I'm 41, and have been using it for over 2 decades.
It's always been a hobby. I work in a non-tech field, I have just liked it better than alternatives, and like the tinkering bit.
It started about 1993, as a freshman at Bronx Science. The school's internet terminals ran AIX (IBM X Stations with these nice big 21" CRTs). Senior year, a friend gave me a CD from Walnut Creek. That was Slackware. Started playing with it, and liked it. I was using a custom built 486 I bought at a computer show. However, things were far from easy as documentation back then was hard to find.
From there, first year of college (1998), I moved to Red Hat (at 5.1) and with the help of a guy on IRC got the Sound Blaster drivers compiled, X running, and everything else I needed. The college computers at the time ran VAX (not so Unix-y) and Digital's OS/F, so again I felt right at home with a Unix-like OS.
From there it was a wrap. Haven't touched any proprietary system since. In between there's been periods of using BSD, and a lot of "distro hopping."
Twenty three years later, I'm almost back where I started - Fedora. Still a hobbyist, still tinkering.
A walnut creek CDROM? Well look at the mr. millionaire here, I could not afford a CD drive at the time :) My first slackware install took like 5 hours of flipping floppies (40 or so) and haphazardly answering questions like "Do you want to install Python? Ruby? Guile? I don't know, do I?!?". I messed something up and the root password was not set properly. All I could do was spend another 5 hours reinstalling it and hope this time it would go right, so I did. I think on the same day I first ran vi, couldn't figure out how to type anything, or exit for that matter, so I ctrl-alt-deleted the computer :) I had just 4 megs of ram too, basically all the computer could do is boot to a shell so I could enable swap. Starting X swapped the hell out of it. Good times.
I honestly don't know if in this day and age I would take up Linux. Back then I did because I was bored, hungry for knowledge and was soaking in anything computer-related I could get my hands on. Linux provided so many new technologies to tinker with. With the cornucopia of freely and easily accessible knowledge that we have today... I don't know, maybe I would choose a different path altogether.
It's always been a hobby. I work in a non-tech field, I have just liked it better than alternatives, and like the tinkering bit.
It started about 1993, as a freshman at Bronx Science. The school's internet terminals ran AIX (IBM X Stations with these nice big 21" CRTs). Senior year, a friend gave me a CD from Walnut Creek. That was Slackware. Started playing with it, and liked it. I was using a custom built 486 I bought at a computer show. However, things were far from easy as documentation back then was hard to find.
From there, first year of college (1998), I moved to Red Hat (at 5.1) and with the help of a guy on IRC got the Sound Blaster drivers compiled, X running, and everything else I needed. The college computers at the time ran VAX (not so Unix-y) and Digital's OS/F, so again I felt right at home with a Unix-like OS.
From there it was a wrap. Haven't touched any proprietary system since. In between there's been periods of using BSD, and a lot of "distro hopping."
Twenty three years later, I'm almost back where I started - Fedora. Still a hobbyist, still tinkering.