That reminds me of a similar story some years ago, when a guy I used to know was shutting down a live system of openSUSE I gave him to try out; he decided to eject the DVD while the system was still shutting down. Then he wondered why the system didn't like that idea. The worst part about it was that, he "supposedly has written software", and yet didn't know the difference between a 486 and a Pentium processor (thought they were the same processor). He also couldn't understand why his machine wasn't recognizing his hard drive, when it's SATA cable wasn't even plugged in, then took credit for fixing it after I'd discovered that and told him. When he was outside in his backyard when I discovered that. Needless to say, I'm not convinced he knows much if anything at all about computers...

So much for newbie-friendliness!

I was in Middle School and installed SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on a kit that came with a manual

I did my first install in the mid-'90s using the CD that came with ``Linux Unleashed''---an early Slackware release. I had to buy a CD drive at a local computer faire in order to read it. Installing the CD drive and an additional hard disk (an old RZ29 giving Linux a whopping 4GB of disk space) and getting the basic Linux to boot was actually pretty easy. Task that struck terror in me was trying to get XFree86 up and running without frying my monitor. With Slackware installed, I was quadruple-booting my '486 at the time using Coherent's boot loader (SW + DOS/Windows, Coherent, and Consensys SVR4.2) and spending a bunch of time dialed into delphi.com (via their DOS-based software) looking for information on Usenet so I could safely fire up XFree86. It seemed to take forever to find enough peoples' accounts of using the same video card/monitor combination -- and what configuration settings they were using -- that I felt comfortable setting up X.

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Many moons ago I discovered Ubuntu 8.04. It blew my mind. I remember I was so excited by it I didn't even back up my Windows PC (not that I kept much on it).

EDIT: or was that 7.10? Yeah I am pretty sure it was 7.10.

Back in the day, programmers really didn't know much about computers. They didn't need to. Mainframe computers lived in an air-conditioned room attended by machine operators and programmers only accessed them via remote terminals if at all. More often, they just wrote their programs onto coding sheets and punch-card operators converted them into card input for an overnight run. The programmer got the results in the morning.

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Wow, that's going back 15 years or so for me. I even looked up my first posts/threads here (6/22/2004). BUT, my actual Linux journey started probably a little before that...same year more than likely, MAYBE, 2003. I experimented with different distros...did use Slackware for a little while. I remember it was so cool to see something that was a functioning OS that was NOT Windows. There was a huge emphasis back then that if you had a computer, more than likely it had Microsoft Windows. Not a lot around our area using Macs or anything else. I remember installation of Linux was not as pretty as some now but still not terrible. I have heard of horror stories of earlier Linux installs.

My post back that then referred to Fedora Core 2 which I do recall using Fedora for a good solid year or 2 as a desktop. Used Thunderbird for email, Firefox/Mozilla for web browser, GAIM for instant messaging (do people still instant message or use GAIM?), K3B for burning CDs, Amarok for main music player, etc. And no doubt, some other software for other tasks. But I was pretty set with it!

Mainly that it was such an easy process to install after Windoze..... This was Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 'Trusty Tahr', a couple of months after EOL for WinXP. I wiped XP out of my life, and 'jumped in at the deep end', virtually overnight.....none of that timid, dual-boot 'messing around' for me. (I like a challenge!)

Haven't looked back, OR even considered using Windoze since..... I found 'Puppy' Linux about 5 months on from there, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Ah. 'Gutsy Gibbon', eh? Not a bad intro to Linux, at all.... Good place to start in those days.


Mike.

Lots and lots of floppy disks! Lots of 'em.

My first (and last) Ubuntu was Dapper Drake. I had bought a second-hand computer and the previous owner threw in an Ubuntu CD which he hadn't been able to make sense of. Before that, I'd only used Red Hat. When Gutsy came out, I tried to upgrade but the installation script said my machine wasn't big enough. And when I complained at Linux Forums (which was my online community in those days), I got flamed for expecting any modern Linux system to run in 250 MB of RAM. So I did a net install of Debian (I think it was Etch) with LXDE and it ran perfectly well. I've had a low opinion of the *Buntus ever since.

@ hazel:-

Admittedly, 'Trusty' was my first - and last! - 'buntu. I could see even then that Canonical were trying to beat MyCrudSoft at their own game; doing everything behind the scenes for the user, and not leaving them much in the way of personal choice.....except for basic things like appearance (whoopee..!)

I'd just had 13 years of that with XP, and frankly wanted something that would let me do exactly as I wanted; that would let me use the results of my own work, rather than have to select from the choices of others.

A few months later I found 'Puppy' - the first Linux distro that would run without issues on all my old boxes, in most cases due to the lack of available RAM (all 'maxed out' already), and elderly CPUs, yet which still functioned 100%. It did everything I wanted; I fell for it, there & then.

Puppies, in many cases, have 'binary compatibility' with either the 'buntus OR with Slackware, but they are in no way actually based on them, in the way that so many other Linux distros are. Puppies are totally unique, and go their own way; the Woof-CE team at Github set the overall 'feel' for how new Pups should be constructed, but much of the 'patches', upgrades, additional software, etc, are supplied by Forum members.....moi included. I've 're-mastered' a couple of Puppies myself ('Racy' Puppy, based on the last of the older 'T2' builds), usually upgrading kernels, core apps, glibc, etc, on these elderly, but 'favourite' Pups from the past, to make them more secure & compatible with modern software.

You need a certain mind-set to be a full-time 'Puppy' user, I won't deny that..!

I'm no 'green warrior', as I've stated before, but I'm always very loath to throw things away that still function fine. The world has enough 'landfill' and recycling issues without me unnecessarily adding to them.


Mike.

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I believe it was Red Hat 2.1. There didn't seem to be any device detection at all -- I even had to figure out what CD-ROM drive I had. I probably didn't do much with it, maybe took a break until 5.2 when I had a book with installation instructions.

IIRC it were slackware, 2004ish, couldn't get it to work.

The computer I first installed a GNU/Linux on died just this year (bad laptop screen + bad charging port + bad battery, all at the same time). I didn't use it very long, but when I first got it, it had Windows 7 Starter Edition. Let me tell you, that machine was NOT fast enough for Windows 7 (installing updates is especially painful), so I started looking for something else. Since I didn't have much on it, I figured I didn't have much to lose from toying with what I though of at the time as "one of those Linux things" (distros).

I ended up picking Ubuntu 12.10 (pretty much at random). I quickly found out that Ubuntu had enough software to do all things I needed, with only a tiny fraction of Windows 7's bloat. Unity wasn't in the best shape, but it was more-or-less usable. As I got more used to doing things from the command line, I eventually started experimenting with different desktop environments, and have since settled on Cinnamon for machines with plenty of RAM, and XFCE4 for the rest of my machines.

Man, I miss those older 3.5.0 kernels, IIRC which could be downloaded and updated in less than a minute, even on my not-so-great internet connection (about 100 kilobytes/second at the time). Newer kernels can be hundreds of megabytes in size, whereas older kernels were less than 20MB.

Then again, at least things work better now. I remember being constantly bombarded with apport error messages that JUST WOULDN'T STOP! It got really old, really fast.

My first distro was Kali Linux. I didn't know much about Linux until a friend showed me how he hacked into a local old website and stole credit cards using sql injection. I was totally fascinated by it and installed my first distro in a vbox and started learning more about hacking. After a few months, I decided to finally shift to Ubuntu because it was easy and besides Windows 7 was coming to an end. It was an easy install. Although I broke up the system initially, I went into safe mode and fixed it. Now I'm using Debian because Ubuntu was too easy and flashy for me. Thinking of moving to Slackware some day.