How did you come to use Linux?

[Kevin McKinley]

I bought a Walnut Creek CD set at a computer show (remember those?). It
had several Linux distributions on it -- Slackware, Red Hat, and
something else called Deviant I think. ;)

I installed Slackware, and holding a first edition of Running Linux in
one hand and typing commands with the other I managed to compile a
kernel. I couldn't understand why the system kept asking me for a
network address, a mask and a gateway, but it wouldn't make any
difference if I had because my only "Internet" connection was
Compuserve dial-up.

In the next couple of years I bought several editions of Red Hat, but I
still couldn't get past the TCPIP stuff (and it still wouldn't have
mattered if I had).

In 1999 I bought a boxed edition of SUSE, because it supposedly
included something called Star Office. I installed it on a Toshiba
P166 laptop, triple booting with Win95 and WinNT Workstation. When I
posted questions to the Compuserve Unix forum (it had a Linux section)
the answers didn't make sense because everyone else used Red Hat and
SUSE was completely different.

Several months later the first issue of Maximum Linux included a
Mandrake 5.1 CD, and the magazine article asserted that I could have a
functioning Linux system in 15 minutes. That was correct, so I also
installed Mandrake on my awesome dual PII-450 SCSI desktop. ;)

I got disenchanted with RPM after I installed Mandrake 7.1, so I started
looking at Debian-based distributions. I tried them all (this was still
possible in 2000 or 2001). I ended up learning enough about Debian to
just run it, and I did so until October 2005.

I had heard about an African Linux distribution called Ubuntu, and I
thought, "A Politically-Correct Linux (blech). Just what we need
(NOT!)". But I heard so many good things about trouble-free installation
and "It Just Works" that I installed Breezy Badger on my Dell laptop. It
Just Worked!

Dapper unfortunately didn't just work, but Edgy and Feisty did. Gutsy
didn't but Hardy did. I can't stand KDE 4.x, so I'm staying with Hardy
until it drops off the edge of the world.

Kevin McKinley