman for make.

Exactly - windows 3.11 ran "on top" of MSDOS. In my case, (first PC), Packard Bell had their "Navigator" software on top of 3.11. I knew squat about Linux then but as soon as I found out about OS2 Warp, I dumped Windows in a heartbeat. That was 1993 but can't remember when I discovered OS2 Warp.