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.

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.

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’ve started with lubuntu 11.10 on a Pentium 4. I was 11. Time flies!

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.

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.

My son’s first computer was Linux. ;) He was still toddling but wanted to hit my computer, so I set up an old one for him.

I was 14 in 1991 I should add. I switched from minix not long after I could get Linux to boot. I think that was actually 1992. Both the computer and Linux weren’t very good back then …

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.

14. Slackware from like 40 3.5 floppy disks.

a month ago, never goin back…so much power, so much free ram. im in love

I started using Linux before you were born, but i also was 20, so you win😄

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.

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.