Linux Origins

So Sup Forums, I was thinking about something today,

What got all of you into linux? and when was the first time you ever dabbled with it?

There was a point in time in my life where I had a very limited amount of computer hardware, this being around mid to late 2012 to early 2013. The main little laptop's charger I had crapped out, and I had no money to get a new one, so for a while all I had was this old Dell GX620 with 1GB ddr2 and a myriad of small capacity, not so great harddrives. I tried a windows 7 install, and did that for a while, but really became dissatisfy with the performance. So naturally I eventually found out about Ubuntu, which seemed to be much more popular and relevant then than it is now ( just a passing thought ), and found that the system requirements were pretty low. I gave it a go, and was pretty surprised by the performance increase, and really drawn in with the intricacies of a different operating environment than what I am normally use too. It was pretty much downhill from there.

But it occurred to me that that isn't most likely the case for everyone here, and I am curious to hear how it was that you "cut your teeth".

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)
youtube.com/watch?v=HEXWRTEbj1I
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

I've always liked the idea of Linux, however, I only recently started using it on my laptop due to me building my own desktop. It's comfy and it doesn't use much resources on my beat up laptop

I keep doing the same shit for higher performance costs. Downloading an entire repository of your preferred distro solves that.

I'm a natural born coder. I use Linux at a friend one when 18 and I was impressed by an OS which really obey to commands. Mac OS and Windows are OS for slaves, Linux is for masters.

My first pc came with suse in 2003. I didn't have internet and have no experince with pc aside gayming gta but still could fire up my printer with yast.

I hated how Microsoft was forcing me to buy a new windows that I really didn't need by making software that was intentionally incompatible with it for no reason at all.
I was using xp, replaced it with mint and never looked back.

>apt-get
>on gentoo

what stupid normie made this gif

>Use Windows for 17 years.
>One day two weeks ago forget my password.
>Go grab a live CD Ubuntu from a friend to download Windows back.
>It was so pleasant to use I decided to wipe the disk and install Ubuntu.

The level of choice and freedom I have
is absolutely-fucking-nuts. The way this is designed makes sense. It's logical. Everything that's X is in the place ment for X, unlike in Windows where it's spread around randomly. It's so pleasant not to go shady sites to download crap. It's so fucking amazing the level of freedom you have with regards to customizing and modifying your OS.

I fucking love it.

user, his hostname is gentoo. You're the norm ie

I just like penguins.
Fucking penguins.
That's why I'm on Linux.

There was a time in the late 90s when I read about some obscure "program" that could replace Windows 95 but you actually needed to be a hacker to install. It needed some magic called partitions on the hard drive , dual boot and typing gibberish into a terminal. But all the best nukez where developed for Linux.. So I had to do it. Cause I wanted to nuke some bitches on IRC and see the quit the channel.

>host name is gentoo
>so the distro is
"love" package exist on the top of that

Linux is a kernel
Mac is a computer
Windows is malware

Get the terminology right.

STFU

Pulling down the thirty or so floppy images and putting it on my system meant that I no longer had to either commute in to school or dial in at a blazing 4800 baud to use the CS Dept.'s lab machines for my assignments. Instead, I could have same tools and environment at home.

When I was 13 some stuff happened and the cops seized our computers, then I had to live without computers/Internet for a while because the parents were scared. Like 6 years later they got me a laptop for uni but no Internet, so I had to install CYGWIN to try to steal the neighbors wifi. It all went downhill from there...

Buy first computer. win98se@pentiumIII
Poke and peek at windows internals.
Fucked computer back in shop in a week.
Take computer home. Fucked again in a week.
Repeat 2 or three times.
Finally ask guys in shop how hard is it to reinstall windows by you're self?
They all look at each other during an awkward moment of silence.
Finally, Not hard, google it.
Cool. Head for door with computer.
Hey, Why don't you try linux?
What's linux?

