I was first introduced to Linux 4 years ago as I was starting my freshman year at Lake Superior State University. My roommate was quite into it. Later that year I got my first computer and I then made two partitions, one for Windows and one for Linux.
My roommate used RedHat 7.3, so that's what I tried. At the time, RedHat 8 had just come out, but I didn't have the CD'S for that install. So, I tried using RedHat, but it was more of a mess around for a few minutes, then boot back into Windows to play games and stuff. I tried to use RedHat but it was just to hard for me to get everything to work. Mainly the sound. For whatever reason my integrated sound would not get recognized.
I didn't use RedHat a whole lot. I did however get Xemacs setup, and wrote several of my class programs in there. We were learning C++ so it was quite nice using Linux for writing projects. Many of my classmates went out and bought the IDE that the professor was using where I used Linux and the free Xemacs which actually got the job done better.
That wasn't enough to keep me away though. Sometime the following spring, they released RedHat 9. I downloaded and installed it. It was much cleaner looking than 7.3 and detected my sound card without a problem. The problem came when I tried to play my mp3's. This was after the time when the distribution had to stop shipping with thecodecs . I eventually got the sound working, but it wasn't the most reliable thing. The system would lockup often. It wasn't to long before I stopped booting into RedHat and just used Windows again.
The following year, I tried a distribution name ALT Linux. It was recommended to me by my brother. I tried it and it worked very well for me. I was using KDE and I was able to figure out most things on my own to get what I needed done. I had been already using Gaim and OpenOffice in Windows so I was very familiar with them already. ALT Linux, like most other distribution came with Mozilla web browser. This was my web browser of choice in Linux. (in Windows I did used Opera) The first semester I had a Java class so I did most of the programming in Windows, though I did mess around with compiling some of the projects in Linux. The following semester I had a C++ class as well as a class that used Borland Delphi to connect to a database. I then used Windows to do all of my programming. I did occasionally boot into Linux, just because it felt cool to use it.
The following summer I got a laptop from my Grandma. Initially I put Windows 98 on it, then I got Windows 2000. Once school started my programming class was with Perl. We had to telnet into a UNIX machine. Working in Unix got me wanting to try Linux again. So I installed ALT Linux on my laptop. It didn't go well. The sound didn't work and the mouse did quirky things. So, off I went to find another distribution that might suite my needs. I instantly found Mandrake 10.0 and gave it a try. It worked great and it even detected my mouse pads scroll section. It, however, still didn't work with the sound card off installation (though I did eventually get it working) but it ran very stable, and everything else worked great. I enjoyed Mandrake very much and using telnet in the console of Mandrake was much easier than using it in Windows.
I continued to use Mandrake heavily all year. The spring semester I worked a lot with C++ and had to use ssh a lot. Linux was very handy for this. That following summer though, I got tired of KDE. It was to bloated for my laptop. Eventually I settled down on IceWM. It was very light, easy to configure, was in Mandrake's package manager and could be setup how I wanted. Now my laptop ran loaded much faster and ran better.
Now I was to the point where I used Linux more than Windows. I would do everything on my Laptop that I could. The only time I used my desktop was when I wanted to play games.
Now came my Senior year. I was using and loving Mandrake. I made friends with some freshman and they were excited about the new release of Ubuntu. Now, I'd been using Linux for a while, but I'd never done much looking at what the other distributions had. I was pretty much just looking and keeping updated with, what at this point was Mandriva. So, they installed Ubuntu and showed me all of its simplicity. After seeing it, and Gnome, I wanted it. I like its package manager way better than Mandriva's and its hardware detection was supposed to also be very good.
So, I eventually made the switch from Mandriva 2006 to Ubuntu 5.10. It was a complete success. I loved it. Gnome ran just as well as IceWM on my laptop, but looked and felt so much better. I've now been using Ubuntu for over a year and its hard for me to even think about trying another distributions.Ubuntu has such a large user base that there are so many applications that are easily accessible without having to worry about dependencies.
Currently I'm running Ubuntu 6.06 on my desktop and laptop and my server (the server has Ubuntu Server Edition) and am loving every minute of it.
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