Me? I've been mainlining it for a while now.
Long enough that the first SSD I bought flatlined.

But when did you first hear about Linux? Have you tried it? Which distro did you try first?

I remember, probably around the Ubuntu 6 or 9 days, I gave it a try. We had had a Linux CD set at home, but heck if I knew how to get that started compared to a LiveCD.

Twas neat seeing what computers it could run on, especially compared to the rat race that computers were at the time still.

Going to ramble for a long time, not expecting anyone to read it till the end. Plus I've already probably written all this before already.

Not really Linux, but my first contact to... non-Windows world, was to work with some HP-UX servers at my first workplace, which was a proprietary Unix-variant from HP (EDIT: Correction, I may have used "VMS" even before HP-UX, but I recall they were about the same time, and VMS was already on its way out from our systems). There I kinda got accustomed to using Unix somewhat both in the terminal, and also using the HP-VUE desktop environment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_User_Environment

Hey, VUE even had some games you could play between several workstations, whee!!! I recall some Asteroids-like game you could play against another player on another HP workstation.

Later in that same workplace I also increasingly started working with Linux, not as a Linux admin but having to do stuff in Linux (terminal) because our software versioning system was running in Linux and the telecom units whose firmwares I was supposed to keep updated were often running some sort of small footprint Linux that can fit to very little space, Busybox Linux and such I think.

From those times I also got accustomed to using the vi editor, as it was the only text editor that would surely be available in various mini-Linuxes and such (no emacs or nano or what have you), plus it was guaranteed to work over any kind of odd telnet connection that wouldn't necessarily recognize your Ctrl+Shift+X keypresses on other editors, or such. So "vi" would always be available, and always work over any connection, so better just learn to use it then.

So no "nano" for me, thanks! Even today I mostly use vi if I quickly have to edit some text file; or then I use whatever graphical text editor (similar to Notepad) is available in Linux. Whichever is quicker. At work I always get admiration for whipping out vi (instead of e.g. nano), people seem to think I am some real computer wizard for using such an archaic tool for mere text editing. (I feel the same way about "emacs" users, who the F uses or used that voluntarily? I never learned that tool that well, and hated using it at least for simple text editing.)

At home I was still using Windows only. I think it was on some work-related CentOS course, either CentOS5 or 6 (which was brand-new back then I guess), where I got the spark to try install Linux also at home, mainly because the teacher talked about it a lot how you can easily install it also on your home PC etc.

I don't recall which was the first Linux I installed on any of my home PCs, but it was either CentOS, Fedora or Mandrake/Mandriva Linux. I was merely dabbling with them and being impressed I could visit homepages with their web browsers, as if I was on a Windows PC! How cool is that, it actually works?!? This is how Warp OS/2 users must have felt back in the day, being rebels and what have you!

I didn't do any gaming on them though, and not anything serious to be frank. Just dabbling. Back then there were things that discouraged me to "switch to Linux" in home use, for instance because my online bank depended on certain Java (or javascript?) version that wouldn't necessarily run on non-Windows machines, so I couldn't do my online banking from Linux, at least without lots of extra effort. At some point though I think Linux OpenJDK started working with that online bank passably, and later the bank updated their systems so that they would work on any device (Windows, Mac, Linux, even your phone's web browser). Maybe they got rid of Java or javascript or both, not sure, but after the change their pages finally worked without issues also on Linux.

Also at my work I got inspired by a couple of colleagues who were running Linux even on their work laptops, and I was amazed they could do all their work there (albeit they might have some problems sometimes connecting to some Windows network drive or something...). One was using UIbuntu, I don't recall what the other was using.

Either way, for many years I didn't run Linux at home (but used it at work), but in recent years I've increasingly installed it on my various PCs at home, primarily on older PCs where newest Windows releases don't work at all or work poorly. They are great for Linux, to give more useful life to those old PCs, besides just remaining as some Windows XP or 7 retro-gaming PCs. With Linux you once again dare to go online with them safely.

Lately I've also started installing (dualboot) Linux also to my more powerful gaming PCs, and only then I've become more in touch what modern gaming is like on Linux. For now I decided to remove my aging Linux Mint (20.x?) installation from my most powerful gaming laptop, just to release the 1 TB SSD used for that Linux for the Windows 11 on the other 1 TB SSD, so that now Windows 11 has 2TB of space. I am thinking of re-installing some Linux back to it at some point, either after I have cleaned some space for Windows stuff, or maybe replacing one or both of the 1TB SSDs with 2TB SSDs.

