My first OS was Windows 98, then came XP, but I switched to linux when I discovered back in my MIRC days that experienced IRC channel ops regarded eggdrop bots as the most advanced. Well, when I went to search the net for this eggdrop bot that I wanted to use for myself, I discovered that they were only available in tar.gz format which I didn't even know at the time what that meant, so to make a long story short, the fact the best regarded IRC bots weren't even available Windows XP piqued my interest sufficiently to get the unix/linux ball rolling for me :) Of course, unix was out of the question since it's proprietary. My first distribution was redhat, then I moved on to slackware, but ultimately settled on Fedora as my consistent distribution of choice for desktop use and much more. I introduced my girlfriend and her son to ubuntu (which they love), and my old computers (500MHz or less speed) that are still lying around have been upgraded with puppy linux and damn small linux; even my most recent purchase, an acer aspire one notebook, runs a linux distribution. I'm a linux user for life :)

I'd wandered into server-side programming after library school in the late 90s and vaguely knew about Linux - it was something the sysadmins were using and those Slashdot people were talking about it too.
Chat - Sohbet -

Jan 07 I installed Windows Vista Ultimate so I could get the full experience of M$ new operating system. I ran it for two week in pain the whole time. I was upset that the GUI for Windows was just a copy of OS X Leopard. Then there was the price when release the Ultimate edition was about $499-crazy. That have the cost of a server. I could go on and on about the problems and pain but I won't today. My solution came out of anger at M$, I search the web for about 5min and found out about Linux and it's greatness. Next thing you know I had downloaded a Live CD iso of Fedora 7.
After a few months of using Fedora and Ubuntu I decided to work on earning the Linux+ Certification. After studying and hands on then two testing attempts I earned it. Windows is something to run and VM period.
Distro's I like are Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE. There is also Unix-Solaris or OpenSolaris.
OpenOffice is the way to go for documents M$ is over rated and overpriced. OpenGL destroys directx.
Been using Linux for over a year now and it's outstanding.

I had started using computers with my father's CP/M AT&T system in the 80's, by the time I had my first computer to call my own I was in high school and had a rather unreliable HP Pavilion desktop with what I believe may have been the most unstable version of Windows (98/2000 was the version it displayed at boot) I have ever personally used. Every 3-6 months I would have to perform a system recovery because Windows had become corrupted. I began looking at alternatives, Linux came to my attention (I can't recall exactly how) as a more stable and reliable alternative. This happened around the time that the term Open Source began appearing in a lot of news papers. After a lot of research about what was the best distro for beginners I laid out the money for a copy of SuSE 8.1. I've stuck with it and haven't regretted it.

Well, I've been fascinated by computers for a long time. I was a physics major in college and our department had a very underutilized IBM 1130, so I taught myself Fortran, which I continued to use through grad school. When PCs came along I took a while to get involved, but once I did I tried to learn all the ins and outs of DOS and started programming with Quickbasic. When Windows came along it seemed that PCs were becoming much more an appliance and much less a hobby device. I tried to study C and Visual Basic, but just couldn't get interested.

I retired recently and have lots of high-tech hobbies as well as house and farm projects to keep me busy, but still love computers and wanted something else to do that would keep me interested, challenged, and mentally active. I started hearing about Linux and did a bit of reading on the subject, and it looked to me to be just the thing I was looking for -- something to experiment with and learn about that would also have day-to-day utility. Besides, I've always enjoyed playing the role of the ubergeek, and since I hang around with a lot of other folks who are also very much into technology, being able to "one-up" them by talking about my Linux experience was just an added bonus!

I started with Breeze Badger booting from an external USB drive and now have Gutsy Gibbon on one laptop and Hardy Heron on another, plus an N800 and an Aspire One. I'm afraid that Linux might be taking over my life!!! ;-)

I started to try out linux back in my high school years. The first one I think was OpenSuSE 10

Back then linux was still not as user friendly (or maybe I was still a newb), hardwares were breaking every where..

I had a chance to go on an exchange to UC Davis (I'm from New Zealand) for 6 months, and it was surprising to see that all the engineering labs were running red hat, with the exception of LabView computers. That basically tempted me into using Linux again, ssh-ing into the lab computer #24 into the basement of Kemper hall was such as a tempting thing to do xD.

Once I installed my OpenSuSE 10.3 though, I basically decided it was the OS I would use.. This is when I truely saw the power of linux and open source, there are many many things you can do with the shell thats just unthinkable in Windows, and most of the programs on Linux are much more intuitive.

After being an IT professional for several years(starting on Windows), I've seen first hand how painful it is to live under the restrictions of the closed source Operating System.

I've seen how the closed source OS attempts to be the "one and only" software solution for the entire corporate IS infrastructure, and I don't like it one bit. The cost of vendor lock-in that is experienced by using a closed source OS is utterly terrible because it limits us all as users.

