How long have you been using Linux?

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Original photo by Rikki Endsley. CC BY-SA 4.0

The Linux community is made up people who have been users for days, months, years, and even decades. How long have you been a Linux user?

As we celebrate the quarter-century mark of the Linux kernel, many of us can think back to our first introduction to Linux and recall the feelings ranging from excitement and joy to perhaps even a little bit of intimidation as we embarked on our journey to learn a new operating system. Whether you're a long-time user, or fairly new to Linux, it's great to be able to participate in a community which celebrates choice, freedom, and the power of people to create and share amazing software and knowledge alike. There are so many reasons to love Linux.

Today, the Linux kernel powers everything from personal computers to the most advanced computer servers, from cars to Android phones. We're reaching the point where many children today are native users of Linux, whether they know it or not, and some of them are now second-generation users. Who would have thought that this little operating system that started as "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like GNU" could lead us to where we are today?

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1896 votes tallied
Since the beginning, 20-25 years.
20% (387 votes)
A long time, 10-20 years.
39% (748 votes)
A good while, 5-10 years.
20% (378 votes)
Not that long, 0-5 years.
18% (342 votes)
I haven't made the switch yet.
2% (41 votes)

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47 Comments

It was the summer of 1992. I downloaded the files to write onto diskettes for Soft Landing Systems Linux 1.02. It was based on kernel 0.99PL12. SLS folded their tent shortly after that, but I still have those diskettes. The next spring I switched to Slackware, and have found no reason to make any further changes.

ah, thank you. i could never remember when i started with linux, but i do remember starting with a similar kernel version as yours. now, thinking about it, i do realize i must have started in fall 1992 when i first went to university. i also got my first computer around that time.

i used SLS until summer 1993 when i switched to slackware. i never understood why SLS stopped...

greetings, eMBee.

You beat me! I started at 0.99PL13 :-). On floppies.

In mid-90's, I got myself a little book and a couple of CDs from a local bookstore, one which sells computer books. The little book was RedHat, before the brand name Fedora. The kernel version was, 2.0.36 if I remember correctly. I first used it with a cheap Pentium refurbished computer with two NICS and a hub to make a primitive router, so I can have more than a single device sharing my then high-speed internet connection. This was way before the DLink, Netgear, and other routers that you now see at Wal-Mart. The graphical environment was so cumbersome that I used it only to configure my NICs, simply because I did not know otherwise, back then. Everything was on the BASH shell. I even setup a telnet (not SSH) access so I could access my box remotely. Very insecure, of course....................................... Things have changed so much since then. Now that I have a family, a house and a car, I cannot put that much time (and money) on computer things.

I once rejected a job where they wanted to force me use Windows.

I haven't been using Linux as long as a lot of the people in this community but once I found Mint and tried CentOS, I have been hooked since. In only 2 short years, I have almost left the Windows world completely. My work place just won't let go.

'Twas the night before Thanksgiving and all through the house
not a person was typing or using the mouse
except one lone bloke in a CRT glow
wading into waters he didn't know
with fingers crossed he hits the Enter key
and when it booted up his heart leapt with glee
as his computer, which frankly sucks
booted the OS with a mascot of Tux
And so he begins his journey, right here
Using Linux and Open source for 13 years!

Happy Birthday Linux!!

Love the story line Drew (lol).

I just wish I could have broken it down to one line under the other and not one long paragraph.

I'm right at the 10-year mark. Your breaks are lumping the leading edge of the Vista refugees with the group of really early adopters from the pre-Knoppix Era. But you did have to draw the lines somewhere.

Thanks!

I'm in the 10-20 year category myself. I don't remember the exact date or distro that was my first, but it was probably in the late 90s or early 2000s. I recall finding a distro that would let me boot from the same FAT32 partition that Windows lived in, and had an on-again, off-again relationship for the next few years until 2007 when I bought a laptop that came preinstalled with Windows Vista, said "nope" to that, and said goodbye to my Windows partiition. I'd go back to dual-booting for a while before converting for good, but I'm now (thankfully) clueless when friends and family ask me for advice on their non-Linux systems.

2004 - DeMuDi (Debian Multimedia Distribution) got me by the time - and I switched to Ubuntustudio around 2010 or 2011

Funny thing about it, for me, is how it sneaks up on you. I swear it was just last week I was the Linux noob, and then all of a sudden I woke up one day and realised that people ask *me* for input on their problems...and, stranger still, I'm providing useful answers.

Sometimes I catch my reflection in my screen or in a shop window, and I think "was that a unix guru I just saw?", but then I see it's just me, a Linux noob, working hard and sharing whatever I learn. Someday...!

