How did you discover Linux?

[Beany]

I had a scoot around and couldn't find a subject of this ilk, but I'm currently catching up with the LO archives [in my hunt to find *that* tune that I was talking about in IRC after the live show] and in the first one, Dan and Fab are talking about how they found God. Er, Linux.

Not just linux though - FLOSS, open source, whatever.

For me, it started with a chap on another forum of deviants I frequent, who was constantly banging on about "Umbongo" - this was back in the day, probably 2003 or something, and as he was pretty evangelic about it, I thought "screw it, I've got DSL, a CDRW drive, a bottle of cola and no girlfriend, what else am I going to do tonight? Worst case scenario I can tell him he's a cock and it's crap". By this point my computing experience was relatively broad - I had been educated [and got my standard grades/highers - that GCSEs and A-levels for those who aren't up on scottish qualifications] on Macs, and my first computer at the tender age of eleven had been a mighty 486 SX25 with 4mb of RAM and a Tseng Labs ET600 GPU that ran Dos 6.22, and in the times between owning computers I was working as tech support for an ISP on dial up support, adn moved up to DSL modem hardware support, so I was fairly au fair with Windows. I had just built a powerhouse of a PC at the time, an Athlon XP 2400 clocked up to Barton specs [but without the cache, dammit] a gig and a half of RAM, and a Geforce 5700, at the time a rocketsled of a machine.

My god, it sucked. It didn't like my GPU, it crapped out on the installer, and in the end I threw my Win2000 HDD back in and carried on. I called my mate a cock, but admitted that I probably just wasn't ninja enough to handle the mighty Umbongo.

Fast forward three years, contracting at the council and a laptop fell into my hands. It had no Xp license on it and that night I was too lazy to consider, er, aquiring one, hunting down the drivers, etc. So I remembered about Ubuntu, at this stage I think it was edgy, and threw it on. It went through the Live CD, everything worked, so I installed it.

Everything worked. I played with it, worked out what I could do on it [internet, email etc] and what I couldn't [sync my phone, get my webcam working] and decided that it was good enough as a daily dirtbox. I used my main XP2500 machine less and less, and the laptop more and more.

I then moved house, and as I was too lazy to unbox and set up the big computer, I started using the laptop for just about everything.

Never really looked back - since then, I've been using FLOSS/open software at every opportunity, because I know it can do the job, it can be good, and it needn't cost you thousands in licensing. Alas, not everyone agrees, as I discovered to my cost when I had a standing argument about the expansion of a CCTV system in a school I worked in.

I had built a IPCCTV setup using Zoneminder as a proof of concept to moniter a new PC suite I had built. It was operational, using motion capture and all that shizzle. This was fine. I then came in one morning to find it wasn't working - the people upstairs had spent £8000 installing 8 cameras and adding them to our existing [and immensely unstable] system that already existed. After I had shown them the system, and the fact that it actually had better quality video, and more stability than the existing system.

Suffice to say I didn't stay there long.

I've had more luck since then though - the government office I moved to after that was more progressive in it's attitude towards FLOSS/Linux and were only to happy to let me implement Linux file servers, FLOSS network monitoring software, and to encourage the use of Ubuntu as a development platform for HTML coding with RDP'd VMs for IE testing. VMs running in Virtualbox on a headless Ubuntu server...

At the moment, I'm probably not going to find a FLOSS friendly job [and my *nix skillz aren't mad enough for me to justify looking at *nix admin jobs - I'm mostly a power user, not a *nix sysadmin], in fact I'll be happy with any job, but I've recently started contributing to an open source project and I'm hooked. I just hope I don't turn into a borderline manic evangalist like my mate - that never wins anyone over unfortunately.

I still work with Windows [I'm a sysadmin by trade, on Win32 platforms, can't be helped] and I've always remained fairly 'agnostic' on operating systems, but I'm a huge fan of the ethos and ecosystem of FLOSS stuff, and while the Year Of The Linxu Desktop, much like nuclear fusion, is always next year, it's good enough for me.

Anyway, that is all, I just wanted to get that out there and see if anyone else wanted to share

[LazyBrian]

I started to play with Linux at home when I found I would probably be responsible for Linux server management in my next job assignment. I started playing with a Fedora Core 6 (or was it 5?) VM and after a couple of weeks, discovered that I liked Linux better than Windows.

