My first laptop was an Ubuntu machine with no battery when I was 4. I had no idea what Linux was, I just played the games my uncle had pre-loaded onto it.

I had a Linux beginners class at my HS in 10th grade but I’ve forgot about Linux, until 12th grade when 2 of my really nerdie friends started shilling Linux to me, especially pointing out that now you can play windows games on Linux, and not too long after I eventually did the jump when starting my comp sci uni (19 years old) with Manjaro as a first, but I have found happiness in EndevaorOS due to Manjaro being unstable.

In University. In the 90s we used commercial un*x (HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, Solaris/SunOS, SCO) and some others like SVR4, BSD, Minix. Then a guy on usenet talked about making is own kernel running on a 386. My first real full linux install was kernel 0.99 on a 486DX50, around 1993, came in multiple floppies, then to install X11 that was like 10 more floppies! Configuring things was a bit nighmarish.

I’d say I was around that age. Maybe earlier, 10? But only because my dad was into linux. This was back in 1998 to 2000 though. I wasn’t actually allowed access to a computer’s hardware (and therefore the ability to install an OS, given my extremely restricted access) until I started uni with an old computer that didn’t even have onboard sound.

In 2006 my university used Ubuntu, I thought ‘Wow, this is different!’ Tried it out on my own computer but I was a heavy gamer so windows was the best option (hey, Win7 pretty alright anyway!)

Fast forward to about 2022, I try it again but it’s not getting incorporated well with my program usage in school (as a teacher).

Fast forward to 2024, worked out that Tencent software is on AUR (teacher in Mainland China) and I figure I’m doing another dive. So far, so good. Little itty bitty glitches especially with Libreoffice but I’m getting by without touching Win10.

Started with Ubuntu at 12. Did a LAN boot to my mom’s laptop somehow, I couldn’t explain it if I tried. It was supposed to be on my PC. Didn’t work in the end and got grounded for “hacking” went back to it though a few years later at 16 and dived around Ubuntu and Gentoo. Never installed gentoo but I certainly kept trying.

Linux didn’t exist until I was 25.

But are we talking earliest age, or length of time using it? I’ve been running Linux on PCs for over 30 years.

I tried xubuntu when I was 14 on a live cd to get students admin access on our school laptops. Once I got my own machine, I kept it on windows 10 until it became unstable so I moved to Bunsenlabs, then Pop OS due to it’s dgpu. (Intel igpu, amd dgpu)

Started messing around with it some time in 2003, on Mandrake Linux when I was 21 years old. Experimented and ran servers with various distros in the years since but it didn’t become my daily driver until about 2014-15, with Debian.

I’ve been daily driving Ubuntu for at least 16 years. I miss when Ubuntu had Windows style Start Menus and barely functional entertainment software.

I don’t care about specific distros, I chose Ubuntu because I liek purple

My dad had a Knoppix boot CD in a case with all the games, of course I messed with it as a curious child, I have no idea how old I was, but it was my first foray into the wonderful world of not Windows.

2005

Fedora Core 5

At some point in 2006, I switched to Ubuntu. Jumped to Debian after Canonical thought it would be cute to send our data to Jeff Bezos and show is ads.

Fuck Canonical.

Been on Debian ever since, except for 1 netbook that I keep using Kali - which I used in the Backtrack days.

I first tried Linux Mint when I was 12, eventually changed to Ubuntu when I was 13 or 14 because I saw the Windows 11 copilot button, installed

Can totally relate, lol. Except I first tried Ubuntu at around 12 (at the time it was considered the best for beginners), then nearly 20 years passed until I saw the same copilot button pop up, uninvited, in my task bar. That was the last straw for me.

Now I run OpenSUSE as a daily driver.

I was 7 when I first properly used Linux. My dad somehow found a prebuilt which came with SuSE - I assume version 7 or thereabouts. It didn’t last long, sadly, before we switched over to Windows XP.

Then at age 14/15, I ran Ubuntu 10 as my daily driver on my netbook. Then #! for a bit.

Used Windows 7 and 10 until… I guess age 26/27 since that’s what we’re doing, when I switched to Debian full-time. (Via MX-Linux, which didn’t quite work out)

I started using openSuSE full time on my laptop after the disastrous Windows 8 upgrade (it kept bluescreening and had problems suspending on that laptop.*), I guess I was 11 at the time.

But I’ve been messing around with Live CDs on my parents’ computer that came with a computer magazine my dad subscribed to for a while before that. I remember spending a lot of time in Knoppix specifically. Probably mostly playing the games that came on it.

* Windows 10 still has the same issues on it last time I checked lmao