>Hey, Why don't you try linux?
>What's linux?
you didn't even stand a chance

>When I was 13 some stuff happened and the cops seized our computers
you can't just say that and not give us a good story time

Sick of keeping my laptop up to date with crap software/badware with Windows, so I installed Ubuntu, srill running Windows on desktop met updates disabled (pre anniversary update)

A friend recommended Ubuntu.
I installed it. I liked it.
He then helped me to install Arch .
I then learned how to install it myself.
Now I have installed Gentoo.
:^)

I wanted to browse the Internet on these laptops we got for school without it blocking me

Eventually I got caught but they couldn't do shit to me because I reverted it back exactly how it was. They were going to ban me from laptops the following year I think, but they got a new guy.

Fun fact:apparently they didn't give a shit what happened to them because they bought chrome books, so when my friend graduated I asked if I could just have hers and I used it for a work machine for a few years. It was a Dell Latitude E series. Not a bad machine in all honesty. Since then I've replaced it with an X220T

i got bored one day about a year ago and put some ubuntu distros in a VM and tried them out, decided to go with xubuntu and i've stuck with it

some things are a bit annoying because i'm still learning but overall i like it and even put it on my dad's comp because i got sick of constantly fixing his windows, he hasn't had any problems.

>bought a pc magazine in 2004 or 2005
>it came with a SuSE CD

I watched someone do a fresh windows xp installation once and tried to mimic it, and was happy with the outcome. I oversaw them using ThePirateBay not long after (2006), and I started venturing into the OS catagory, and I discovered Gentoo and Solaris, and when their live boot worked flawlessly with my system, I was amazed, but I couldn't figure out how to actually install them, so I stuck with windows until I was brought to Sup Forums in 2008, and then I just shit posted in Sup Forums until I finally came to Sup Forums in 2010 and heard about stallman, so I started looking up videos on that dude and I liked what he had to say, so I looked more into it and discovered distrowatch, and fell back in love.

took "computer science 2" in university which was just an intro to programming and algorithms. Professor told everyone to use ubuntu and I was very skeptical of it at first. Wound up installing it on my laptop and realized it was infinitely better than Windows.

Consequently, I thought "huh I think they post pictures of their Linux desktops on Sup Forums. I'll go see if I can do that too." And here I am.

I bought a chromebook, realized I couldnt do shit with it and installed ubuntu. loved it, got new computer and dual booted at least 5 OS's on it. Now I just fuck around in Manjaro on my main machine and Xubuntu on my travel one.

>Be five years old
>Fucking hate windoees
>Yell at my mum for buying me an apple pc
>type fuck you on apple notepad
>go to gentoo website
>install it
>now I am happy
>yell at mom to get me cheetos and coke
That is pretty much how I got into linux. Nothing special.

Game server management on a Gahnoo plus Leenucks hardware box. Plus a bit of embedded use on a modified home router.

Decided to try out desktop distros after that. If it wasn't for the fact that my home desktop is cor gaymen and my work computer is for Windows domain management I'd run it everywhere.

>What got all of you into linux?
I wanted to use my free time to fine tune my Windows installation and the only options were shitty paid themes and sketchy programs that added a calculator I didn't need.

So in my search of the web I came across mention of GNU + Linux, and gave it a shot. 50 installs later I was able to have a stable system and then 20 more installs I was able to maintain that stability. Now I use Windows 7 with the classic theme and wait for the eastern sky to split.

hell i can't imagine trying to get around linux in the pentium 3 era

>What got all of you into linux?

XP was too old and 32bit so some programs i used such as Blender would crash when they took up more than 2GB of RAM. Updating to Win7 x64 was an option, but back then it seemed kinda bloated compared to XP. I figured that if i were going to be dealing with bullshit anyway, why not go with Linux Mint. It looked way more like Windows than Ubuntu (which i had tried a few years prior) and i wouldn't have to deal with shitty activation cracks.

Transition wasn't perfectly smooth, but the fact i was already used to FOSS cross-platform programs for most daily tasks helped a great deal.

