On LinuxInsider yesterday, Katherine Noyes took a look at Linux users' recollections of their "first time," a topic discussed at this month's Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit and later on Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols' blog at Computerworld as well as on TuxRadar. Here's just a couple of the hundreds of responses:

"I started with a copy of redhat that came with the linux bible; initially I was interested in learning to program in C, and linux had a nice compiler without the huge price tags that accompanied the ones I knew of for windows 98 at the time," recalls starcannon at Computerworld. "I oscillated in and out of linux, trying a multitude of distributions over the years, then several years ago I tried Ubuntu, it worked so great that I switched my entire family over to it, and have not looked back."

"My first real Linux install was Mandrake around the turn of the century (2000-ish)," recalls sfdrew at TuxRadar. "Don't ask me which version. I had tried to install a different distro, which I can't remember the name of and probably doesn't exist anymore with no luck. The book Mandrake came with helped a lot — it was a commercial version I bought for 50 bucks. It took over 8 hours to install start to finish because I had to keep taking my computer apart to find information about the hardware. You think it would make me appreciate the modern install process, but I guess like everything else, we learn to take things for granted..."

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