I’ll go first, I took my mom’s college textbooks which came with discs for a couple distros and failed to install RHEL before managing to get Fedora Core 4 working. The first desktop environment I used was KDE and despite trying out a few others over the years I always come back to plasma. Due to being like 12, I wanted to run my games on it, and man wine was not nearly as easy to use (or as good) as it is nowadays. So I switched back to windows until around 2015 or so when I spent the next few years trying to replace windows as much as I could. Once valve released proton, I switched fully and have t looked back, unless my still there windows partition tries to take over my computer when I restart it at least.
Installed an early version of Slackware on a 386 in the 90’s. Went through a couple it jobs so I ran windows for a bit until 2002. I had bought a nice laptop and it came with windows xp. Xp was so bad after windows 2000 that I had to find something else. Played with redhat and a couple other dostros then went back to Slackware and have been on it ever since.
It’s funny you mention xp being so bad, I’ve always remembered it as the one people loved. But I was using MacOs 9 in the school computer lab while xp was getting reamed for its ui and early security issues so.
I started running Windows 2000 in 1999 with a Technet Beta. It was fast, stable, reliable. Bought the new laptop with XP and it would hang from resume often. Then plugging in USB devices would stop being recognized and I had to clear duplicate entries out of the registry. Then my work desktop couldn’t open a second Vmware guest without swapping where it could run four guests under windows 2000. I burned one of my MS support calls asking them why it wasn’t reading the swappiness reg key only to be told they drop support for that so XP would have plenty of free ram but start swapping as soon as I tried opening the second vmware guest. I had to stick in another hdd and dedicate it to swap to get a second vmware guest just to run. But then there was the huge security hole thinly disguised as a web browser called internet explorer. Despite me running as a non-admin, file and registry permissions locked down, unnecessary services disabled, all the typical desktop security stuff just a simple mis-typing www.gogle.com into IE would result in popups and a malware infection. The second time I got infected bad enough to require a reinstall I setup a dual boot of redhat and eventually just quit using windows. Supposedly they fixed some of those issues with later service packs for XP but windows 2000 beta was faster, more secure and more stable than XP. It was just a big turd.
IIRC Kubuntu/Ubuntu and DSL in 2003-5ish, and IIRC programs were compiled on the local machine back then.
I mostly sticked with Windows cause most of the 3D packages are on Windows (I’m a 3D generalist). Was exposed to centos variants while working in the industry.
After covid, I had a lot of time to get back onto GNU Linux.
Slax and puppy on a 128mb usb that i would take with me to school to test
I think my first experience was around 1993 or 1994. I downloaded the 3.5" disks at the university and then uploaded onto my 386. No GUI, all command prompt. :).
Right around that time, too, I found some network cards and co-axial cables and 3-4 of us in the house put the cards in our computers and could see each other’s computer. Couldn’t do much else though. Hahahaha.
A friend loaned me a CD set of Mandrake which had an early version of KDE. I was floored away by something as simple as the level of customization you could do with the taskbar. And having this alien operating system running on an alien EXT3 partition format instead of FAT32 or NTFS that you didn’t need to defragment. It seemed pretty fantastical.
I loved tweaking the desktop environment on Windows by replacing explorer.exe with LiteStep and Blackbox so likewise I did this on Linux. Over time I had fun discovering Gnome2, Fluxbox, XFCE, etc. you name it. Eventually I got a desktop I really liked and felt productive on and as Windows XP approached end of life I had no intention of using Vista so I transitioned to exclusively Linux at that point.
I did play with different distros and running servers at the time, hosted VMs back in the day you had to take whatever distro they offered. But for my desktop I basically went Mandrake, Arch (didn’t know how to make everything work), Debian, Ubuntu, back to Arch.