Forgot to mention - having tried Ubuntu before, i really didn't like it. I think it was the Cinnamon DE with the good ol' start-button and taskbar look that got me to stick around.

what does love do?

At one point I decided that I absolutely hated Windows. Wikipedia told me that Linux was a thing, and after figuring out that there was no complete Linux desktop operating system, I learned what a distro was and eventually went on my merry way.

>never give a shit
>hear it's good
>try distros
>they bore me
>only programming on it
>nothing else
>switch back to windows only where I can do the same and everything else too

Forces you to go away from your computer so you can spend money on another human then coppulate

I meant the package not prostitution

first heard about it from some fag on youtube
then my brother got a cheapo laptop with ubuntu pre-installed so that was my first experience

Clover defaulted to Sup Forums so I looked sometimes and found that this board was a Linux circle jerk so I decided to try it

I have found love in my repository...
I'm affraid to install it.

>turn 13
>month later (X-mas season) the part of my family that lives in different countries comes to visit
>buy me my first computer so I can "learn to program" and shit
>uncle installs Slackware 8.0 as a dualboot with XP
>end up only using XP for windows games, linux for everything else because it looks cool and makes me feel smart and different
>whenever had a problem would bug my uncle on ICQ or talk ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software) ) until he helped me solve driver or library issues
15.1 years later
>Slackware 14.2 (updating from -current)
>haven't used Windows on any of my computers in almost 7 years
>last time I used Windows was for about a year and a half to catch up on AAA games on a new fairly powerful laptop
>eventually got frustrated by how inconvenient UI was and not having basic shit like standard unix command-line tools
>before that used Linux exclusively for 2 years

all ideological and muh privacy issues aside, after spending so much time in the comfyness of consoles, fluxbox, dwm, simple access to basic system information and configuration, not having to use NTFS...
I can go on forever but the point is at this point Linux is just so much more convenient, simple, and powerful than the two major commercial OSes. Also, considering Windows went through 2 major releases since the last time I used it, and I never really learned how to "hack" Windows under the hood with registry bullshit and whatever, and considering it's not even designed for you to be able to do that easily, and considering I've never used FagOS in my life, I literally would have no idea at all how to do basic system maintenance and configuration on a new computer. Whenever relatives or co-workers forced me to help them, I'd sit and poke at various menus for 10 minutes, then give up.

Got interested in hacking (exploiting buffer overflows at that time).

Heard about it from a friend in 2006.
Tried out knoppix, much easier to install than xp plus it came with most of what I needed.
Back then I thought everything was installed by downloading the code and compile it on my own system.
Still had some games on my windows partition, LAN games was very popular.
Switched to full time Linux user in 07.
Switched my parents to Linux in 08.
They made me give them windows again 8 months later.
2008-12 dualbooted, windows for school, Linux for games.
2012- full time Linux user, all classmates use Linux too.

Description: 2D game development framework based on Lua and OpenGL
LÖVE was created to be a user-friendly engine in which simple (or
complicated) games could be made without having extensive knowledge
of system or graphics functions and without having to dedicate time
towards developing the same engine features time and time again.
.
Developed with cross-platform implementation in mind, it utilizes the
latest open source libraries to deliver a similar game experience,
independent of operating system. By relying on the Lua scripting language
for game-specific programming, it allows even the novice game creator to
quickly and efficiently develop an idea into a fully working game.

>be me
>1998
>want to make vidya in current year. Used to make vidya in 80's on 8 bit Atari computer.
>also on c64
>looking around at CompUSA for C compiler for Win95.
>friend happens by
>Hey user, what'cha lookin for?
>tell him of my search, he picks up box that says "Red Hat Linux 5.2"
>"Dude, it's got a C compiler and everything, you can compile stuff for DOS and Win95 too!"
>look at it, seems interesting but I pass for the time being. Later discover djgpp and try using it.
>two years later, at CompUSA again. Find entire section full of boxed Linux distros as well as FreeBSD.
>Pick Mandrake 6.1 box and take it home, setup dual boot on spare 6GB Maxtor Bigfoot drive I have in machine.
>Check out everything, now wish I had picked it up when friend-dude suggested it.

two years wasted without Linux in my life... And I never did make vidya 'cause there was just so much more to do.

