So what got you into Linux?

[madcompnerd]

*tear* That was just.... *clasps heart* ... true.

[blackbelt_jones]

Originally posted by Sepero
Sounds like the same thing I hear alot of Slackware/Gentoo users say. I'm for Debian all the way, but don't stay with it out of "loyalty" or something like that. Give other distros a REAL try. In the end, I think you'll come back because of sheer technical superiority.

Mostly, I keep coming back to Debian out of laziness. Every other distro I ever tried is more work than Sarge to get set up the way I like it.

[Parcival]

Originally posted by blackbelt_jones
But I never forget that my most important reason for running Linux is that I find myself living in a moment of great historical change, right up there with the invention of the prininting press, and I want to contribute to this moment in a significant way. The plan was that the whole PC revolution was going to be a corporately owned phenomenon, everybody linked by a Microsoft's Secret Corporate Operating system. That's one plan that I am proud to have a hand in f**king up!

Amen, man, Amen.

Next Saturday I will participate with my LUG at the university at a Linux installation party and spread the gospel.

[Sepero]

Originally posted by nko
One day the next summer, I decided to say goodbye to Linux. It was great, and I'd used it quite a bit during my dual boot time, but I decided that Windows was just that much better.

I kid you not, later that week, I installed over Windows and have never, ever looked back.

Get a BSOD? Fat32 squash your files? What could happen in just one week?

[sbassett]

It was an old buddy of mine who visited me when I was visiting in NY, who downloaded linux, Slack, I think onto a large amount of floppies. He was to poor to buy a copy of windows in college. He had since switched over ever since. While I was visiting he gave me the dual disc set of Red Hat 6.0 (yeah 2 cds binaries and source). This sat on the dresser for about 6 months, until my girlfriend managed to hose up her system. So I finally dove in. I haven't looked back since. Still work with the other OS at work, but all of my PC's are running linux (even though the GF has gone back to windows). Thanks to all of the people that have put their lives into linux.

[leonpmu]

Originally posted by madcompnerd
OS X is in no way based on linux.

don`t be a nit-picker`it is based on BSD which is a bloody brilliant *nix, no need to get all flustered about it....

I got into Linux because my best fried was a *nix admin, and I was the DOS/Windows guy, so one day he says to me, bring your laptop over and we`ll dual boot RH 6 for you, see how you get along. So we went there, had to make a network cable seeing as I had NO CDROM on my laptop, (at that time) and so I started mucking with it, was using Gnome, which was dog slow on that hold Cyrix 100MHZ with 16 MB RAM, only plus point was a 4.2 GB HDD!!! Then I found FVWM, which was slick and fast on that old banger. bit by bit learnt the CLI. Got faster and faster machines until the monsters I have today.

That was about 6 years ago, and now I am a consultant with my own little one man show, which is doing OK.....

[nko]

Get a BSOD? Fat32 squash your files? What could happen in just one week?

I installed maybe 5 games, and was running my computer a lot. I kind of went in to shock at the idea of a comparably uncustomizable GUI, the machine got steadily slower with every piece of software I put on it, and it was a chore to stave off the spyware / viruses (I didn't want to run any antivirus or anything else that might slow down games). I ended up spending very little time playing games and quite a bit of time just trying to do homework for school. So I ended up choosing between an OS that got steadily slower and required daily care and feeding and an OS that I wasn't as familiar with, but that I could use to write e-mails, RTF documents, and look stuff up on the web.

And my DSP card causes random problems in Windows. Sure, there aren't any Linux drivers or programs that can use it, but when just doing occasional recording corrupts winlogin.exe or whatever it's called, the line has been crossed!

[mrBen]

I got into Linux because of an article in PCAnswers, a UK magazine that eventually spawned what is now Linux Format.

They were talking about Linux, had screenshots of KDE, and said it was stable and secure, which sounded pretty good for a guy running on Win3.1

From Uni I had received the Burks CD, a resource kit which included a version of Slackware (with a 2.0.36 kernel, IIRC) which I gamely installed. However, lack of internet connection, and a dodgy memory stick that made GCC keep dying, meant that I left it to the side. But I came back to it a little later with Mandrake, then through a few other distros, finally getting online with a hardware modem in SuSE. Then it was back to Slackware (8.0) and then to Debian, where I have stayed ever since.

