Asklemmy

DOS. Not sure what version, I was far too young to care. But not so young I couldn’t learn how to operate a command line interface!

In high school I got my hands on an old Sun workstation with Solaris, and eventually after a week or so of compiling switched to Gentoo

Windows 1998 on a Pentium2. First linux distro was Ubuntu, uh....8.04 I think ? That was much later.

First OS: MS-DOS, I reckon around v3 - was running on an IBM XT PC.

First Linux distro: Slackware, came on a CD-ROM on the front of a PC magazine.

Windows 3.11

Sinclair Basic on my ZX81 with 1k ram. My first personal linux distro was Redhat 5.2. I used VAXVMS at work.

C64 -> MS-DOS 3 -> 4DOS -> Win 95 -> Win 2000 -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> chaotic smattering of various distros that changed almost weekly -> Mint -> Arch -> Manjaro -> MXLinux -> SteamOS (SteamDeck), Rasbian.

MS DOS v4.somthing. (1995)

Slackware that came on three 5.25" floppies. (1997)

First hard drive Linux: Debian.

Eventually red hat for several years, then back to Debian based (mint etc) around 2005. Been using Sid (Debian "unstable") for a long time.

My desktop OS history:

1. Windows 98
2. Windows XP
3. Windows Vista
4. Windows 7
5. Ubuntu
6. Linux Mint
7. Antergos
8. Arch Linux
9. NixOS

I've used others, but not enough to warrant a place in the list above.

My first OS was Apple OS and what the NCR's ran in 1978. My favorite game was snipes on Netware in 1986? My first OS distribution via retail box was windows 1.0. My first Linux distribution was FreeBSD 2.0 er wait.... My first Linux distribution was Debian 1.1 buzz on 3/5" floppies.

If you could call it an OS, ZX spectrum basic was my first. My first Linux was Slackware 6 or 7 installed from a string of floppies. Good times.

DOS -> win95 -> win98 -> debian (and i'm still here 24 years later...)

Desktop: Windows XP

Linux: Probably Raspbian on a Pi 2 b

Tech has come a long way since then lol

DOS s.u.s.e. 4.x or 5.x

Briefly some form of DOS on an Amstrad PC when I was very young, then Windows 95

My first Linux was a few years later with Mandrake IIRC, which I dual booted with Windows 98SE

Been running combinations of Linux and windows since then, with MacOS getting involved in the 2010's too

First operating system I ever used was probably Windows XP, first Linux distro was probably either Ubuntu or Puppy Linux on an old laptop (I remember trying out the Ubuntu web demo back in like 2014.)

Hmmmm Amsdos on an early amstrad CPC machine

First I put real time on would have been the Atari TOS, man those machines where the biz at the time!!

Windows 98, Windows XP, Ubuntu 6.06, some other distros on and off, Arch Linux is the last OS I would ever need for desktop PC btw

Windows 98 and Ubuntu

PC-DOS on an IBM 5150 (iirc).

Windows XP

Windows Vista on my old family desktop.

First Linux distro, if it counts, was the Raspberry Pi OS

my first was windows for workgroups 3.11 with msdos 6.22 back in 1994; later upgraded to windows 95.

my first linux as mandrake linux (aka mandriva) in 2002 on kernel 2. i use linux fulltime now and no longer own a windows computer.

First OS, WinXP.

Later when win7 was discontinued, I kept windows 10 on my desktop and Ubuntu on my laptop. It wasnt until Valve started working on proton and most of the games I play became playable on Linux that I ditched windows entirely.

I distrohopped around for a while, but always found myself landing back on Ubuntu, so it's what I've stuck with to this day, although if anyone else asks me what distro they should get, I will usually recommend mint.

First OS: Win 95 (As a wee lad). First Linux: early lubuntu and backtrack that I used in college around 08-09.