I've run it on a 486 (actually, AMD 5x86 133MHz w/64MB RAM), Pentium Pro 200, and K6-2 300, 333, and 450. Wasn't bad at all.

greentext pls

>there was time when "having a C compiler" was a selling point of an operating system
Damn I wish I had a computer back then

That's not what i expected when finding love, so i won't install love, and i ...

i wanted to be the next kevin poulsen in the late 90's XD

ahhh, those days when a 6GB drive was "high capacity"...

Around 2003, I was really unsatisfied with the sluggishness of XP on my 2001 Vaio laptop. At the time, XP was a really buggy piece of shit that had the bad habit of getting slower and slower to boot as you installed more and more crap.
I tried MS-DOS, FreeDOS, Windows 98 on it, to no avail, both hardware support and reliability were crap.

Then, I heard about Mandriva Linux, watched the installation process on manual and was visually impressed by the default DE on it (KDE 3 at the time). Thankfully, despite being sometimes buggy, the configuration interface on Mandriva helped me make the transition quite smoothly. Then, I tried multiple Live CDs, including some Slackware derivative and Damn Small Linux, that could be loaded on RAM and were blazing fast. Tinkered hours and hours on them... Live CDs were like magic to me. Until then, I didn't imagine that you could get a whole system up without losing hours and hours on installation and configuration.

youtube.com/watch?v=HEXWRTEbj1I

An OS isn't supposed to entertain you.

Yeah, back then it was a big deal to get not only the compiler, but an IDE as well (in the form of KDevelop) and to get it for so cheap was amazing (I can't think of a single distro that was sold for more than $29USD). Granted, a lot of people got their first exposure to Linux from stores like CompUSA, Babbages, Borders, etc so many of us didn't know you could simply download if for free until after you bought it and installed it, so to have an OS with so many development tools, desktop choices, media players, etc at your disposal out of the box for so cheap was simply amazing.

...

I bought a book about Linux some time in the late 90s, it came with a Red Hat CD but I never got it to work properly on my computer so i reinstalled Windows.
Then a few years later I installed Debian and used it for a while until I reinstalled Windows.

Attended an after school club druing sixth form where one of the IT technicians had burnt copies of Knoppix 3.8.1. He let us live boot on school computers. Circa 2005/6.

Best KDE.

I wanted to stop playing games. It worked.

I got into linux when I noticed Minecraft Windows edition downloading and installing itself without my consent on my Windows 10 machine.

Shorted main PC. HDD was among casualties.
Needed to do some office work. Luck had it that I owned another HDD-less PC at that time.
Got a copy of xubuntu (or maybe ubuntu) and ran it live-cd on the HDD-less PC.

Worked like a charm.

Kek

We had it on the computers at Uni, and despite Linux being generally awkward and different, even at the time it was obvious that I needed to dual boot if I wanted to get actual work done. Sometime in 2002 I began installing Linux distros on my PC.

Around 2007, I borked my Windows installation while resizing partititon and just said fuck it. Been running Linux only ever since.

Thinking about going PC master race now, and facing into a $150 Windows tax. This is such bullshit.

Anyway, what graphics card do I get?

>Gentoo
>sudo
>apt-get
That's not how it works nigger

>be me
>mid 2000's
>get summer job writing java with civil service
>well user, we need to requisition a computer
>weeks pass, sit in office reading reference manuals all day
>oh hi user, still waiting on computer?
>this will get you started for now
>dual p1 machine
>debian woody
>have fun user!
>no net access
>this is kinda like a text adventure, right?
>start trying words
>find info command
>ruined for life

What kind of shitty distro doesn't have a love package?

