How Linux entered into your life!!!

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jahid

Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by jahid »

RacerBG wrote:
jahid wrote:
RacerBG wrote:Then on 3rd of March 2013 after little investigation and a lot headaches around the dying Windows 7 I tried Mint 14 Nadya and you know what happened next... ;)
You even remember the date... :D
The same day I registered here. ;) By the way 3rd of March is the date when the Bulgarian state was re-established as the Principality of Bulgaria in 1878 so I can easily remember this.
Hmm, You were much more of an expert when you first started, compared to me :( , I only knew, it was a linux desktop (which i heard about later), nothing more or less. I didn't know it has some forums... Compared to me, it seems you were no noob when you first started.
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BenTrabetere
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Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by BenTrabetere »

My first experience with Linux was like a dream vacation … and my luggage was lost.

My first attempt was in 1998 with Red Hat 5.0. I had been running OS/2 since v2.0 and I was slowly accepting the fact that OS/2 was going nowhere. I needed a replacement and Linux seemed to be just the thing.

It baffled me. Nothing clicked. The RH User Guide left me confused and frustrated, and the best online help at the time was Usenet. Linux made me feel like I was computer illiterate, and that hurt my feelings.

I struggled with it for a couple of weeks before I decided all Linux was good for was to break in a new keyboard and mouse. And for that I had WordPerfect for OS/2....

I tried different flavors of Linux several times over the next few years, and all were a repeat of my initial RH experience.

Fast forward to 2014 when my 9-yo computer suffered an near-fatal attack of Bad Caps. After I made the necessary repairs I knew I needed to reinstall XP. I dreaded putting that much the time and effort into an unsupported OS. It was enough incentive for me to try Linux Mint MATE.

No regrets.

I've been running LM for three weeks, and in that time I have booted to XP twice – once to make sure it didn't get hosed when I installed LM, and again to retrieve my address book and bookmarks. This time around I am simply using Linux … learning about the fiddly bits can wait.
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jahid

Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by jahid »

BenTrabetere wrote: Linux made me feel like I was computer illiterate, and that hurt my feelings.
That's when tenacity bursts out... :lol:
1.618

Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by 1.618 »

I started of with xp about 5years ago, had a commodore 16 as a kid but no major interest in computing really, about 2009 got a 2nd hand pc and put xp on it, but got infected pretty quick, LOL! being the naive newbie to computers and the internet that i was back then. Ubuntu got recommended so i had a look, it was ubuntu 10:10 ( maverick meerkat i believe ) burnt a disc and played with it, for a few minutes, then went back to windows and thought nothing more of it, so after getting sick of constant updates and viruses i decided to install ubuntu and see what i could do, i was only listening to music and surfing the net at this point in time, I tried ubuntu but couldn't find much help for a few issues that came up so left it and went back to windows, then i noticed the difference, my pc fan was constantly running at high speed, apps took hours to open , updates would interupt everything and last for 2 or 3 hours sometimes, finding the drivers was nightmare, surfing the net not knowing what i was actually doing like we all do at the start and just installing stuff and hoping it worked, the viruses came back..... ubuntu had been quick to open apps, installed everything for me with just a couple of clicks, all the software in one place, my pc ran silent cos it was using resources differently. The difference was really noticeable and after about 2 days of listening to my fan going 24/7 the second i started xp up i decided to give windows up properly and get used to ubuntu.....and boy am i glad i did!! tried ubuntu maverick/natty/ocelot but found the gnome desktop to be the one i felt most confortable with, didn't like unity at all.... so i tried a few others like ubuntu studio, learnt a bit of command line stuff, got a bit more confident at digging around in the system and reconfiguring things, inside windows it was like a huge no go zone, tinkering with config files was for the veteran tech guys who had been coding on screens since they were in daipers, but with linux i was suddenly in control of my box and even though i'm fairly new to computing overall, it was still a much better feeling thatn i was getting from windows.... tried backtrack and learnt to hack my own wifi :-) had a look at centos/red hat, then mint got linked to me because the guys were doing a fork of the gnome desktop so here i am, started off at mint 14 and will be here for a while yet i think! :-)
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Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by nathanjh13 »

1995 had a look at Linux at uni and it looked too primitive, call me shallow but eye candy meant something to me (still does) and this was using university computers running Windows 3.1.

