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I've been a Linux user since 1998 or so, when I borrowed something called The Linux Bible from my local library. It came with a CD-ROM of Yggdrasil Plug-and-Play Linux, which was the first Linux distribution I ever tried out. I didn't understand much at first, but the promise of freedom and hackability — and the modular and elegant design of UNIX and its tools — was very enticing to me.
After trying and failing to use Yggdrasil properly, my next real attempt was Slackware Linux 3.6, which I stayed with for a while. I tried pretty much all the other distributions of the time (for some reason we used to make fun of Red Hat users, I guess because they could do some of their sysadmin work through graphical tools, which was wimpy and not proper) — hated Debian 2.2 "potato" due to the inscrutability of dselect, but after some more iterations of Slackware I eventually ended up with Debian 4.0 "etch". apt was pretty magical coming from Slackware. I stayed with Debian for a while until they switched to systemd, at which point I was embarrassingly enough using Windows 7 most of the time.
I'm not super happy with the current corporate direction that Linux has been taking, with systemd and such. On and off I've tried going FreeBSD and OpenBSD for my desktop, and while I love the philosophy and organization of these systems, minor annoynaces have brought me back to Linux. I've also tried Devuan and Void to varying degrees of satisfaction. Sometimes I really want to go back to Slackware, my original home, but living without proper package management seems a little too much for me these days.
These days I work as a Linux and Mac sysadmin and use macOS for most of my daily work. (I will say that systemd, despite its many flaws, does alright at making some Linux sysadmin tasks a fair bit easier.) I do have some secondary Linux machines, like my piece-of-crap file server, and my heart is still in Linux land -- that's part of why I love being able to futz around on tilde.club.
(By the way, I love that I found this Linux Now! button. I remember having this exact GIF on one of my early homepages.)
This site is mostly HTML 3.2 compliant, but relies on some Netscape extensions. · E-mail me at [email protected]