I was getting tired of Microsoft's fuckery with Windows 7. (shady updates and such) I knew Linux wasn't as daunting an OS as some people claim but I had an extremely limited understanding of it. So I dicked around with Ubuntu and Mint in virtual machines for a bit, didn't like it, stopped for a couple years.

Then my curiosity increased slowly, pushed by Microsoft being even more aggressive with fucking up W7. I got familiar enough with Mint that I finally took the plunge and switched over. I moved on pretty quickly to just Ubuntu, and recently move upward to openSUSE Tumbleweed. I get the feeling I won't be switching for a long, long time.

(I still have W7 on my laptop, dual-boot config. I made a backup of W7 right before they started bundling all the updates to basically force the telemetry onto your machine - got all the good updates, installed basic software and drivers, updates disabled completely.)

it's a 2d game development library

why would you make your hostname "gentoo" if you're not running gentoo
it's safe to assume that it was a gentoo machine

When I upgraded my pentium machine, I ended up with a VIA chipset on windows 98SE. It did not take long for the constant crashing to piss me off to the point of grabbing Slackware and installing it.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

Well, you surely don't get the word "entertainment".
If you're not having fun visualizing your environment, enjoying the tools you have.

You're getting bored. That guy prefers TardOs, he has fun going around in there, fine by me.

I feel entertain on my Linux system, I find it pretty and comfy and does what I need to do.

I get bored on TardOs because there's so much limitation. (AKA one of the few, NTFS, right there I have no uses)

Microsoft literally pushed me to it, I was a nice user of Windows + Ubuntu, then they fucked up with 10 and I've been using Debian since it came out.

I think his point is that if you need entertainment, it should come from the software. It's a valid point. A good OS should be transparent and minimal. But at the same time, Linux has better selection (and a higher variety) of available window managers, file managers, media players, image viewers, and little entertaining things (like fortune, the bsd games suite, AMOR, etc.), and even some high-quality games, than Windows. And most are free as in speech and/or as in beer.

I'm rarely entertained by the kernel itself.

>Windows is malware
Half malware half operating system actually.

XP machine was having HDD issues. Booted up puppy then got Xubuntu. Ran that til I made built my computer in 2014.

Now I purchased a ThinkPad and put Xubuntu on it and trying to relearn.

Buying a new computer without enough money to buy Windows. Came for the free as in free beer, stayed for the free as in free speech.

>be me, 8-year-old kid
>dad brings home piece of shit thinkpad from his job and gives it to me
>has win98 on it, barely fucking works
>crashes one day
>I somehow learn about linux and get my dad to help me burn a live cd of puppy linux
>spend hours trying to get GRUB to work
>eventually it does
>mfw messing around with computers as a kid so I could play shitty flash games has led to a lifelong interest that will net me ~100k/year when I finally get my ass a degree
>assuming pajeets don't steal it

I was quite the skiddie as a 12 year old, even placed an XSS on hackforums leading to getting some users and password and one saying user: whoareyou password: fuckingfaggot, while lurking in such hacker skiddie forums someone mentioned redhat and gave screenshots, I got curious and attempted to install debian by the goodbye microsoft website, failed obv and discovered ubuntu around the start of 2008, since then it was an obsession of computers and internet

You're right in some way, the kernel isn't really entertain-able desu.

>be me install Ubuntu 16 on desktop
>Can't configure it to run steam correctly
>But somehow now when I open my file explorer it also boots clementine and blares Death Grips
>feels_noided.jpeg

I was a poorfag and bought a T60 used when I was 14, installed Arch out of sheer stubbornness despite knowing next to nothing about computers. So a combination of desperation and bullheadedness, I suppose.

Started in 09 with slackware. I use Windows full time now cause of school and programs. I don't even play games that much, I just need native support for my programs to get maximum performance. I love *nix but I just can't switch to it full time and especially not after school is over with and I got a job in the field.

Some kid at a gituar store was a bit of a computer nerd and gave me ubuntu on a CD. I think it was ubuntu. Wobbly windows were pretty wicked.