I've no idea which Linux flavour it was but I remembered being pleased there was an alternative that might one day "get somewhere" even though I totally ignored it thereafter.

Ten years went by in a blink and I was sick and tired of MS crashing all the time, being infected, being clumsy etc and I was close to getting a mac even though I hated the mouse and different commands (I recommended other people get macs as I was so fed up with MS).

Then I remembered my Uni days and I came upon Linux Mint 8

Been with it ever since (Mate drenched in compiz, eye candy all over again, what can I say).

Mind you compiz has never worked as well as it did back then. Nowadays Mate-panel is often dormant and there's no animation-extras package for the burn effect either. Back then everything spun around, windows exploded the lot. Eye candy slave, I know I know. On the plus side my wifi card worked straight away under 17.
colyn

Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by colyn »

My introduction to Linux started before Linux existed. During the 70's while in the Navy we used Unix systems. In the early 90's Suse introduced their OS which I used for a few months (still have the 40 floppys needed to install) before switching to IBM's OS. I then switched to Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.22. A couple of years later I went back to Suse and by the mid 2000's went to Debian....

I recall doing many net installs of various Linux distros.. A lot of work I might add since a full install would take days since in those days we had slow modems... This was before DSL and Cable internet..

During those times I had to keep a Windows machine in order to do a lot of what could not be done at the time with Linux...
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Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by Jedinovice »

My first attempt was back in 2010. I had an old AMD athlon with 256 MB of RAM. For stupid reasons I tried Slackware 10! It was a nightmare. I really did not get what Linux was about back then and Slackware was a bad start.

On top of that I tried Open Office on Windows. Back in 2010 it was a disaster! It actively KILLED my Office docs mangling them so badly that there was no way to restore them to their original state. I installed open Office on a friend's PC... and it killed Windows. Others confirmed my experience; Open office, at least for Windows, was a bug ridden mess.

I went on a huge rant on how useless open source was. Also, there was no usable non-linear Linux video editing SW at the time and I had just bough Magix Movie Edit Pro. (Bugged to hell mind!) I was not impressed and the Linux geeks around me would only talk about their ruddy kernel. I wanted to DO things with my computer not just stare in awe at a 'wonderful kernel!'

But... I knew the days I could continue with Microsoft were numbered as the company moved more and more towards people renting their software and not owning it. I could not not face not having a DVD with my software on it. I hoped that one day Linux would get together and become usable - and that included having decent software.

Also, in 2011, I had to read .docx files just before I left for Indonesia and I only had Office 97! So I loaded up Libreoffice and hoped it would work better than Open office did. It did. I was really nice and no stupid ribbons! I was delighted to see my .docx files appear correctly formatted. This was my first positive experience of Open Source and did much to undo the damage of Open Office.

Scroll onto 2013. I buy a new laptop. I decide I can't face Windows 8, nor Microsoft's new activation (renting) policy and I figure the time has come to learn Linux. After research, I conclude KDE is the way to go for me and I buy a cheap Acer Aspire 1 Celeron netbook/laptop... Note: Surprisingly fast and quite a desktop replacement plus very portable but awful touchpad!

I try Kubuntu and... it is a nightmare. The touchpad is over sensitive anyway and I could not get control of the mouse pointer at all. I am also appalled by the minimalism of Kubuntu. I preferred apps installed as long as they were not adware or malware. I was also determined to store my S/W OFFLINE and, at the time, it did not look like Kubuntu would do that. So... I switched to Slackware 14!!! Actually, this was a good idea. I actually liked it! KDE 4 was the single best GUI I had (personally) ever used! It was the GUI I had been dreaming off. It took a while to get to grips with the text work that Slackware needs but I did get an idea how Slackware and, with it, Linux) worked under the hood. I quite enjoyed compiling code but it was slow and the sources took up serious disk space. Slackware 14 had taken steps to make their OS usable by the masses at last and now I could get a handle on it. Not having to manually mount my flash disk all the time helped.

Eventually though, I had to switch. After spending a week getting the dependencies to just get Abiword running and with my workload stacking up fast I decided to jump to Mint 14 KDE edition just to be able to install software in a reasonable fashion. I was happy to learn I could store the DEB files on my hard drive and install via Synaptic. Nice. I also downloaded Kdenlive and had the same fun I had with Magix... but without all the bugs.

