What was your reaction the first time you used Linux/Ubuntu?

[bruakerche]

Where is 'My Computer' on Linux? And there is no way to manage my iPhone on a linux box. It would be an easy job with Windows or Mac as there are a plenty of transfer software available for device management. The gtkpod is no longer vaid for iOS 8 and later

[him610]

Linux. The first time I used Linux (Slackware) back about 20 years ago, it overwhelmed my machine at the time, a Quantex intel 486 w/120MB HDD ??RAM. I kept trying, mostly for the open source idea, different distros for the next few years - Red Hat, Suse, or flavor of the month from a CD included with one of the Linux themed magazines.

Ubuntu. None of the distros quite caught my fancy until I tried, Ubuntu Breezy Badger or Dapper Drake - don't recall which. Once I got it installed and booted up, I thought to myself, they (Canonical) have really done a good job on this. Back then, one could request free CDs from Canonical containing the most recent version of Ubuntu which I did, and in turn, gave them out to members of our local users group at my place of work. I also have a server running freenas, and a wireless router with dd-wrt installed on it.

Windows. I currently own six computers of which 5-1/2 run some form of Linux. My spouse migrated from Windows 7 to Ubuntu a couple of years ago. I have one machine, about six years old, that is dual boot with Ubuntu 14.04.3 and Windows 7 that I use to run Windows-based tax software on annually.

[PhilGil]

The first live CD I tried was 6.06. Even back then, I was pretty impressed with all the free software it came with and how usable it was. At the time I didn't see any compelling reason to switch from XP, though.

I installed Ubuntu 9.04 because I was bored with XP and too cheap to buy a copy of Windows 7. I really liked it from the start, for me was intuitive and easy to wrap my brain around.

[Sweet_Baby_Jamie]

A school mate brought a Windows 7 laptop from a pawn shop to the computer club because it was stupid slow and freezing up alot. Some really geeky kids all took shots at fixing it, cleaning the registry, defragmenting the HD, doing antivirus scans, CCleaner and whatever stuff. One of them finally reinstalled Windows 7 but the computer still wouldn't work because there are missing drivers and I guess it needs more installation disks to get those drivers for proper display, wireless, printing, and sound.

I watched, being the new kid and not technically inclined at all! But I had mentioned how I brought my home desktop back to life in all of 25 minutes with Linux and they're like, "Sure, yeah, right."

Okay so a little side note:

I got tagged with a silly nickname on the first day of school because I'm very small for my age. They call me "the puppy." Rather than get mad I just go with it, and to be a really good sport I brought in Puppy Linux on a USB thumbdrive.

Finally it was my turn to have a go at this buggy, stubborn laptop. "If you can make it work you can keep it!" So I did. Almost instantly too, since Puppy runs entirely in RAM. I proved it when I removed the USB thumbdrive and kept going, writing and printing (after setting up the printer in CUPS), playing music, Googling. Wireless worked, sound played, everything zoomed along. And I got a nice laptop out of the deal. It has 3 GB of RAM so I'm not limited to Puppy or even a "light weight" distro! So I took it home and tried Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Lubuntu (because I am used to LXDE) and Xubuntu in Live mode. Wireless didn't work with any of them the way it had with Puppy. So I tried my LXLE on it because that's what I use on my old desktop. Wireless worked right away! I don't know what LXLE does differently from Lubuntu but this was pretty major for me. So now even though it doesn't need a light weight distro, it runs the same OS as my old fossil desktop which is kinda cool!

I took it back to school and let the computer kids see how easy Linux is! And how fast and zippy! And how all the software on it is free and totally legit, from the office software to some of the cool Edubuntu stuff I have loaded on it for school, and a neat little note-taking application called Xournal that I like alot.

They still call me "the puppy," but with respect instead of teasing. Linux is changing my life!

[pqwoerituytrueiwoq]

plaese don't laugh at my early linux self i was in over my head at the time

wow that run quite nicely
8.04 on a pentium 4 dell (some low profile system known to have a issue with bad caps)
probably got bad caps cause of the poor air circulation (lets pull cool air in from the rear and blow it out the rear)
installed it splitting my 40gb hdd in 1/2 with xp
ubuntu ran fine but for some reason windows slowed down so i panicked not knowing how to remove ubuntu to get windows to speed back up
i had someone i know remove it for me, next time i messed with it was when 9.04
i think i ditched windows for 10.04
eventually i replaced that dell with m4a79xtd evo + phenom II 965 + gt 430, later got a gtx 550 ti during black friday sales
sold the 550 ti a couple years later and made money off it, it was replaced with a 650 ti boot (early november sale)
now i have a i5-4690k+z97 board+16gb ram+650 ti boot w/ oc

i also had got a hp laptop w/ vista and replaced it with ubuntu
performance was crap let it sit a week not waning to admit i messed it up
found out about installing the nvidia driver which made it not suck
it still sucked but not so much (2ghz athlon II is crap)
i wanted to upgrade but did not cause it was still under extended warranty
eventually got current laptop on sale 11/4/2012 for 330 and use 3/4 of the $40 MIR from the 550 ti
wow my laptop is 3 years old now

[RabbitWho]

"this must be how old people feel when they try to use a computer". It was a while before I got used to everything. Totally worth it!