I sure do 
not on standard TCP port though.
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I first used UNIX back in 1982, along with VAX VMS (probably the best OS I ever used). I had a few more encounters with UNIX in the 90s and saw a Linux install in the mid 90s, but it seemed very primitive at the time.
I switched to Linux in 2002, because Windows XP was such a pig’s ear! I’ve used it ever since, but with Vista, Windows had played catch-up with Linux and I switched back for my main workstation, mainly because I had to share a lot of Office documents and OpenOffice / LibreOffice leave a lot to be desired, when it comes to sharing documents with MS Office users - formatting goes to hell, for example and line in diagrams aren’t where they are supposed to be or pagination in documents is wrong.
Annoying, when the customer says “look on page 5” and it is page 6 or 7 in your document… Worse was a presentation at one company, the boss tried to save money by using OpenOffice and a client came in with a PowerPoint presentation, the workflows they were showing were totally screwed up on the presentation room PC, as the lines were going to the wrong destinations.
I still use Linux, I have half a dozen different VMs running on my main Windows PC, a Rasberry Pi 3 running Pi-Hole and some Docker containers on my NAS.
At my previous employer, we were 98% Linux - it was an IT security company and only a couple of sales people had Windows PCs.
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Nice, been wanting to do something like that myself, but I feel like I don’t have the networking know-how to do it securely.
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Since the introduction of the .pptx/.docs/.xlsx-formats Microsoft Office and OpenOffice play quite nice together, don’t they? Or is that still an issue?
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Not in my experience. I’m thinking of a recent experience with a 400-plus-page Word document containing embedded Excel tables in different orientation to the Word pages, plus embedded PowerPoints and PDFs. The only way to share editing successfully between a group of people successfully was for everyone to be using MS Office - any edit using another tool would completely mess up the formatting. I don’t doubt that Open Office compatibility is fine for domestic use, but when you go into the world of corporate or legal documents, everyone needs to be editing with the same programs or it all ends up a mess, and the corporate world tends to try to do everything with MS Office, even when it isn’t the best solution…
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Oh, didn’t consider that it might still cause issues when you’re going to the deep end of the pool.
I guess we’ll just have to hope that MS Office will be on Linux one day.
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SoftMaker Office was, ISTR the most compatible non-Microsoft Office pacakge in a recent test. LibreOffice was a fair way behind and OpenOffice came last.
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Softmaker Office seems pretty nice, thanks for the tip 
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It was like 24 -25 years ago when my ISP was about a mile away and I was able to check it out to see how it worked, Was not a big operations kinda a local ISP, they had 2 T1 lines coming in, and 56k modems just came out. Now they ran freebsd on there servers for mail and news groups and web, when I saw there admin pounding away at the keyboard and all kind of stuff scrolling across the screen, I had to know more. He told me unix is better than windows or mac, like when a program crashes (and they did all the time) unix would release that block of memory and keep chugging along, dont forget 4 meg of ram was huge then. He told me to try redhat on my old 486 first before going to that new Pentium. It was a learning curve but enjoyed every bit of it. Not long ago cleaning out the basement threw out tons of cd’s labeled redat, mandrivia, debian, fedora.
But now mostly stick with debian as its always rock solid for me, do have a windows laptop, used mostly during work, but linux is the future.
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Ha! This question brings back memories…
I had an old Toshiba laptop that was getting so slow it was painful. Since it wasn’t my main PC, I decided to give Ubuntu a try. I had never used any type Linux before. This was still rather early days of Ubuntu. I was pretty lost. Eventually I was able to install programs, connect to my internet, retrieve my email but never found a printer driver for my printer and gave up on my HP scanner ever working…even though I supposedly had the right driver for it.
I eventually just faded away from using it. Now, I’m thinking I want to try again. It’s been quite a few years and they’ve improved so much! Plus, I want to play around with various distros. With this forum, I even have a place to ask questions as I don’t know anyone in real life that is a computer geek!
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I started using Debian about eight years ago as sort of a means to an end. I was asked by a friend who did freelance programming work if I wanted to help out, and that was just sort of what he used.
I’m currently like, the internet meme of what a Linux user is. Librebooted ThinkPad running Parabola, with i3 as the window manager and OpenRC as the init system. The more I got into Linux, the more I became a control freak about my system, and all roads lead to this setup.
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In the early 80’s I was programming on HPUX and AT&T Sys V rel 4. On my personal laptop I was stuck with DOS. I first threw MINIX on it then tried Coherent. Then when Linux came out I installed it ( I think the first was slackware). I still needed to use DOS and Windows over the years to support business users but for personal use I’ve always used linux/UNIX/Variant as much as possible.
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I started playing with Linux when I watched @Leo play with Red Hat on The Screensavers many years ago. I continued to experiment with it off and on throughout the years but this year I completely ditched Windows and started using Linux fulltime. The two laptops I use both run Linux Mint. I also have an older desktop that I run Linux Lite on and a home server that runs Debian.
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Bit of a necropost, but I imagine this thread being one of those that will just keep going as folks join the community.
I decided to make Linux my daily driver at home a couple of years ago having dabbled with it years the past. I’m currently running Fedora 31 on my laptop (System76 Lemur), and I dual boot Pop_OS and Windows 10 on my desktop. I prefer Fedora to Pop_OS, but my parents will eventually be getting a System76 laptop and I figured it would be worthwhile to get familiar with Pop_OS myself.
On the professional side, I’m currently training for RHCSA and will eventually be moving into the Linux administration world.
I don’t have a passionate “why,” as far as choosing to use Linux other than liking some the concepts of the open-sources software mentality and “because I can.”
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I use linux as a trouble shooting tool, I think its been 15 years now, I started wt Ubuntu and I use Mint now…
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I started using Linux in December 1999 with suse Linux package and then build a Linux from scratch pc up to command prompt and later to X. Then Mandrake and currently using Ubuntu. Between Mandrake and Ubuntu I have tested about 15 different distros. Few years ago I started using Windows just for music making.
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I started back in the late 90’s with SuSE and Red Hat - switched to Ubuntu a while back and now I’m running Linux Mint on a Lenovo ThinkPad T-420 with a 14” display, 2.3GHz i5, 8GB of Ram, a 500GB HDD, and a DVD drive! This old machine I had in my closet feels like a brand new system running Linux
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I never started with Linux. Linux is new by comparison to Unix. I started on Solaris Unix systems at university in about 1988. I started a new job in the late 90’s and they also used Solaris Workstations for developers. Eventually that employer started using RedHat Linux is some development capacity. Around, say 2004, I probably installed my first Fedora server at home. Fedora version numbers were low single digits back then. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_Linux#Releases)
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Started with a single floppy “pizza router“ must be 20+ years ago. Since then have always had a server somewhere around the house.
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I moved to Linux full time around 5 years ago for my desktop. I do not remember what Microsoft did to upset me now. I use Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on important machines and the current branch 19.10 on day to day machines.
I also run a Steam game server in an Ubuntu VM
The Raspberry Pi’s email and NextCloud servers run Raspbian 9 Stretch until I upgrade to RPI 4s soon.
I still have Windows 10 drives on my main desktop and laptop for testing etc. Also for one game that I play. You can get it to run on Linux but the way the dlls are handled can be detected as cheating, I have read. Other games I play all run natively on Linux or via Steam with Proton.
I did play with Kali Linux years ago when WEP was a thing. I had fun cracking networks and later brute forcing WPS.
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