<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse; ">When, why, and how did you start using Linux?<br></span></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><br>
</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">Wow... Let's see here. I know when I started using Linux Slackware 1 was current, so that puts it around 1993. At the time, I was looking for something with more current development than the Minix I had been using before that.</span></font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">Minix had spoiled me with virtual consoles, command line completion, and a ton of other things which DOS couldn't even think to deliver at the time. However, Andy Tanenbaum famously had no desire to expand it to a general purpose system. BSD was still shackled by ATT, so Linux became the next logical choice.</span></font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">Around 1994 I was hosting a BBS. Desqview was a royal pain to use, and there were no other real useful DOS mutltaskers. In the end, I ran DOSemu on top of Linux to host multiple nodes of my BBS, which ended up using less overhead and provided better performance than Deskview did.</span></font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">For the past nearly 20 years, my desktop systems have been almost exclusively Unix systems of some sort, and most of that has been on Slackware or some other Linux flavor.</span></font></div>
<div><br></div><br clear="all">Kris Browne<br><a href="mailto:kris.browne@gmail.com">kris.browne@gmail.com</a><br>612-353-6969<br>612-408-4431<br><a href="http://www.google.com/profiles/kris.browne">http://www.google.com/profiles/kris.browne</a><br>
<br>"the least expensive, most bug-free line of code is the one you didn't have to write." - Steve Jobs<br><br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 21:42, Jason Hsu, Linux user <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jhsu802701@jasonhsu.com">jhsu802701@jasonhsu.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
When, why, and how did you start using Linux?<br>
<br>
I started using Linux 3 years ago. The reasons I started using Linux were:<br>
1. I had heard about how Windows was full of security holes. It also seemed that security threats only grew over time.<br>
2. I had heard that support for Windows 98 (my main OS at the time) was about to be terminated and that this was even more vulnerable to security threats than Windows XP. I wasn't about to "upgrade" my main computer from Windows 98 due to the expense and trouble of doing so.<br>
3. I heard that Windows Vista was nasty - a quantum leap forward in bloatware that was slow even on many NEW computers. I also heard that Vista didn't work with many items of older hardware like printers, scanners, etc.<br>
4. I'm cheap. My attitude towards computers can be summed up by, "If it ain't broke, don't replace it." I didn't think Windows XP was that much better than 98 or 98 that much better than 95. But I noticed that it took more RAM, hard drive space, processor power, etc. to do exactly the same things we had done 10 years earlier. At the same time, I noticed that there weren't many killer apps (like the Internet in the 1990s), so I felt that we should be able to keep using the same computer for 5-10 years.<br>
5. I'm green. I thought it was scandalous that so many computers get trashed each year NOT because some critical component failed but because the OS failed or was declared obsolete. To me, the only good reason to get rid of a computer is because it breaks and cannot be repaired.<br>
<br>
So I bought a used IBM NetVista desktop computer (256 MB of RAM, 1 GHz processor, 20 GB hard drive, built in 2001, originally equipped with Windows 2000, which had been removed for sale) for $50 from a local used computer dealer. I also bought a KVM switch so I could switch between the older computer and the newer one. I used this newer used computer for going online and used the old computer with Windows 98 strictly offline. (I still have and use this old computer, which I bought new in 2000. It had a 466 MHz processor and a 4.3 GB hard drive. It originally had just 128 MB of RAM, but I upgraded it to 384 MB of RAM. I just recently replaced the Windows 98 setup with Linux.)<br>
<br>
Over the last 3 years, I have been doing more and more stuff in Linux and less and less in Windows. My first distro was Fedora Core 1, because the CD came with the book _Linux For Non-Geeks_. Then I used Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, and Ubuntu. (I dabbled with Debian but couldn't get it configured properly.) I recently switched to antiX Linux. As I mentioned before, it's the most lightweight and user-friendly distro with more than 20,000 programs in the repository due to the Debian repository compatibility. It's the best of both worlds.<br>
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--<br>
Jason Hsu, Linux user <<a href="mailto:jhsu802701@jasonhsu.com">jhsu802701@jasonhsu.com</a>><br>
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