That's when I realized the GNU/Linux operating system.

GNU/Linux represents everything that is exciting in our computerized world. Instead of restricting it's users, GNU/Linux bestows ultimate power upon the user. This power can then be harnessed towards making our world a better place.

Also, using GNU/Linux is liberating. The feeling of explaining to my children and to people I meet that they can freely redistribute GNU/Linux and the software it provides, and build upon it to make it even better, is a great freedom indeed. It's very exciting to be a GNU/Linux user!

When you switch to GNU/Linux, you've opened your mind to a world that is enabled by computerized technology, only then are you are free to make the world a better place using computers.

Shannon VanWagner
http://healthysystem.blogspot.com
http://digg.com/users/bicep
http://shannonvanwagner.com

I would have to say I saw a Ubuntu vid on youtube and was hooked. I dualbooted ubuntu with windows and after a week trashed the windows all together and have not looked back and never will !!!! LINUX RULEZ

The documentation is free, the source code is free, know-how to write code for Linux is easily acquired and most questions -- an overwhelming majority -- are freely answered one way or another.

If I were to make the jump to Linux (after supporting MS products fpr 20 years) I knew there was no better place than Fort Collins because of the many -ix programmers in the area. Since I'd never lost the foothold I found in VMS and Unix, as an undergrad, I switched but had help doing so. Since 2002 or so, I've built, repaired, and managing Linux networks, mixed networks and I've provided email support since 2004. (FWIW, my business savvy seems to be less than what Shawn admits to!)

I wouldn't feel good about writing this without thanking the Big Three (my mentors) to whom I owe much. They are John B., Hugh M., and Brian G.).

Today, we also have mature publications like Linux Journal and publishers like O'Reilly, and even more programmers. If you want to learn Linux doing so is even easier, today.

(My homepage isn't built yet, but the address provided is where I hope it will stay, once built.)

It was back in 1998 and I had a fairly new Compaq Presario 7170 (I still have it)Pentium 90Mhz CPU with 16MB RAM. THe machine had come with Windows 95 preloaded and a Windows 98 upgrade disk in the box. I promptly upgraded the computer to Win98. But almost immediately I begun experiencing random shutdowns and multiple boot failures. THe computer would often suddenly shutdown and then take upwards of half an hour and multiple attempts before it would boot up again. I was a graduate student at the time and teaching part time at a local college. Needless to say it was a huge aggravation to have a computer that basically worked when it felt like it!

I managed to beg and borrow another computer, some old no name 486sx 33mhz with 4mb RAM. This machine worked ok with win98 and after a couple of months I decided to network the headstrong Presario with the meek and humble 486. This proved to be a bad idea! It turned out to be impossible to network the two computers despite having an MCSE friend of mine do the actual work. Various tweaks and fiddles in the bowels of both computers left them both essentially non functional. I now had two computers that were completely unreliable. I was told that the solution was to reinstall Windows on both computers.

At this point I found myself on the horns of the classic Microsoft Monopoly Power Dilemma:
1. I had a Win98 upgrade disk from the Presario, but it was not possible to reinstall Win98 from an upgrade disk on either of my computers.
2. I had the Win95 install disks from the Presario, but it was not possible to reinstall Win95 on either computer as they both already had Win98. Microsoft did not allow reversions from Win98 to Win95.

So my only option was to either buy the full Win98 install for each computer or to pirate the software from somewhere. Neither choice seemed very appealing to me.
However, I was aware from some internet work that I had been doing on a Unix server that there existed free web browsers, text editors and other such software. I reasoned that if there were free applications there must be free operating systems as well and I was now desperate enough to try anything.

So one day when the Presario was in a good mood and booted up, I got on the internet and typed the words "free operating system" into I believe the Lycos search engine. In those days Linux did not really figure much in the OS universe and so the first page of links that came up was all FreeBSD. So I read up a bit on FreeBSD and then decided to install it. I downloaded about 9 floppies of FreeBSD (I think I may still have them somewhere in box) and tried to install it. It proved to be a bear! No matter what I tried how much I read etc I could not get FreeBSD to install on any of my computers. Finally after a couple of weeks of trying I gave up and sought help. At that time a good friend of mine was head of IT at the college where I taught and while in his office one day I got to talking about my problems with FreeBSD with one of the techies on staff there. This guy, Bill as I recall, not only offered to help me with my computer troubles but went ahead and burnt a CD of something called Redhat 5.0 for me and gave me a printed manual to help with the install.

