What is your story with Linux? Me first: \ stacker news ~Linux

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What is your story with Linux? Me first:

5295 sats \ 22 comments \ @felipe 4 Mar Linux freebie

Disclaimer: I know it's GNU/Linux but I'll be referring to it as Linux for short.

The first time I remember reading something about Linux was around 1998, while sitting on the toilet on my friend's house.

There was a pile of magazines near the loo and one caught my eyes. I can't recall exactly what it was but I think it was about the fusion of Mandrake Linux with Conectiva Linux forming the new (at the time) distro, Mandriva Linux. At that time, I knew nothing about Linux at the time but, as I flipped through pages and pages of blue screenshots, I was hooked.

From 99 to ~2002, I remember seeing my friend's brother installing Linux on his desktop a few times. I also remember playing around on KDE on his freshly installed Suse Linux and, maybe in 2003, I remember mindless typing my first apt get commands and breaking his installation of Kurumin Linux 'cause it messed with some dependencies or something. Good days :)

The first time I installed Linux on a machine I owned was in 2004, the same year I bought my first computer with my own money. It was the Kurumin Linux wich was huge in Brazil at that time. Kurumin was one of the first live distros (that I know of) so it was easy to play with without breaking (too much) stuff.

From 2005 to the present day, Linux (mostly Debian Stable with i3wm) remain my main operating system and I only used other OSs on work related tasks, like Windows on a work machine between 2010 and 2013 for .NET development and MacOS on a few old macs for iOS development between 2014 and today.

That's it for this post. There are more interesting stories like when Canonical was giving away free installation CDs and I ordered some to sell'em on Brazil's equivalent of Ebay 😅 or when in 2009 I made an unsolicited "port" of a DOS program of the softhouse I was working on to "work" on DOSEMU (or DOSBox, I don't remember exactly). It probably wouldn't work in production but, man, was it fast.

Now it's your turn.

PS: thanks @hodlme for creating the Linux territory!

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163 sats \ 1 reply \ @MattInTech 4 Mar

I first discovered Linux while trying to improve the performance of a potato PC back in 2013, when I was 18 years old and about to write my mini-thesis for high school graduation. My go-to choice was Ubuntu 13.10 with the Unity desktop, which has been updated multiple times (as well as some pc components) up to Ubuntu 15.04 if I’m not mistaken.

Also, I took a gap year between graduating high school and starting a university course, in which I worked for a 3D printing startup that strongly believed in open-source. Every company laptop was running Lubuntu 14.04 LTS, as well as our Ubuntu server. After that, I choose Fedora as my go-to distro during my university years and, after a lot of distro hopping, I finally stuck with OpenSUSE Aeon (former Micro OS desktop). It’s been an amazing journey, and the little penguin never let me down!

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @felipe OP 4 Mar

Since 2004 I distro hopped a lot but never tried OpenSuse. I remember installing it once (it was four CDs, if I remember correctly) but I don't have the memory of actually using it that day so I probably got stuck at the install process.

116 sats \ 1 reply \ @siggy47 4 Mar

Here's mine: #126179

107 sats \ 0 replies \ @felipe OP 4 Mar

Nice read!

Welcome to the rabbit hole, @siggy47 :)

85 sats \ 3 replies \ @quark 4 Mar

I got a slackware 1.0 CDROM in a magazine. I don't even remember the year. mid 90s. The rest is history :D

96 sats \ 0 replies \ @dayOldDonuts 10 Mar

Oh my, many memories flooding back from my early linux days. This linux discussion caused me to go look at Slackware's history so I could somewhat pinpoint a year when I began using linux. Slackware begin in 1993, so that's about when I began using it. A professor at the university, where I was studying EET, loaned me 110 3.5-inch HD floppies containing the Slackware distribution. At the time, CDROM drives were very expensive and I don't remember seeing any/many computers on campus with them, and I certainly did not have one in my home computer. I had a 80286-based system at home so I could not run linux at home, and therefore installed it initially on a 80386-based machine in the ham radio shack. I was immediately compiling streamlined kernels to get as much horsepower out of those systems. A short time later I ended up acquiring a 80386-based machine at home, and have been running at home ever since.

