I'm loving all of these stories, and I'm really surprised by how many folks are in the "using Linux exclusively for 10 to 15 years" bracket (I am, too - started with Kubuntu 14 years ago, moved to Xubuntu a year later, and have stuck with it ever since). There's a lot more variety than I expected.

Came from C64, the DOS/Win3.11 and later Win95 on a Packard Bell 486SX 25 Mhz. My first PC that I owned myself was an Escom Pentiun 60 with Windows 95. After that I got an IBM Aptiva Pentium 200 MMX. I believe that one also ran Win95 but I upgraded to 98 at that time. After that I ran AMD systems. First a Duron and after that an Athlon. Those were Win 2000 machines.

And I believe there is where my interest in Linux started. I have used Mandrake Linux KDE for the longest time but also used Suse but switched to Fedora when it released. Still using it today.

It was a hobby to compile KDE and installing it on a bare system. Also did a gentoo install for fun. But most of the time I was busy getting games to run through WINE. Spent hours on winehq analyzing other people's logs and adding mine.

Dual booted with windows, first 7, then 10, for a while to test things out before trying them under Linux.

Then came Proton along and I found that I just wasn't booting into Windows anymore. So I decided to reclaim the space.

I bought back many of my old computers, as well as others I could never own, because they are retro now. At this time I have three C64s, an Amiga500, Sgi Indy, Dell XPS 720, PS3 slim, Nintendo WII, and an IBM Aptiva AMDK6-2. The last one was in an unused state and I couldn't pass it up.

So technically I still run windows in a way, just not on my main machines.

Quoting: PenglingI'm loving all of these stories, and I'm really surprised by how many folks are in the "using Linux exclusively for 10 to 15 years" bracket (I am, too - started with Kubuntu 14 years ago, moved to Xubuntu a year later, and have stuck with it ever since). There's a lot more variety than I expected.

We're all secretly old, lol.
But I will give a lot of credit to Ubuntu back then too.

Quoting: denyasisWe're all secretly old, lol.

No secret about it here - I'm almost in my 40s, haha! Seen plenty of generations of computers and consoles, started with the former for gaming, moved to the latter, and most recently ended up back on computers again.

On that note, a Commodore 64 C was my first computer (1990), then I was forced to use Windows out of necessity but never got on with it (1996), then moved to Mac OS X during its 10.3 days which was a nice introduction to the conventions of Unix/Unix-likes (2004) while waiting for Linux laptop support to get to where I wanted it to be, then finally got myself over to Linux on a ThinkPad (2008) right after the Asus Eee PC hit and brought a lot of attention to Linux. I've enjoyed trouble-free computing ever since, and now I'm finding the same with gaming, too!

Last edited by Pengling on 7 August 2022 at 3:53 pm UTC

Yup we're old but we're not obsolete

Was already gaming since 96 on the PC with windows 95 until Vista disaster. Vista was the reason (BSODs and not enough customization options for desktop) i made the switch to Linux back in 2007. Never looked back. Back then i pretty much only played World of Warcraft, which worked fine under linux also with the help of wine, so i had no trouble with switching. There were always plenty of games to play under Linux. Native or with the help of wine, so i didn't really have problems with it. These days it's too many games. Hard to choose what to play :).

Last edited by Xpander on 8 August 2022 at 7:43 am UTC

Late February this year marked my 20 years since the big change. Which practically meant I switched my primary boot to Linux (and also switched my keyboard to the Dvorak layout). Did very limited gaming before that and not much after that either. Which also meant that my next PC upgrade two years later meant I had no more windows partition either. So really, I didn't get "into Linux gaming" at all. :) However, gaming got into Linux and I kind of jumped on it. First with a couple of LGP games and later when Steam jumped on the Linux train I actually started buying powerful GPUs to do so.

I was dealing with Windows 98 SE issues back in 1999/2000. There was a mod for UT99 called Silent Hunter. It was a assassin game where you got points for killing your intended target but negative points for killing the wrong target. t was renamed a few times. I was at a LAN center and UT99 just kept on crashing as it had been doing. Anyway, at the LAN center the only ppl not crashing were Linux users. So I joined up the LUG in my area and they helped me install Slackware and also helped me install UT99 and bunch of other games. Soon after I got into Lindows/Linspire and dumped Windows entirely around 2001. Have not used Windows since. Found a job around that same time that was all Linux based been at that job since around that time also.

Last edited by Mezron on 8 August 2022 at 11:25 am UTC

My history of gaming extends back to the early 1980s micros, and I then took the MS-DOS and Windows route for many years. I'd been tinkering with Linux on and off for a while, but in 2006 I installed OpenSUSE and accidentally deleted my Windows partition! Couldn't be bothered to rebuild it and stuck with Linux ever since. My primary game at that time was TES: Oblivion and it worked on Linux using Cedega so I was stoked :-)

Windows 8 being terrible got me interested in alternatives. It started with running a seperate system with Linux but I quickly realized I wasn't going to learn how to use it properly unless I made it my daily driver. Windows 10 being just as terrible as Windows 8 combined with my finding out just how bad Windows was for privacy and security sealed my fate and I moved to Linux full time. That was in 2015 and I haven't looked back. I have gone further down the rabbit hole and am trying to stick to mainly FOSS games and run gaming systems that have as little in the way of black boxes and closed source blobs as I can. So far I have gotten rid of the Intel ME and AMD PSP from my life, my next goals are to have a gaming system that I can run the Libre kernel on.