My first Linux was SuSE Linux 6.3 AD 1999 :-)

My first successful install was sometime in 1998 and it was Red Hat 6.1. My first production server was Suse in 2001. It became my "go-to" OS sometime in 2003 after taking a Red Hat class. When I was still working in K12 I had a Ubuntu desktop with Windows XP virtualized for the times that I had to manage Windows servers. I prefer it to every OS I've ever worked with. It's solid and I just love the applications I can use and the fact that I can use Linux to help others and rescue their malware trashed machines. It's a win-win.

Red Hat Linux 3.0.3 ... I bought the book "Red Hat Linux Unleashed!" A CD of Red Hat Linux came with it in a pouch in the back of the book.

I remember it took me forever to get the OS initially installed. After days of troubleshooting, I finally figured out that the install was failing because the CDROM would spin down occasionally and the CDROM driver didn't know to spin it back up and it would just crash.

So, I had a terminal open where I manually cd'ed into the device directory for the CDROM and for the hours it took to install the OS I would occasionally type "ls" to get a directory listing. This was enough to keep the CDROM spun up and the allowed the installation process to complete.

Those were the days. Oi! :)

Note, Red Hat Linux 3.0.3 ... was 1996. So, 20 years for me. Pretty neat.

I was doing my schoolwork in the early 90s on UNIX X-Windows and I wanted the convenience of tele-computing and even working at home, but I couldn't affort a UNIX workstation costing >>>$10K. Then I heard about Linux. I think it was Slackware 30-or-so floppies with Linux kernel <1.0 with XFree86. It was a perfect timing. I suddenly had my own UNIX-like workstation at home and at my school workplace (I was working part-time as sysadmin at school, and they had coax Ethernet that I could telnet and do remote X sessions from anywhere for both school and work) and have successfully done my schoolworks and finished all my work projects without having to fight for computing resources or being at a particular station at a particular time. Those were the days.

Linux gave me freedom of mobility, more leisure time, more control, and more personal empowerment. I remember struggling with Windows as sysadmin working more than half-time while still paid pittance as a half-time student, then after deciding to convert all the servers and workstations to Linux and UNIX, work time dropped to below half-time. I only used Windows for gaming and education, but since 4 years ago, Windows was removed when most of my Windows games ran just fine under wine.

I now use Fedora Linux at home and Red Hat Enterprise at work. They are very well suited together and especially fit for those who have sysadmin background, since they don't just focus on the desktop but also on the servers which I rely heavily on. My home is setup with personal cloud and network services and distributed processing with PCs, Macs, RPis, and smart devices and sensors all interconnected with automated remote management. Both PCs and Macs run Linux, and RPis run Raspian Linux. Without Linux, this would have never been possible.

5 years for me now.

1993 TIS firewall install on Slackware.

I started with Yggdrasil in the early 1990's. It came with a brilliant reference manual - the 'Yggdrasil Bible'. Nearly 1000 pages and about 40 mm thick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X

Suse in the nineties, Red hat after that, finally Gentoo and never looked back.
I will probably be forever grateful for Linus and all the hard enthusists making this possible since 25 and hopefully endless years to come.

The summer of 92. Boot and root diskettes, mtools! kernel 0.98pl13.

What drove me to Linux was the activation system built into Windows XP. I was just simply reading about it at a nearby Barnes & Noble one night back in my single days back when I had Windows 98, and ran across the information about it. I just felt that a hardware upgrade that made XP think I had pirated it was just not acceptable to me. At that time, I had heard about Linux several years before, and so I vowed that I was going to ease into learning it. I started with programs that were available in both Windows and Linux and familiarizing myself with those. I then, soon after, discovered live CDs and bought books containing those and played around with those. And then, a couple of years later, after I had gone to Windows 2000, I began getting error messages every few minutes...and then, eventually, every few seconds. I finally had enough and went for broke and installed Mandrake, and the problem disappeared (I later learned that it was a hardware incompatibility with Win2K that had caused that). Even though I have had quite a few other distros on my computer ever since, I have never had Windows on my computer at home since then, always going with pure Linux -- and I don't miss Windows one bit.

Started with Red Hat Shrike somewhere around 2004. Spent quite a while trying to get it to work but got more frustrated with every try. Came across Mepis 2004.3 and it worked 'out of the box'. Amazing. Spent years with it, and loved tinkering. Spent some time with Arch and Suse, back to Mepis and now with Kubuntu for the last 4 or 5 years.

Tinkering days are over and as far as I'm concerned Linux is mainstream when it comes to technology and usability. With Android, it's blown Windows out of the water. Never mind about the 'year of the Linux desktop', it's moot.

