How Old Were You When You Started Using Linux?

[Paddy Landau]

I was 13. Got really angry at the fact I didn't know how to open a .sh file for my video card drivers. But I eventually got it ^_^

LOL, it's funny how our reactions to events change as we age. At your age, I also got angry and frustrated when I couldn't figure out something. Now, 40 years later, I just get curious.

[auredium]

Ah yes, I remember my first encounter with Linux. I was 19 years old and had just started at my MBO education. A friend and classmate of mine came with this odd bundled six CD version of an operating system. It was called 'SuSE 6.3' and I bought it from him for the price of little more than a boiled egg.

It was in the first month of the new millenium, blistering cold when I first got it. I installed it on my beige colored big tower PC with a Pentium III 1 Ghz Coppermine processor (clocked up to 1.14 GHz at the time)

It was a real discovery of a new system. I had to trash it in order to get it to work properly. Later a change of graphicscard glitched the O.S. even in bash. I moved to SUSE 7.3 and then to RedHat and Fedora but I always kept Windows running next to it.

I believe it was about 5 years ago that I got in touch with Ubuntu. It was a love hate relationship. I loved the principle of Open Source software, loved Ubuntu for being easy to use, and didn't mind learning in order to get it to do stuff it couldn't out-of-the-box. I started using Ubuntu as the only O.S. about a year ago. While it still bugs me I can't runn all of my games under Ubuntu, I still find it better than Windows.

It pains me no small feat that I have to wrestle through dozens of programs and codecs in order to get WIndows to do all the things I want while Ubuntu has virtually no work at all out of the box.

[Paddy Landau]

I had to trash it in order to get it to work properly.

Only Linux would require you to trash it to make it work

[SeijiSensei]

I was 45 when I started an Internet consulting business in 1994. We wanted to build firewall routers/servers for smaller organizations. We began with Slackware (on about two dozen 1.44 MB floppies!) but switched to RedHat 3 when it became available. The RPM package management system was an important innovation. We gave Novell Unixware a spin, but Linux was already a better product, and it was free.

[kunai]

I only started using Xubuntu as my primary OS a few weeks ago, so 14 years old.

I had played around with Linux for far longer before, however. My family still had dial-up Internet even up until 2008, so when I was 10 I used to try and download Damn Small. Someone would invariably call the phone and I never was able to finish the donwload. I got so frustrated that I took my mom's laptop to Starbucks to download it with their free WiFi. I burnt it to a disc and tried it out, and boy, was I disappointed. I didn't know much about Linux at the time. I thought it would be some revolutionary free OS that was way better than Windows and OS X, but apparently that wasn't the case.

Fast forward 4.5 years and to Ubuntu 12.10, and it turns out that my original expectations came true.