After running some Linux servers for a couple of years, I will quit if they try to make me maintain Windows servers again. Fortunately, my company is also seeing the light and is replacing their Windows servers with Linux servers at a rapid rate. Now if I can only get them to replace more desktop machines . . . . .

[windigo]

In high school, I had a friend who ran a web server off of his home broadband connection. Redhead, hardhat, something like that. It sounded pretty cool, so I tried installing Gentoo - no go. Got Debian up and running, but couldn't actually do anything with it... and now I live on the stuff.

[sotolf]

I was always fiddeling around with computers, and found out about podcasts by starting to listening to chess griffins podcasts, he had made around 10 of them, and I burned through them, got filled with the spirit, and downloaded it and tried it, and it worked, it worked so well, so much better than mandrake, which is the last linux that I tried, but being 12-13 years old at that time, not having internet it didn't work out as well that time. well now I am loving my system, loving my tiling windowmanager, and all the programs that I learn about, my latest flames, vim and emacs, are playing around in my head now, and I am having so much fun with them, learning new things, finding out that I don't need big bloated programs to do things that I can do just in a text editor, and well, that is it I am going back to more simple and text based programs, since they do what they are supposed to, and do it fast, then lets me concentrate on the things that I want to do when I want to do them

[hughbert]

I started using Linux about two years ago when I got my eee 900 - I'd wanted to try it for a while, and I'd been using open source graphical programs like blender and inkscape for about two years before that.

Anyway windows broke on my old craptop and I bought a Linux eee to replace it. Xandros Easy Mode was pretty shoddy but I hacked it to pieces, and eventualy replaced it with Ubuntu (which is still on it, although may be replaced with #! before long).

I'm definitely not an admin, or anywhere near a pro, but I'm learning all the time

I don't see much chance of using Linux in a job, I'm a soon-to-be-graduated engineering student and computing in engineering is mostly based on big proprietary CAD and calculation software. However I have managed to get a final uni project based in Linux on open source software, which I'm thrilled about and will probably start a thread about when my current exams are over.

[nailuj]

I discovered Kubuntu in a PC magazine on a holiday trip and checked it out at home. I switched to Debian soon, and when I bought a new PC I switched to Fedora because hardware support was better. Now I'm here on this strange forum

[kabniel]

Linux appeared on my radar because of LiteStep which was the first thing i installed on everything from Win98 to WinXP.
Having read that it was inspired by some Linux window manager, i decided to try out Red Hat in '99 and wrecked a few partitions and lost some hair over my winmodem and went back to Windows again after a few weeks or so.

Even though i didnt know it at the time (everything was just freeware/shareware/warez for me around 2000), it looks like i have mostly been running an open source window manager for over 10 years.

I've also used Firefox as my main browser ever since the first version of Phoenix was released (2001?).

Decided to move to Linux and FLOSS 100% in 2006 (thanks Vista!)

[kristizz]

I was running win 98 at the time and thinking it was a bit poo-so I considered xp, but with a p2 and 128 mb of ram I didn't fancy my chances-some geek told me suse 9.0 was cool, I installed it, it was

[d-r]

Around 10 or 11 years ago, back during high school, I tried Mandrake on an ancient 486. I thought it looked cool, but it was too slow to be useful, and I didn't have an Internet connection. When Knoppix came out, I tried that in live mode on a few computers, and played around with bash a little.

During college, I ran DeMuDi on an oldish Dell laptop that I got in exchange for a 40 and some six packs. I never used the music software much, but it was my only laptop, so I used it quite a bit - Fluxbox ran quite nicely on it. I ended up selling it help buy an iBook - some music software the school used was Mac only, I got sick of trekking across campus to the music computer lab.

Then I started dual booting Ubuntu on my desktop . . . about 3 years ago, I switched to only running Ubuntu on the desktop, and then converted the iBook to Yellow Dog . . . and I haven't run anything other than Linux and BSD since.

[nighthawk]

About 5 years ago I was getting sick of Windows but didn't realise there was anything else till I saw linux mentioned on a computer mag.
When I got this PC built it had XP put on (should have told the shop no O/S). Anyway. I played with live discs for a while then 10 months dual booting mostly into ubuntu. 4 years ago I came in drunk from the pub and for some reason the next morning XP had disappeared from the computer.