Bill told me try get Redhat Linux installed and that if it did not work he or a friend of his would come out to my house to help me out. So I went home that day and popped in my Redhat CD into the computer, rebooted and commenced the install. To my astonishement the install went flawlessly. In a couple of hours I had a functioning Redhat Linux desktop, with I believe Enlightenment as the window manager. I even had sound and the modem working and I was surfing the Redhat website before I went to bed that night.

Needless to say I was hooked on Linux from then on. I now had a computer I could actually use and use reliably. Gone were the random shutdowns the interminable boot attempts and the frustration from not knowing if the computer would cooperate when I had an important paper due the next day.

I used Redhat through version 9 in 2002 and then switched to Debian and used that untill about 2006 when I switched to Ubuntu and I'm now writing this on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. I kept my old Presario as a file server running Debian until late 2007 when I finally retired it. It still works great, but I needed a computer that could take 500GB SATA drives (Kudos to Compaq of yester year, the monitor that came with the Presario is still in my service. I have gone through a couple of brand new monitors from other manufacturers in more recent years).

In many ways I'm thankful that FreeBSD was such a darned hard install back in 1998, otherwise I would probably have become a FreeBSD user. Not that that would be a bad thing, but I can't imagine that I would have had as much fun with FreeBSD as I have had with Linux over the years. Many thanks also go to Bill who introduced me to Linux in a very calm, helpful and low pressure way. I still remember my own astonishment, when I attempted to return the Redhat CDs and book that Bill had given me and he refused to take them, telling me that they were mine now and I should pass them on to somebody who needed them. Thats the way things were done in the Linux community.

emk

I started using Caldera back in 1999, and for the next 8 years I just used GNU/Linux mostly as a toy rather than a true OS. I then decided to be a beta tester for Windows Vista 64 bit with a 64 bit machine. After seeing 'Windows ME Version 2.0', I quickly changed to Ubuntu and that is what I'm using now (8.04). It was a learning curve to use GNU/Linux everyday; but after getting some advise from 'the very polite community of Ubuntu', I have stayed Microsoft free for the last two years. Almost sounds like a recovery program doesn't it? ;-)

It still feels odd not purchasing software when entering Future Shop or any other dept store; but then again the freedom is truly wonderful! (and it helps the pocket book as well).

I came to Linux through the Mac/Unix world.

Stanford 1986: I was going to buy my first personal computer. I could have a IBM running DOS or a Mac. I bought a Fat Mac (512K memory, built in floppy) with an external floppy drive. I could run the OS and MacWrite on one floppy disk and save the results to the other, bliss!

As time went on, I used more powerful Macs and developed a hatred of Big Blue and all things Microsoft. After a string of Macs, I wound up with a Titanium laptop (the wimpy one) but I had to use Sun workstations at work for some scientific programs. When I left that job I needed to have my data and some operational scientific software so I bought a Toshiba Satellite laptop and had it dual booted with Windows XP and Red Hat. I never used the Windows. The Red Hat was later replaced with Fedora and the Windows was wiped out at that point. Soon, I was doing all my work on the Satellite using OpenOffice, Latex and Emacs.

Later, the Titanium needed replacing and I looked into Mac laptops. Couple of thousand for the laptop and a couple of more to upgrade all my software. I bought a IBM (lenovo) T60 with Ubuntu Feisty Fox (now Hardy Heron), no dual boot and have not looked back. My computer at work is a Mac Power PC running OS 10.4 but I run Fink and so have access to open source software. I came for the free beer but I stay for the freedom.

I will admit the the #1 reason I switched to Linux back in 2001 was control over my computer security. It was the dawn of hacking as it were, and I was MORE than aware of my system's (and consequently my) vulnerability. No more stealing my life thank you!

Oddly, at about the same time, I was doing SO much work on Unix systems, that I figured--heck! I'll just run my own *nix system! :)

I think I may have first heard about Linux from some students who were messing with it in about 1998, but, I was, well skeptical to say the least. Then, I found out that in 2000, a co-worker was using it on one of our "real live" servers, so I picked his brain a bit about the whole experience before diving right in.

I'm an old command line hacker, didn't grow up on "icons", so the change was minimal and exciting! WOW! I am now the mistress of my own universe!

It has been a wonderfully exciting experience for me. Loaded it up on everything I use and never looked back! ;}

Having used Microsoft software for almost two decades, I awoke one day in 2006 and realized that I could no longer afford to continue using it. Add in the EULA; DRM; ever-increasing hardware requirements; WGA/OGA; MS-OOXML; increasing costs, etc., and I looked for an alternative. Apple was out, as it's merely a cult. But GNU/Linux had continued to get better and better. Tried Ubuntu: didn't care for it. Tried Fedora, liked it. Kept it. It took me about a year to fully wean myself off of my old Windows machine and find all the free software to do my work. However, once that was complete, I've never looked back and I've never had so much fun computing!