Haven't really looked back. Mint KDE is fast, easy to use, has great software support and much cleaner than WIndows. My wife is a convert now and has taken my little atom netbook from me. She can't face Windows now.
Mint Linux 18.0 64 bit KDE edition.
Video editing (AMV's mainly) on a dual core n2840 atom!
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LOOK HERE FOR MY DEMO OF MINT LINUX KDE - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8hDYiGprWs
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Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by Night Wing »

What made me look into linux? It was all because of me using Windows 8 pre-release for three weeks during the summer of 2012. :shock: I grew to despise Windows 8. :x

Decided after three weeks to look at and try a few linux distros which began with Zorin, Solus and finally Mint. Found Mint in December of 2012 and have been using Mint since then on a daily basis alongside SolydX.
Linux Mint 21.3 (Virginia) Xfce
MX Linux 23.2 (Libretto) Xfce
Linux Debian 12.5 (Bookworm) Xfce
jahid

Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by jahid »

Night Wing wrote:What made me look into linux? It was all because of me using Windows 8 pre-release for three weeks during the summer of 2012. :shock: I grew to despise Windows 8. :x
I remember using windows 8 developer preview. I had no windows key then. It used to shut down every two hours. That makes the main reason (playing games) invalid, what i tried to use it for.

I tried to find cracks but unfortunately didn't find any... :wink:
hotpepperguy

Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by hotpepperguy »

I was introduced to Linux while I was troubleshooting a 128Gb USB flash drive that would not work on Windows Vista (back when Vista was newly released.) Some guy on a forum completely unrelated to Linux suggested to try using the flash drive while running PCLinuxOS live. Needless to say, it worked.

After that, I was bit. I ran PCLOS for quite some time, but I was a bit fed up by the bloatware, and general instability in some things. PCLOS got me hooked on KDE, so I then went from distro to distro, trying different implementations of KDE (and other DE's as well, to give them a fair shot.) I eventually landed here with mint, quite late, at the release of LM 13. I loved Debian before Mint, but was getting tired of the constant maintenance required. I loved the way that Mint felt, it was a blast of minty freshness :wink:
killer de bug

Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by killer de bug »

hotpepperguy wrote: that would not work on Windows Vista (back when Vista was newly released.)
I landed here also because of Vista. :)
I'm wondering if something was really working in Vista in fact :lol:
hotpepperguy

Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by hotpepperguy »

killer de bug wrote: I landed here also because of Vista. :)
I'm wondering if something was really working in Vista in fact :lol:
Too funny! That is probably the best viewpoint to take, in order to erase those endless hours of frustration from our minds. :lol:
JohnBobSmith

Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by JohnBobSmith »

Here we go...

So like, I'm only in high school (almost 16 years old now) but I have always been a computer nerd/geek. I heard and read about Linux online, because I didnt like that I couldn't change some strange setting in Windows (don't remember what that setting was). My first install of Linux was a dual boot with my Laptop and Windows 8.1. Man, the troubles Windows 8 causes with Linux... Lets just say, every other day I would be unable to boot because Windows 8 decided that it needed to wipe the bootloader after some Microsuck update. I also accidently deleted GRUB while trying to free up space on my hard drive, but thats a different story. My first experience with Linux was almost a year ago now. Let me tell you about that first experience...

My first ever Linux install was Ubunutu 12.04. Upon logging in, I literally screamed. It looked, behaved, and felt like a Mac PC. I thought to myself "WHAT IN THE WORLD HAVE I DONE!!" and I proceeded to wipe Ubuntu for good. I didnt want to give up on Linux, so I found Mint... and I fell in love with it. I tried cinnamon, and thought that it was fantastic.

Fast forward a few months, I proceeded to install Mint as the only OS my desktop. I tried cinnamon, but it lagged so horribly that I almost cried. So then I found XFCE... and fell in love again. XFCE is now the only mint distro I would ever run on my computers.

Fast forward to just about a week ago (or less), and I proceeded to wipe Windows 8 off my computer for good. I now enjoy freedom, customizing my entire OS. As an artist, I find that Linux lets me do my artwork MUCH faster and more productive than Windows ever was. I enjoy Blender, as its really fast too. I already used Gimp (as I associate Photoshop to Mac and Mac is the devil) so there were no hurdles there.