Red Hat 3.0.3. 1996

It was either RH 5.2 or 6.0, I forget which. Mint 17.3 now.

yggdrasil. According to Wikipedia this stopped in 1995.

Anyone remember Coherent, the pre-linux UNIX clone that came on 5 1/4 floppy disks and a huge manual? It was my first UNIX introduction which was followed by linux when Coherent faded around 1994.

I think the kernel version was 0.98 on the SLS distribution. I downloaded 5.25" floppy images to the servers at my company's research center, then copied to our local VAX/VMS system, and finally to a Windows PC to write to floppies.

First attempted to boot on my 386 w/ 1MB memory and 20MB hard drive. It wouldn't boot, so I upgraded to 2MB (swapping out 72 DIMM chips). That worked for a console without X, so used that for a while.. Swapped with a friend for another 386 with 8MB with SIMMs to get X working..

Those were the days :-)

My first distribution was Slackware 1.0. It was released in 1993 but I don't think I got around to installing it until 1994. I got it on a CD-ROM but back then it had to be copied to floppy disks; installing from CD-ROM wasn't supported until Slackware 3.0.

Redhat's Mothers Day addition was the first time I got on the internet with Linux on an old Digital 386DX 33.. So around 1995. Dialup modems,floppydisc ruled the day back then.
Digital,floppies and dialups, OH! My!

Red Hat Mother's Day Edition - May 1995 - I still have the disks. I don't still have the 386 PC.

My first distrib was Redhat 4. Not RHEL, see. I own yet one Linux 5.2 in carton box with a paper user's guide bought in a shop

Remember !

I have fond memories of my VIC 20, Commodore 64 and acoustic modem when I discovered the Internet. As soon as I could afford a second hand PC clone, I started downloading floppies for Linux. It was a magical, wonderful time.

Started using Slackware 3.0 (October 1995). It was a lot harder to install then (had to give a command line string to have the install disk read from my non-standard cdrom interrupt), then recompile the kernel so it would keep using the cdrom. Recompiling the kernel on first install was a bit much for a noob (but I got there).

Literally the very beginning.. I was new to UNIX and kept scouring the Minix group in case Minix became available for home use. I wanted to learn more about it and suddenly, Linus posted , his alternative.. I downloaded it over uucp, if I recall correctly, and booted it that night. Basically bash with a few extra virtual consoles.. been a faithful user, without fail, ever since!

Hey, I started out with Minix from Andrew Tanenbaum, just like Linus did. I started with minix somewhere 1989, hacking the source.
The first linux installation I had my hands on (I put together) was somewhere summer 1993.

In 1994, I picked up a copy of the latest Red Hat Linux release from a CompUSA store. I have used many different distributions since then, and like different distributions for different purposes.

I bought the Linux Slackware from Walnut Creek in 1996, but it's my younger son who started to use it on his computer! He is now the system admin for a not-for-profit ISP! I was an OS/2 Warp user from 1995 to 2002 when I switched to Windows/7 because of graphic & video softwares and, as I retired, I finally installed Ubuntu 14.04 a year and a half ago for my main system, but I still have a windows/7 machine for games...

I unknowingly used Linux way back in 2007. My dad had Ubuntu installed alongside with Windows XP. Being quite curious, I booted up Ubuntu, guessed the password my father uses, and got into the desktop environment. I gotta say, it had the feel of XP but the power of Linux.

Nearly ten years later, I'm now a CS undergrad primarily using Linux for all of my papers and requirements. I cannot imagine myself being productive in a Windows machine.

1995, Slackware floppies.

My start was with Yggdrasil In Fall 1994, I found a book with a cd-rom and boot diskette at my local computer shop while looking for something else. I bought it on a whim and haven't looked back. I migrated to Red Hat around 5.1 but use several flavours now for different purposes.

I started out with a copy of Yggdrasil in Fall 1994 as it came in a small book with a cd-rom and a boot diskette. I had a spare computer with the cd-rom drive thru the sound card and that was listed as a possible configuration on the book cover, so I took it home to try it out. I had used minix but was a little disappointed so this was a fun adventure. It worked and I haven't looked back. Migrated to Red Hat at around 5.1 and now have several different distros around the house. Thanks Linus.

Started with Unix Version 6 back in 1976. Thanks to Bell Research Labs from AT&T. All the rest is based on this.

Since November 1991. Damn, I'm old.

Started with RedHat (not RHEL) 7.1 back in 2001, but never got much from it. I've had a Linux server since 2004 I logged into from windows but my desktop was back to Windows til about 2006 when I tried Ubuntu and truly got into Linux as a desktop OS. Since 2009, apart from a job where for a couple of years I had to use Windows at work, I pretty much used Linux on everything and for everything.