In college (comp sci) we had a big project which we did on SunOS workstations in a lab 5 blocks away from my dorm (large campus!). It was winter, and I was tired of going there all the time.

I heard with Unix OSes one could log in remotely and even display graphical environment across a network. Luckily I haven't heard of Putty, so installing a Unix-like OS seemed like a good solution. Plus I was curious about this Linux thing I kept reading about online.

It was late 2000 and I had a laptop with Win98 on it. I also had a friend who has been using Debian for quite some time already. So numerous phone calls to him and a few days after, I managed to slap together a Debian Potato installation with a working X and network ( it took me another couple of months to make sound work )

I was dual-booting for some time and around 2002 I found out I didn't need Windows any more.

Back in 1996, using win95, there were people on the IRC who were immune to the nukes. They also didn't have much of a problem setting up security bots for the channels on EFnet. These were qualities I coveted.

Five years (and a few computers) later, I never forgot about that, knowing all along there was something powerful and perhaps superior about this OS. I finally bought a second hard drive and managed to get Slackware 9.2 to boot into a console. I haven't purchased a new computer since, although I did pick up a dual processor pentium 4 a few months back that someone had decided to chuck to the curb. It's been a gas.

My start with linux wasint that good, about 9 years ago I had bought redhat (dont remember the version) And installed it and didnt like it, it was way to hard, didnt support any hardware, and was bad choice to start with and still is (sorry).
I had played around over the the last 3 or so years with knoppix and liked it for how fast and user friendly it was but never installed it just played around. About 2 months ago I had gotten a BUNCH of virus's on widows xp and just broke the os up. I did finely after 3 days (4 AV, 6 Spy, and 5 Mal) of scans (no thanks to my brother) get it back but not to my taste.
While all this was going on A friend of mine gave me a 8 year old Dell computer. I wanted to use it as a network print/file server. Well I installed Ubuntu 7.10 and fell in love with it, I was on the slow dell more than my fast virus infected XP machine.
So I said heck with it and formated one of my backup HDD's and installed Ubuntu 8.04 on the faster computer and havant looked or booted back to xp. I love it. and will continue to use it.
I'm geting to the point where when people call me to fix XP I have to sit here and think about How to use xp some times I forget LOL
Just thought I would share.
Thanks

Stability
Better multi-user architecture. I could let other users be non-administrator and still have a useful experience.
Free

And because it Rules!

In our house we had several XP computers. They worked OK but when the kids started visiting homepages and receiving mails with malwares of different kinds I decided it was time for change. Don't care for wasting time on non working virus software, running Spybot, running AdAware and every now and then rebooting XP. On top of that, when all necessary security software is installed on XP performance sucks. Knowing about Linux but not having used it I started trying different "live CD's" such as Knoppix. I liked what I saw, started to make installations of different distros on one computer and had miscellaneous hardware related issues. However once they were sorted out, WLAN card exchanged, BIOS changed for use with graphics card, things started to roll. Today I am a happy Windows refuge. I will NEVER buy a Vista machine. I enjoy having control of my machine and not being exposed to malware. BTW I now run Linux Mint with ability to stream whatever I like (Internet radio, Youtube, TV, whatever), handling photos and when needed editing videos.

I have used Linux since 1995, Debian from the beginning because when I was looking into it I read that Debian was being developed in the same spirit as the Linux kernel itself.

I was working with SunOS, and I wanted the same functionality at home.

Working at a start-up ISP (that never went public, paid with worthless "stock", darn that CEO to heck!) that was in the Win95 Beta Test program, I learned to actually like Win95. Compared to Xwindows of the time, it was much prettier, and simpler (in my view) for a single user machine than *NIX.

After I found SCP and Xwindow support for Win95, I no longer used my Linux system for a desktop, keeping it as a dead-solid-reliable server.

In 2000, after 5 years of playing with Win95, I had it pared down to one single background process, simplicity, stability and speed. Never got a virus, never got hacked, but then I'm a network guy so I understood the concept. But then I made a fatal error while playing with DragonLinux on that system, and corrupted the Win95 system.

It never worked right after that, and playing with DrpagonLinux had given me a taste for the KDE desktop. KDE was in Debian, so I erased what was left (after backing up some choice TruType fonts, and etc.), installed Debian, and am typing this on the laptop bought to replace that very one.

A note if I may: This laptop I bought a couple months ago came with VISTA. I wanted a refund, since I had neither interest nor use for VISTA, but the VISTA EULA no longer allows a refund. The software is tied to the hardware. "YOUR ONLY RECOURSE IS TO RETURN THE HARDWARE TO THE PLACE OF PURCHASE, SUBJECT TO THE RETAILER'S RETURN POLICY."

Just in case anyone thought Microsoft wasn't learning from experience.