Of course, this discussion also brings back memories of my early days on the internet; before HTTP/world-wide-web. Gopher, WAIS, telnetting to MUDs, FTP sites, and so much more. In a way, the advent of HTTP caused the internet experience to be limited (man, that sounds like an incorrect statement!)

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @felipe OP 4 Mar

I recall experimenting with Slackware around 2005. It was really hard making things work and I didn't have internet at home , só I had to download things somewhere else, get home to try it, fail miserably,rinse and repeat hahah. But it was a lot of fun 😁

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @felipe OP 4 Mar

Later in 2008, I think, I tried Slack, which was a live cd distro based on Slackware. I used it to jailbreak my workplace's computers to surf the net 😄

53 sats \ 2 replies \ @gunson 5 Mar

I've progressively been moving my life away from Google and Apple for a couple of years now.

Besides from some university computers and the odd AWS instance, I only really tried Linux when I decided to buy an old ThinkPad and set up a new Bitcoin node. I chose Ubuntu because it just seemed the simplest with lots of support.

Recently I've moved away from my MacBook since it's about 9 years old and not coping so well, but I wanted to make the final switch so I don't rely on Apple at all (moved to GrapheneOS 1.5 years ago).

Bought a newish refurbished ThinkPad and installed Ubuntu again just because I'm used to it. It's so simple and clean, and I love using FOSS - people dedicate so much time crafting it (Ubuntu, LibreOffice etc) for almost no financial reward, the least I can do is use it :)

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @felipe OP 5 Mar

Old Thinkpad s rock! I'm a proud owner of a few of them :)

I've been willing to try GrapheneOS for a while now. What's been your experience with it after 1.5 years?

32 sats \ 0 replies \ @gunson 5 Mar

Yeah I love the aesthetic and build quality of ThinkPads

Graphene has been great. Was some effort to migrate things like passwords, but generally pretty easy.

A few minor inconveniences I add to it like having location off and not choosing to use Google maps (although it's possible). Also changed the keyboard to gboard (no network access) and use the pixel camera (also no network access) to make things a bit better.

53 sats \ 1 reply \ @jp305 4 Mar

Circa 2006: Compiling KDE on gentoo using a Dell laptop and no other machine to help troubleshoot, I was living dangerously.

Later I used Arch because I loved the composability. But nowadays linux is server-only for me.

31 sats \ 0 replies \ @felipe OP 4 Mar

Compiling KDE on gentoo

That's a pretty rough start 😄

53 sats \ 0 replies \ @doofus 4 Mar

I learned about and starting using live distros around 2007, and never looked back. I was skeptical of Bitcoin at first when it was just available for Windows. I had just gotten rid of Windows and wasn’t ready to install it again.

53 sats \ 1 reply \ @thebullishbitcoiner 4 Mar

I saw some peers in college running Debian/Ubuntu and had to try it out. For a while, I felt pretty cool reviving family and friends’ old hardware with lightweight distros. 😎

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @felipe OP 4 Mar

Hahah, yeah! I know exactly how you felt!

All my close relatives are using Linux but they don't even know what it is 😄

53 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 4 Mar

Here's my story.

#450240

53 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford 4 Mar

Disclaimer: I know it's GNU/Linux but I'll be referring to it as Linux for short.

lol. You know your audience :)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @felipe OP 4 Mar

😅

53 sats \ 0 replies \ @03d99caedc 4 Mar

First Linux I ran across was around 5.2 and Caldera though I had interacted with SUSE before. It was an adjustment from windows 3.1 and I didn’t understand mounts very well and I hosed the file system of linux trying to mount the windows partition under linux. Good times.

32 sats \ 0 replies \ @TNStacker 5 Mar

Ubuntu on one of the first intel iMacs using the VMWare virtual machine to run the VM in a separate window. Around 04-05, I'd say.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @expatriotic 13 Mar

Getting started now! Want to run Pop!_OS on my Macbook Pro via a VM