Yes, im doing le funy Meme. And yes, I am an autist, with some signs towards something adhd adjacent
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 arch at late 14, and got to gentoo when I was 15.
Can anyone beat me to it?
Here’s what I started with. The release of Windows 95 lured me away from Amiga, but as the Amiga was a very customisable environment, I had this for an escape plan :D
In the Amiga days I was ridiculously lucky and bagged a Silicon Graphics Indy system for pennies, so Unix was no stranger at this point.
Cool, no, not my version but very close to it…
I started using Linux before you were born, but i also was 20, so you win😄
in 2002 when my windows me computer start looping on the blue screen of death, with all of my college papers/essays/tests/assignments trapped in it.
the recovery media refused to work because i had upgraded the computer several times and i couldn’t afford the $180 windows xp cd. so i bought a linux magazine for $5 that included a copy of mandrake linux installation media and used paper printouts from my college’s computer labs to help me rescue my work from the computer.
That’s how you do it. Waiting to drown but suddenly learning to fly :D
lol. This is my story as well, except I wrecked my XP MBR and the CD was in Dr. Dobbs that my dad had a sub thru his work from. I was too impatient to wait for him to bring home an XP install CD.
I suspect that this is the story for most Linux users; windows failing at a critical need
Just to put you all on notice: I started my kids on Linux from day 1 of their computing lives. I’m playing the long game here. In another 80 years they’re going to be in the longest living users category.
They mostly use Linux as their daily drivers. Any time they have to use windows for school work they also rage at the terrible UI and lack of ease of use. <Insert evil laughter here>
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.
Yes, at least seeing a 50yo guy like me. We come from the 8bit world, there was no linux!
Been there! It was Avery different time.
The first program I wrote was in the Logo Turtle Game on an Apple Iie in 4th grade. Did some BASIC programming on the Apple IIe’s building interpreter too.
I use Arduino boards with Atmega, Esp32/8266, and M0 chips on them for embedded projects. These $8 boards have more processing capability then my first desktop computer…
I know it’s just nostalgia, but I sometimes really miss the days when you could memorize the entire memory layout of your computer. You knew that if you poked a value into a memory location, some pixels would flip at a certain place on the screen.
It was nice living in such a small, constrained world.
I still live it. I use some Atmega chips like the attiny85. It only has 256 bytes if RAM and 5 i/o pins to work with. I code in C++ so I have 100% control over memory if I want it.
Someday I’ll find a reason to work with attiny10 chips… There’s almost no resources on it and it’s about the size of a grain of rice!
Man, you make me wish I’d have followed an embedded career. When I first entered the market, embedded was niche and the domain of specialty industries like the MIC. If you cut out companies like Lockheed, building stuff to kill people, the job pool was really small. But there was a window, juuust around the time I moved to management, when you could find embedded jobs. I wish now I’d have taken that fork in the path.
I just finished teaching an Internet of Things class this term. I went strong on the ‘things’ bit of the title. We did all kinds of hardware projects, along with web apis, mqtt, and a tiny bit of clouds services to move data.
It was one of the most fun classes I’ve ever taught. That stuff is great!
a month ago, never goin back…so much power, so much free ram. im in love
Slackware. 1993.
I’m old lol.
Been through:
Slackware
Mandrake
Debian
Ubuntu
Redhat , old and new
Fedora
Arch
Knoppix
Pop!
CentOS
Enlightenment
Etc etc…
Right now I’m living on KDE Neon.
I have a physical CD of Ubuntu 6.10, back then they were distributing those over the mail and a friend of mine ordered some and gave me. I still keep it.
Built my first PC in High School from scraps. Decided to try Ubuntu 10.04 (current at the time).
I was very impressed with how much performance a free OS could get out of my awful hardware. Have been using Linux in some form as my OS ever since.
when I was 13 or 14 because I saw the Windows 11 copilot button
That button was announced January 2024.I think the first Linux I installed was probably Ubuntu somewhere around 5.04-6.06, I would have been about 15 at the time.
That cant be true
I remember dual booting Ubuntu, I was on a Win insider build, and the button must have appeared around 2023
Oh, I thought you were talking about the physical keyboard button, apparently the software copilot button appeared around May 2023, about seven months earlier
- Slackware from like 40 3.5 floppy disks.
2002, I was 11. My dad had bunch of Linux install CDs that came with Dr. Dobbs. I fucked up my XP MBR and asked him to bring home a XP install disk cause i lost all mine.
By the time he got home I had installed Mandrake Dolphin Linux on my PC.
About the time that Windows 10 came out. I was just messing around and ended up liking it.
Yggdrasil somewhere around ‘93… maybe ‘94. Recompiling a kernel took a VERY long time.
I’ve been doing this a while.
I think my very first exposure to Linux was when I got a Pi 3 for Christmas when I was 10; by next year, I was trying out Ubuntu 16.04 in a VM.
However, it took several years before I began daily-driving; I had thrown it on an old laptop during my sophomore year of high school that I mostly used from the couch.
I then did a “test install” of Debian Testing on my main desktop pater that year, which just became what I used every day and quickly just became my main operating system.
I soon installed it on everything else I owned and haven’t looked back.
