What was your first experience using Linux? How old were you? Stick around or did you go back to windows before eventually circling back to Linux?
What was your first experience using Linux? How old were you? Stick around or did you go back to windows before eventually circling back to Linux?
I'll go first, I took my mom's college textbooks which came with discs for a couple distros and failed to install RHEL before managing to get Fedora Core 4 working. The first desktop environment I used was KDE and despite trying out a few others over the years I always come back to plasma. Due to being like 12, I wanted to run my games on it, and man wine was not nearly as easy to use (or as good) as it is nowadays. So I switched back to windows until around 2015 or so when I spent the next few years trying to replace windows as much as I could. Once valve released proton, I switched fully and have t looked back, unless my still there windows partition tries to take over my computer when I restart it at least.
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All I remember about my first time is being tricked into using Slackware. They told me it was the easiest distro. And this was in like 94 or 95; just a year or two after the damn thing came out.
Slackware was mine too - all it took was a box of floppy disks and tens of hours of downloading and installing! It was great though, something so different. But it was just a toy, and I went back to DOS/Windows on PC - mainly for the games and hardware support (Voodoo!)
A year or so later I spent a lot of time playing with Solaris and VAX/VMS at University and really developed a love for the command-line and UNIX environment. It was that which led me to my first job (with HP-UX) and my second (Debian/Yellow Dog). From then on I used it at home a lot more. Now I use Windows for games/gamedev, and Ubuntu for everything else (desktop, laptop, servers).
But it's amazing how far things have come in some respects, but how some things have regressed over those 20 years - window managers/themes never reached the heights I envisioned in the Enlightenment hay day, session management/restoration/remoting seems to have been eroded away, virtual desktops/window management/tiling regressed and became fractured, the wonder of Compiz didn't really move things in an interesting way, and I felt sure Quicksilver (for MacOS) was the future of launcher, but it's not really been taken up - though the Expose feature is an excellent essential part of Gnome now (Activities)!
In some ways I think Linux has lost that "wow factor" that we used to have with all those cool features - but it is much more rock-solid and professional now! I use it more now than I ever have.