First os: technically the Wii's os and android

First Linux: Ubuntu 16.04 (I remember it like it was yesterday 🥲)

Windows 3.1, 98SE, XP, 7, 8.1, 10 and now 11.

I did once use Ubuntu for a few weeks but this was after someone at school goaded me into acquiring a copy of Norton PartitionMagic to try and merge two awkwardly partitioned drives on my computer, which then nuked my C:\ partition. I didn't have a backup copy of Windows XP to reinstall from so I had to go open source.

Needless to say, we didn't remain friends after that.

Personal computer? Windows 3, I believe, but worked on computer earlier than that by a couple of years - I'm not sure what OS, it was maintained by this old guy named, no kidding, Mr. Fox. Had a rudimentary spreadsheet program.

My first Linux distro was Ubuntu 5.04 that I got from a free magazine cd from my university.

First OS: Windows ME (shudders)

First Linux distro: Some random one designed to run on Netbooks (Couldn't get wireless to work if I remember correctly)

TOS

Amiga back when you booted off floppies.

Then I guess ms-dos for pc.

For Linux I got a box set for redhat from compusa in 99 and learned from there.

My first OS was most likely DR DOS 3.41

For my daily driver desktop PCs that was followed by

• MS-DOS 5.0
• Windows 3.11
• Windows 98 SE
• Windows XP
• Windows 7
• Windows 10

On the linux side, I got started with Gentoo, experimented with several lightweight distributions for an old laptop and had a Mint VM for a few years. These days I run Ubuntu on a couple of servers and in WSL. Never got around to using it as my main desktop OS.

For university I had (in order) an iBook G3, a MacBook and a MacBook Pro, so you can add most of macOS 10.x to that list.

Technically (but only very technically as we basically never used them and they were obsolete at the time already) it would have been a version of Acorn MOS but realistically it was Windows 3.1.

First OS was DOS (I think) on an Apple IIE at school. I think there were a few Commodore 64’s there as well. A couple years later we got our first home computer running Windows 95. Good times playing Doom, Jane’s Apache, an MS Flight Simulator.

My first personal computer was running Windows XP and I switched to Ubuntu sometime in 2004. Ran Ubuntu for the most part till a few months ago when I switched my desktop and laptop to NixOS.

Started self hosting services in 2012 and started with Ubuntu as base OS. Now though most of my servers are Proxmox with the VMs usually running Ubuntu LTS, though NixOS is starting to creep in there as well.

For Linux I started with Wubi to install Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. It installed Linux as a program in Windows and added some kind of hacky boot entry to boot into Ubuntu from your windows partition. Pretty cool, and I'm still pretty nostalgic for the GNOME 2 aesthetic with compiz effects from that time.

MS DOS 2.11.

First OS: TRSDOS 1.3

First Linux distro: Slackware 4

Probably some version of DOS, I can't remember. First Linux distro was Fedora Core 4.

Commodore64 for first OS, taught myself to type and then taught myself BASIC on that beast.

I honestly do not know what my first Linus distro was, whatever was on the machines in the CS half of the computer lab in college. First one I installed myself was Ubuntu, but I abandoned it almost immediately in favor of another distro that I also don't remember.

Well, this sets a new level of recent here judging by the comments.

Desktop OS: Linux Mint 20 MATE. Yep, that's right. I only got my first proper computer in 2020.
Thankfully, I had to install the OS myself, which was of course preceded by choosing an OS.
I had Windows 10 on that laptop for 2 days which served me to compare different OSs and burn the install DVD. I had no flash drives, and just dug out one old DVD-RW. OK, I'll be honest, hearing about Linux first I was searching for "just Linux", pure Linux, not derivatives. Oh well, GNU+Linux copypasta actually being helpful.

Alright, but why did I "have" to install an OS if I got it with Windows? It was used. I did reset it, but even though it was my first proper PC, I had no lack of paranoia. I thought that someone before me could have put spyware on that.
And I was right. Not the way I thought, but I was. That someone was Microsoft.