June 2nd 2003 saw me scrap Windows entirely and move to Linux. And I haven't regretted a day of it.

[madcompnerd]

Originally posted by leonpmu
don`t be a nit-picker`it is based on BSD which is a bloody brilliant *nix, no need to get all flustered about it....

I'm in no way flustered. I was simply pointing out a massive gap in his post. And it's really not a fair comparison, and frankly it's an insult to Linux. I get kind of annoyed at Mac heads at times; if you think there are gnu zealouts then you've never met a Mac zealout.
Seriously though, BSD's and Linux' are very different. While they often feel the same, it's worse than saying Mandrake and Slackware are similar!

[battalax]

hmm.. It all started for me when my unreliable windows machine got the bluescreen one day. I had no other windows disks to install and I knew about linux beforehand. So I decided to head over to linuxiso.org and I downloaded mandrake 9.2 burnt it and installed it. I liked it then since I did not know much about linux beforehand I got very tired of not being able to do things so I had my brother mail me a windows cd and I then reinstalled windows. After this about a week later I got tired of how sluggish and unstable windows is and coincedently around the same time i got another bluescreen, So this time I tried mandrake again tweaking all little things to my liking. I then grew tired of mandrake and went to suse 9.1 pro which I was very very impressed with and then I tried to find something new to learn so I switched to debian sarge and I had a few minor issues but thanks to the great people here on the justlinx forums I was able to tweak and change all the harder things and get htings working in no time.

[klackenfus]

I got into Linux because of an article in PCAnswers, a UK magazine that eventually spawned what is now Linux Format.

Hey mrBen, Linux Format is one of the best Linux mags I have ever found but a subscription to but it is horribly expensive in the states, what would it set me back to have you send me a few current issues in PDF format?

[yourmompeterson]

i got in to liunx throught one of my friends he is anti-windows and i have been raised by a windows loving family when i was being brought up my dad worked for microsoft but in my sophomore year of highschool my friend gave me a p2 300 POS computer and after that i was on it and slowly i am learning bit by bit

[Sepero]

Originally posted by yourmompeterson
i have been raised by a windows loving family when i was being brought up my dad worked for microsoft

It's funny how quick those Microsoft(or Apple) loving families turn around after they get laid off. Especially when they find out they've been replaced by an outsource in India.

[Lucas_Maximus]

My first computer had Freebsd on it, it was given to me with BSD on, it was a 486 with some sort of GUI.
still got that computer I think it running an old version of SUSE or maybe redhat, however it runs okay to check email and a few other things.

I then bought a laptop with windows 2000 on it and to be honest windows 2000 wasn't half bad, however after a virus wiped all my music, I decided that I needed to learn a lot more, so I built my own computer and then I put windows XP and Redhat 7.3 on there since I had seen it running on the Uni machines.

After installing Windows XP loads of times, I found that I hadn't needed to reinstall redhat once (only fix grub), and started to use that a lot more and ended up moving to slack and now debian.

Still use windows but increasingly less as I find that I can do more stuff in Linux the way I want rather than in the way M$ want me to.

[Seph64]

What an interesting thread.

Back in oh 2000 I think, I was running a Windows 98 machine (old p 1 166mhz 32MB ram, etc). Leo Laporte kept saying something about Linux, and saw a screen shot of Red Hat Linux in action in Yahoo! Internet Life Magizine. I've been having trouble with Windows 98 crashing a lot... The very first Linux OS I actually tried was Win Linux., but since my modem (at the time I was on dialup, eeeek!) was a win modem I could not access the net with the linux that was installed.

In 2001, and ever so anxious since I am finally getting a new computer! I ordered a hardware modem, and decided to get a friend to burn and send me a Mandrake CD set (8.2). The CDs arrived sooner than my modem so I went a head and installed Mandrake before getting the modem (since it wouldn't be long).

Everything (except the modem, which I expected) worked out of the box so to speak, and was greeted by this nice GUI interface. I been using it (off and on) ever since.

I still like Mandrake, only because it was the distro that got me seriously in to Linux. But my favorite Linux distro is now Gentoo, and perhaps it'l stay my favorite OS.

Speaking of first Just Linux forum posts... This was my first post, I was such a n00b back then and thought all problems had to be resolved by reinstalling. I think I became a little wiser since then.