I am still running Linux on several other PCs at my home, including Raspberry Pi4, and even gaming on some of them, but less demanding Windows games (e.g. on one Linux installation I occasionally play Team Fortress 2 and Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition (GOG Windows version running through WINE), both work great on it).

Whoaahhh there old-timer. I was arguing on a forum (as per usual) about how awful Linux gaming seemed to be, and how inferior the OS was compared to Windows. I brought up very original arguments, like the 2% Linux gaming market share based on the Steam survey, and how such a small market share meant no studio would put any effort into it, making the experience terrible. Why would anyone want to use it??

Then the guy said that Linux wasn't for everyone, not everyone could figure it out or get it, especially gaming on it.

I said:

"Hold my beer."

This was about 4 years ago. I first dual-booted Win10 and I think Kubuntu (I distrohopped a lot in the beginning). After about a year of dual-booting, I realised I hadn't booted into Windows for, well, about a year, I nuked Windows out of there as it was pointless to have it and I could format that SSD as ext4 and have something actually useful on it. Never looked back.

I never encountered that obnoxious Linux fan from the forums again. But if I did, I would say. Thanks mate!

First was Red Hat in an intro to Linux class at college.

After that I dated a nerdy guy who taught me about Linux on a USB stick. We used those bootable drives to fix Windows issues for people as a side gig in the early 2000's.

Once Ubuntu started gaining popularity I tried it out and found it was great to make my main OS since it didn't have an enterprise reputation like Red Hat.

I often look at Linux distros from afar and fantasize that "I might try that one, one day" but never seem to get around to it.

These are the ones I've said I want to try:
Kali Linux, PopOS, Mint, Cinnamon, Parrot OS, Raspberry Pi OS, Qubes OS.

My flip phone uses KaiOS so I suppose I barely use that one (since I mostly use it as a phone instead of a browser). If you count Android as a smartphone then I have one of those too (but it's not hooked up to phone service I just use it on public wi-fi for browsing on the road).

My first contact using Linux was around 2010 when searching the internet for "how to make this piece of crap of a Atom powered netbook faster".
Being very used to install Operating Systems, since my first computer had Windows ME. Yes, constant blue screens and monthly OS reinstall :) I managed to install Puppy Linux and was fine but found it somewhat limited due my limited knowledge and being very used to Windows.
Soon after I installed some Ubuntu derivative, I believe Kubuntu, and oh crap, it almost felt like a new computer. I still wasn´t able to run Windows software but for everyday tasks, it was fast. And I mean FAST!
Youtube videos on Windows were limited to 360p on good days while on Linux I could play at 480p without issues!
Soon after I got a new netbook with a faster CPU (dual core with 4 threads) and it got the same treatment. 720p Youtube videos for the win :)
Oh, so many hours playing Battle for Wesnoth on those devices.

Granted, at that time there were some issues with drivers on Linux and most of the gains I felt come from the really crappy stock setup with Windows 7 Starter Edition that couldn't even change the desktop background, coupled with only 1GB of RAM and very poor driver support. The later Netbook had a PowerVR intergrated GPU that wasn't completely supported on Windows (neither on Linux BTW).

The main issue with Linux at the time was poor battery life on laptops (when we could get drivers at all) and for me, it was always the same until 2016~2018 when the power usage start to be the same either running Linux or Windows on the devices I've tested. Nowadays driver support is freaking awsome (excepting a few vendors) and laptop battery life is the same or better than Windows.
Actually, I use a intel mini pc that cannot get under 7W at the wall running Windows no matter what I do, and it goes to 3.5W running Linux, with 1080p youtube playback between 4.5 and 7W.

While I like to tinker with stuff, I'm also lazy as a pig and my current laptop is running Linux Mint and Bottles to help configure Windows/WINE programs. At first the Cinnamon desktop was somewhat unstable but ever since some blessed update, the machine is rock stable. It's not uncommon to sleep 100+ times before some reason is needed for a restart (like changing the graphics from the Intel integrated to the nVidia "high power" GPU), with uptimes of a couple of months.

Early 2000s. Installed Gentoo, accidentally wiped my windows partition and became a Linux-only user overnight. I had an Athlon XP 1800+, which came out in 2001 so probably this took place in 2002 or 2003. Haven't gone back, though I did use OpenBSD for a few years (and still do on a home server).