All in all, I simply love Linux. Ubuntu is too much like a Mac for me...But Linux Mint is my /home, and always will be. So there you go, thats my love story. I look forward to hearing more stories from you guys! :D
jahid

Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by jahid »

@JohnBobSmith
Love for freedom is universal and age restriction doesn't apply here.... :D
Coetzee

Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by Coetzee »

I was introduced to Linux by a IT developer who was in our lift club. He helped me to install Mandrake Linux which I used for a couple of years, upgrading regularly. In those days the distro came with all the add on software. The last Mandrake I used came with about 7 disks...lol. Mandrake was a very user friendly distro at that stage and the preferred Linux for newbies.

I am currently using several different distros, Mint 17, OpenMandriva 2014 LX and OpenSuse 13.1. I love them all and I hardly use Window$ anymore. I am trying to convert my wife and my son but it has been an uphill battle thus far :) .
gtsfer

Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by gtsfer »

Coetzee wrote:I am trying to convert my wife and my son but it has been an uphill battle thus far :) .
Make a list of how much a M$ system costs. M$ Windows, M$ Office, Norton (Symantec) Anti-Virus, etc. etc. Figure in the costs per year, plus the cost for a new OS every three or so. Not to mention "new hardware". If you can come up with a way to add in your time to install (that's one full day for a new Windows OS) and maintain the thing that's bonus points. Show the list to your wife. It's a dirty trick but it might help do the job.
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Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by austin.texas »

gtsfer wrote:Make a list of how much a M$ system costs. M$ Windows, M$ Office, Norton (Symantec) Anti-Virus, etc. etc. Figure in the costs per year, plus the cost for a new OS every three or so. Not to mention "new hardware".
How about the cost for multiple computers? I had four computers in my home, and at the end of life for Windows 95 I was faced with paying for four different licenses, plus the other software.
I started out checking out Red Hat, and later ordered a set of (expensive) floppy disks with Mandrake which came with a printed manual. (A big paperback book - people actually read books back in those days - you know - with a 56K modem I would pick up a newspaper to read while the web page I wanted was loading... :cry: )
I wiped out Windows on all computers, installed linux, and never have installed Windows since.
I worked my way through PCLinuxOS (still a great OS) and Ubuntu - and then discovered Mint Daryna, and have been with Mint since.
Mint 18.2 Cinnamon, Quad core AMD A8-3870 with Radeon HD Graphics 6550D, 8GB DDR3, Ralink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI
Linux Linx 2018
Shunjoss

Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by Shunjoss »

Few years ago my brother installed Linux on his pc, that was Ubuntu with unity. Maybe 2009-2010 I don't remember.
I find it interesting to have an up-to-date and better operating system in open-source, but I was not fan the UI.
Later I searched and find out Linux mint and bodhi, in the mean time windows 8 were done and I could have a free version because I'm at the university and I tested it.
But for unknown reason my pc freezes because he was out of ram (with 8Go it is plenty of ram), with the 25 Go of my SDD by w8 and the "proposal" to download and install w8.1 plus the random new release cycle of Microsoft windows (M$) was too much (i liked the metro/modern UI without startmenu).
So I installed Linux mint 17 cinnamon last week. Bye Bye windows for long ;)
Roger Moore

Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by Roger Moore »

I messed around with Linux Mandrake back in the day when I didn't have internet. I used to buy pc magazines for the software cd attached. I managed to explore the command Line and liked the look and feel of the desktop. It never crashed unlike my XP. It also used to be able to browse and copy stuff from my windows partition which was fantastic for data recovery after virus infection.

Fast forward a couple years, I've got a small server. Didn't want to pay for Windows 7 and I despise 8 and I also didn't like the Windows updates which quiet often left my hardware not working and my pc bloated. So I installed Ubuntu 14.04.

Thereafter I didn't like the Windows 8 look of Ubuntu so I chucked it and got Mint 17 LTS which I got Samba working flawlessly and it also talks to all my other devices incl Windows laptops and android phone effortlessly. I'm really happy with it :D ......Next mod is to get my virtual machines on it and install XBMC.
Habitual

Re: How Linux entered into your life!!!

Post by Habitual »

"Slackware is Sexy" was tattooed on this Stripper's thigh, so I went out and installed it.
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