‘When Did You First Use Linux?’

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at Computer World asks himself when he first started using Linux after attending the Linux Foundation Summit where several others were asked the same question. The Linux Foundation has posted a video of some of the answers; boy, do I feel young.

Linux was just a myth to me that I’d only heard rumors of when most of these people started using it. I’m still fresh into the open-source world as a whole as it’s only been a little over a year since I downloaded Ubuntu on a whim and installed it. I’m still an avid Windows user, I sometimes use a Mac but don’t own one, and I often use Ubuntu and test various other Linux distributions from time to time, so we’ll see where that gets me in the future.

Linux has its roots way back in 1991 when I was just a wee little one myself. Linus Torvalds started it as a “hobby,” and nearly two decades later it’s spawned dozens of major distributions and still hundreds more all used throughout the world. Here’s part of Torvalds’ Usenet message explaining his project back in August of that year. It’s rather funny to compare what he thought would become of it with what it’s become today:

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready… It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.

When did you start using Linux? Share your history below!

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