Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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What was your first experience using Linux? How old were you? Stick around or did you go back to windows before eventually circling back to Linux? (lemmy.cloudaf.site)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'd been a Fidonet BBS sysop for years when I read Torvald's post on comp.os.minux and I was interested, as MS-DOS was too limited. So I downloaded my first "not distro" on a midnight call (300 baud!) to Finland. It wasn't even a distro back then, just a bare kernel and a few programs. Then SLS came out in late '92 and I was off and running.

I've hopped all the major distros just out of curiosity and torture/fun, many times, too many to count. Each has it's own quirks and usability, but they all have the kernel. So it doesn't matter which you run as long as you like it, you're having fun exploring, and it does what you want it to do.