Yes, im doing le funy Meme. And yes, I am an autist, with some signs towards something adhd adjacent
I first tried Linux Mint when I was 12, eventually changed to Ubuntu when I was 13 or 14 because I saw the Windows 11 copilot button, installed arch at late 14, and got to gentoo when I was 15.
Can anyone beat me to it?
I think my very first exposure to Linux was when I got a Pi 3 for Christmas when I was 10; by next year, I was trying out Ubuntu 16.04 in a VM.
However, it took several years before I began daily-driving; I had thrown it on an old laptop during my sophomore year of high school that I mostly used from the couch.
I then did a “test install” of Debian Testing on my main desktop pater that year, which just became what I used every day and quickly just became my main operating system.
I soon installed it on everything else I owned and haven’t looked back.
Around '99 or '00. A friend of mine was gifted a Linux Magazine subscription and made me a copy of the CD. It was noteworthy at the time because it didn’t have any copy protection and we were neck deep in piracy, keeping our friend group supplied with copies of games that we pulled off of IRC.
Getting a CD full of software that made no effort to prevent copying was intriguing enough that we sacrificed a spare machine one weekend (giving up the ability to play LAN StarCraft!) to see what another operating system looked like.
We tinkered on and off for a year, once we could get dual boot working (thanks to the IRC crowd) we used it a bit more often. Mostly ricing, though that wasn’t a term at the time, and playing with the hacking tools (for educational purposes only, of course).
I think there was some copy protection mode that was annoying to write on Windows but trivially easy on Linux, which was the first time that I can remember where it was just better than Windows. That, and ARP poisoning our LAN parties to packet capture and read people’s AIM and ICQ conversations because we were little shits.
Also early 2000s here, but I was in my late 20s by then. Started out on Debian not that long before Woody came out, then before too long I tried Mandrake alongside it.
Exciting stuff for someone who first set hands (and started into BASIC) on a TRS-80, and then ran GEOS on a C64 for years. I was drawn to the opportunities for more tinkering, among other things.
2002, I was 11. My dad had bunch of Linux install CDs that came with Dr. Dobbs. I fucked up my XP MBR and asked him to bring home a XP install disk cause i lost all mine.
By the time he got home I had installed Mandrake Dolphin Linux on my PC.
I messed around with Linspire in the early 2000s after seeing a segment about it on The Screen Savers (on TechTV). It was about Microsoft suing them for originally calling the OS “Lindows”, so called because it was among the first OSes designed to attract people who are used to Windows.
I believe that it was among the first distros to induce the concept of app stores to Linux, and since I couldn’t figure out how tar.gz files worked at the time, it sounded like a good idea to me. Used it for about a year or three, before moving onto Ubuntu for many years then eventually Arch.
And now I’m back on Windows again because I bought an HDR display and learned the hard way that Linux has terrible support for it. Can’t get the HDR intensity slider to work properly in KDE, and there’s no SDR-to-HDR conversion at all in Linux, which means no AutoHDR and no RTX HDR. So in the meantime I’m dual booting Win11 and Arch, but I find myself using Windows more and more because it’s HDR support keeps getting better and better, especially if you have an nVidia GPU.
I think I tried DamnSmallLinux in a VM around like 2008 or something which I thought was really cool, then I tried Fedora which I didn’t really like, then I tried Ubuntu which I really liked and still do, although I’m going to switch to Mint at some point because I prefer the idea of having a community-owned distro.
Built my first PC in High School from scraps. Decided to try Ubuntu 10.04 (current at the time).
I was very impressed with how much performance a free OS could get out of my awful hardware. Have been using Linux in some form as my OS ever since.
Here’s what I started with. The release of Windows 95 lured me away from Amiga, but as the Amiga was a very customisable environment, I had this for an escape plan :D
In the Amiga days I was ridiculously lucky and bagged a Silicon Graphics Indy system for pennies, so Unix was no stranger at this point.
Cool, no, not my version but very close to it…
I’ve started with lubuntu 11.10 on a Pentium 4. I was 11. Time flies!
I started using Linux before you were born, but i also was 20, so you win😄
Linux didn’t exist until I was 25.
But are we talking earliest age, or length of time using it? I’ve been running Linux on PCs for over 30 years.
Yes, at least seeing a 50yo guy like me. We come from the 8bit world, there was no linux!
Been there! It was Avery different time.
The first program I wrote was in the Logo Turtle Game on an Apple Iie in 4th grade. Did some BASIC programming on the Apple IIe’s building interpreter too.
I use Arduino boards with Atmega, Esp32/8266, and M0 chips on them for embedded projects. These $8 boards have more processing capability then my first desktop computer…
I know it’s just nostalgia, but I sometimes really miss the days when you could memorize the entire memory layout of your computer. You knew that if you poked a value into a memory location, some pixels would flip at a certain place on the screen.
It was nice living in such a small, constrained world.
I still live it. I use some Atmega chips like the attiny85. It only has 256 bytes if RAM and 5 i/o pins to work with. I code in C++ so I have 100% control over memory if I want it.
Someday I’ll find a reason to work with attiny10 chips… There’s almost no resources on it and it’s about the size of a grain of rice!
Man, you make me wish I’d have followed an embedded career. When I first entered the market, embedded was niche and the domain of specialty industries like the MIC. If you cut out companies like Lockheed, building stuff to kill people, the job pool was really small. But there was a window, juuust around the time I moved to management, when you could find embedded jobs. I wish now I’d have taken that fork in the path.
I just finished teaching an Internet of Things class this term. I went strong on the ‘things’ bit of the title. We did all kinds of hardware projects, along with web apis, mqtt, and a tiny bit of clouds services to move data.
It was one of the most fun classes I’ve ever taught. That stuff is great!
I have a physical CD of Ubuntu 6.10, back then they were distributing those over the mail and a friend of mine ordered some and gave me. I still keep it.
a month ago, never goin back…so much power, so much free ram. im in love
in 2002 when my windows me computer start looping on the blue screen of death, with all of my college papers/essays/tests/assignments trapped in it.
the recovery media refused to work because i had upgraded the computer several times and i couldn’t afford the $180 windows xp cd. so i bought a linux magazine for $5 that included a copy of mandrake linux installation media and used paper printouts from my college’s computer labs to help me rescue my work from the computer.
lol. This is my story as well, except I wrecked my XP MBR and the CD was in Dr. Dobbs that my dad had a sub thru his work from. I was too impatient to wait for him to bring home an XP install CD.
I suspect that this is the story for most Linux users; windows failing at a critical need
That’s how you do it. Waiting to drown but suddenly learning to fly :D
Just to put you all on notice: I started my kids on Linux from day 1 of their computing lives. I’m playing the long game here. In another 80 years they’re going to be in the longest living users category.
They mostly use Linux as their daily drivers. Any time they have to use windows for school work they also rage at the terrible UI and lack of ease of use. <Insert evil laughter here>
