When I took a programming class a student sitting next to me introduced me to Linux. I was like "what is that?" I honestly thought these kinds of machines were just in the movies. I loved how it boot in a black screen, text scrolling, and there was a penguin. Unlike today, there was no Ubuntu. I didn't have wireless at home.
It took a while to get Disks burned to install. I had struggles moving back and forth between two machines across rooms to look up "help" documentation from the internet. When it was all installed, nothing worked. Network cards, sound, etc. When my network card worked, it felt like heaven. When my screen resolution was fixed (x11 settings), felt like heaven. Repeat.
He had asked, do you really want to learn how it works? I said, yes, let's start there. I was very confused with all the Linux variants so he recommended one. Now I look back and unsure that is where I should have started. L.O.L.
That's roughly how I started, around 1999. I loved the all text console, multiple screens, and how the shell was essentially the same as my beloved Amiga OS. I went through countless distros - Corel, Suse, Mandrake, Debian, Red Hat, Caldera, Yellow Dog, Mandriva, and leagues of desktops and WMs... KDE, Gnome, IceWM, Xfce, xmonad, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, BlackBox, OpenBox, LXDE, Fluxbox. I'm not sure what effect this total lack of interface consistency has on my psyche. Every time I upgraded the kernel or distro there was a significant chance the audio or video would stop working and require 15 minutes through 2 days to restore. It turned out frequently the easiest way to get it to work again was reinstall. The positive aspect of this masochistic computing experience is that when I launched a startup 8 years later I was quite comfortable filling the sysadmin role.
It took a while to get Disks burned to install. I had struggles moving back and forth between two machines across rooms to look up "help" documentation from the internet. When it was all installed, nothing worked. Network cards, sound, etc. When my network card worked, it felt like heaven. When my screen resolution was fixed (x11 settings), felt like heaven. Repeat.
He had asked, do you really want to learn how it works? I said, yes, let's start there. I was very confused with all the Linux variants so he recommended one. Now I look back and unsure that is where I should have started. L.O.L.