I've known about Linux since...for a long time.
I only gave it a serious try about 2 years ago after one day of particular annoyance at Spyware 10.

It wasn't that Linux seemed amazing at the time, it was more that I felt compelled to run from what I was now using and a company I did not feel I could trust.

RedHat Linux. My dad had a computer store, and while looking for a way to get into programming more Linux as an alternative to Windows was brought up, how an entire OS was built more-or-less from scratch and included compilers and tools. This was back 1996 or so, back when Windows 95 was slowly becoming a thing and Windows 3.11 was still the defacto standard.

Downloading ISO's were slow then, so you were more likely to get a distro on disc that came with a book (or a book that came with a distro). I bought on Ebay a 4-disc set of Redhat 4.2? (Disc 1-2 were the OS and programs, 3-4 were source code you could optionally install) i don't remember, but that was my intro into linux. Had Linux running for a while trying it out and upgrading packages from time to time, and finding upgrades slowed the system down a lot so i'd downgrade the Gnome packages. Then i noticed i'd gone past the Y2K big worry bug a few hours after the dreaded hour and.... things were fine.

Distros then and Distros now are two very different things. They were much less refined and difficult to get going. And compiling your kernel was setting the computer to run overnight. Though a big turning point was when they got the LiveCD's to start working with Slackware back in 2008 or so? Try the OS before you install, or just run a different OS for a time to do something you couldn't do in windows. Very nice.

When Edward Snowden revealed that Microsoft was part of the NSA's Prism-Program, and therefore legally obligated to give away my data and lie to me about it, I knew I couldn't trust them something as important as an operating system going forward. It still took me a few years to around 2017 to first dip my toes into the Linux world.

I wasn't really all that excited at first. I dual booted a long time, trying to shift more and more of my tasks to Linux but repeatedly ran into issues. Be it with games or other software or even hardware. It wasn't until 2020 or so that Linux became my main operating system and I used Windows less and less.

Finally last year I deleted my Windows partition as getting compatible hardware and software became more and more difficult. I'm talking about Windows 7 obviously, the last good Windows version. In fact, Microsoft made the transition as easy as they possibly could. Their and my view of what an operating should and should not be able to do are so far apart now, I really wouldn't consider it as an alternative even if the political situation in US would change.

I have known about Linux since high school but never tried it until college. I think the first Linux distribution tried was Fedora. After that, I got Linux certification with all my other certifications for I.T.

The most recent distribution I use is Mint, which is installed on old laptop. Believe it or not, I really like Mint.

Aaah, classic story. Accidentally wipe the Windows partition and shrug.

I dabbled a lot with Gentoo in 2004-2005, but in a dualboot with Windows (2000) setup, and I kept basically falling into the trap of needing to boot into Windows, and then not returning to Linux. Then in 2005 I went cold-turkey, just installing Ubuntu on a new machine. I fully expected I'd want to add Windows before the week was out, but months later realized that I'd never felt any need to. Haven't looked back since.

Of course, it helped that during this period of time, I was simply not playing computer games at all. It was only the Humble Bundles in 2010 which showed that hey, there were actually some pretty nifty indie games which worked out of the box on Linux, which rekindled my interest in gaming. The amount of games with native Linux support has exploded since then, which together with Wine's phenomenal quality basically means that I can play anything I care about.

Ubuntu in 2010, tried to make it work with the printer; was a nightmare for a total novice user so gave up.

Starting in 2011 I was trying different distros on my laptops while the desktop stayed on Windows.

I started computing life with an Apple IIE, then changed to Windows 3.1 a few years later.

After that, many years ago I first tried Linux with Redhat, but that didn't go well.

Then a few years later I tried again, but with Ubuntu, which went well enough to play with for a while.

But by then I was deeply into using the AutoIt programming language, so that dictated what OS I used, Windows, that and a big bunch of favorite programs only available for Windows.

So a Linux distro really only became an occasional plaything for me.

That remained the case, when a few years later I started to play around with a Live USB stick with Mint. I enjoyed that and still have it somewhere, though not used it in ages now.

If I wasn't tied to Windows with so many projects and things I'd probably use Mint Linux full time, but only if I reduced myself to simple things as I find Linux too nerdy otherwise. Function names and mindset are a big part of why I only use the AutoIt programming language (for the most part). Keep it simple has long been a mantra of mine.

That said, I do imagine I might setup a Linux gaming rig one day ... given half a chance.