What was your path to Kubuntu?

[oshunluvr]

Ok, more info: 1980's - brief stint with an Apple II, switched to PC's, never liked MS Windows, loved OS/2, 1990's - it died, looked for alternative, Mandrake 7-8-9, PCLinuxOS, Kubuntu.

Dabbled with about 10 other distros but none of them stuck. OpenSUSE, Fedora, Sabayon, Arch (for like a minute), etc...

[oshunluvr]

Honestly, Kubuntu is currently the best of many worlds: Debian package management, KDE (I never could stand Gnome and the other DEs weren't cool or functional enough), good community, TONS of packages, close enough to the bleeding edge without getting a fatal wound.

I there were a distro out there that did all the above, I'd consider it.

[jlittle]

Professionally, CP/M, Unix, Vax VMS, back to Unix (mostly HP-UX and IBM AIX), linux in an Agile shop where every developer had to use the exact same set up and the same login, with the Gnome DE, but I found KDE was also installed, and no-one else used it, so it was ok for me to... <hush>change settings! And I was hooked. Looked around for well supported distro with KDE for home, and through a friend found Kubuntu.

Regards, John Little

[GreyGeek]

Was using SuSE from ver 5.3 in the fall of 1998 because it was released with KDE 1.0 Beta. Stayed with it until Novell bought it. Tried Knoppix, Mandrake, LibraNet, PCLinuxOS, and then Mandriva for a year or two. Had problems with 3D and getting Stellarium to display properly. Was working with the xorg guy to get the i815 driver to work properly (Mandriva automatically selected that driver.) Saw a story about Kubuntu switching to KDE 4 with their 9.04 release and tried out the alpha. It chose the i915 driver and Stellarium was well behaved. The Kubuntu 9.04 Alpha was Mandriva release quality. (Mandriva was having financial difficulties). I switched in Feburary of 2009 and stayed every since.

[Rod J]

From the beginning: I first became interested in computers around 1982 with the introduction at work of a Compugraphic EditWriter typesetting machine (I'm originally a typesetter by trade ... a Linotype operator). I was fascinated by the technology at that time, the EditWriter used huge 8 inch single sided floppy discs that stored a whopping 160Kb. When I had saved enough I bought my first PC a TRS80 clone (Dick Smith System 80) using LS-DOS (I think) with two 5.25 floppy drives. Next PC was a Commodore XT compatible running MS-Dos 3.3 and it had a huge 10Mb hard drive! When you think back to those days it seems incredible how small (in memory, permanent storage and CPU performance) those systems were! Then I bought a Celeron 500 PC running Windows 98 and soon after I had a look at Red Hat 6.4 via a CD that came with a book about Linux (still got the book). I dual booted with that for a short while then discovered Mandrake. I dual booted Win98/Mandrake for some time.

My brother thought I was crazy playing around with Linux back then (still does!). I remember live booting Knoppix at that time also (first time I had seen a Debian based distro and I was quite impressed with APT over .rpm). Next PC (still my current main machine a Core2-Duo 1.86Ghz with Windows XP). More recently I discovered Ubuntu 8.04, then 9.04, 10.04 LTS (all clean installs) and dual booting with WinXP. While using 9.04 I started using Linux more than WinXP and by the time I got 10.04 I had decided to switch to Ubuntu as my main os. Then Unity came along and I tried to like it but couldn't ... discovered Kubuntu 11.04 and loved it! KDE has sure improved heaps since the Mandrake days :-).

I'm sticking with Kubuntu 12.04 LTS till the next LTS comes along or I get new hardware. Although I still have WinXP on this PC I very rarely boot into it.

[NickStone]

...When you think back to those days it seems incredible how small (in memory, permanent storage and CPU performance) those systems were!

The important thing is they worked, very very rarely crashed (if they crashed at all)

[NickStone]

...When you think back to those days it seems incredible how small (in memory, permanent storage and CPU performance) those systems were!

The important thing is they worked, very very rarely crashed (if they crashed at all)

[Detonate]

My experience with Linux began in 2006. At that time, I was given a broken computer, I can't remember what. I already had a computer running XP. I determined the broken computer had both a bad hard drive and something was wrong with the motherboard. The computer had been running Win98. I got the hardware repaired but I did not have and OS for it. I can't remember how I heard about Linux, but I decided to give it a try. After all, it was free, what could I lose? So I ordered the CDs of Fedora 4 as I was still on dial-up at the time. I almost abandoned the project being totally mystified by the installation procedure, but I persevered. During the install I chose KDE as my desktop. I got a lot of help from the Fedora forum or I would have given up, but i did get everything up and running. I don't remember when I switched to Kubuntu, but I did it just to try it out. I discovered that I much preferred apt over yum, and that is what caused me to completely switch over. I have played around with many other distros since then, but I always seem to come back to Kubuntu. I left Kubuntu for quite a while and switched to Ubuntu when KDE 4 came. I am finally getting the hang of KDE4, but I still fondly remember Kubuntu 8.04 as one of the greaest distros ever.

[oldos2er]

In a word, Unity. I'd briefly looked at Kubuntu when KDE 4.0 first came out, but it was not really ready for prime time then, in my opinion. When Ubuntu went to Unity as the default desktop, I switched to Kubuntu and have been mostly happy with it. I did take a couple small detours to try Opensuse and Netrunner though.

Edit: Evidently I didn't go back in time far enough. First home PC we owned was a 386SX with, um DOS 2 or 3, dont' really remember. That was 1990. Kept upgrading hardware and software, had a 486 with Win 3.1 around the end of 1993 when I decided there had to be something better than Win 3.1 around. Found OS/2, used it for many years. After a failed attempt to install Slackware around 1996 or so I gave up on Linux until installing Ubuntu in 2007, and I've used Linux exclusively since.

[Teunis]

In the early 70's I worked in the electrical maintenance dept. of a factory making large marine diesel engines.
They had a mainframe and the closest I came was changing light bulbs in the ceiling of the air-conditioned room.
I did notice the two data typists were by far the prettiest things around the whole plant, something I've since associated with computers in general.

In the late 70's - early 80's I was working internationally and with small computers running some form of HP and Unix for data logging, it did not excite me, it was just work.
I did like the opportunities given/forced by the remote locations to do my own software maintenance.

Then I moved to a company running a data logging system with OS9 Unix http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS9
It used something called µmacs as editor and after a bugfix we could compile our own new version of the software.

For some daft reason they decided to recompile everything to NT3.5 and from then on we lost the ability to fix problems 'in the field'.
The system is presently running on Win7.
Reporting software was developed to run on Win3.0 and that's what we're still stuck with, 16bits...

At that time (win3.1) I decided to buy my own computer, a 66 MHz Pentium I.

A year later I upgraded to Win95 and had problems with various Windows applications, one of our IT guys said what I wanted was possible in X.
So I got a CD with RH4.2, because of better ease of use I quickly upgraded to 5 and 5.2

Windows remained my main OS, especially XP worked for most applications OK.
I tried the various Linux desktops of the day and had on all one major issue, copy and past between applications did not really work.
Until I realised KDE did have such integration.

Around 2003 I got myself a Toshiba laptop dual booting XP and RH6.2.
When Red Hat decided to move to Fedora I was having serious issues getting it to run on the laptop and checked out other distro's.
The one with least HW compatibility issues was Knoppix and I tried to install it, resulting in a Debian with KDE.
The switch from rpm/yum to deb was a great experience!
Soon I heard about a new distro called Ubuntu, Gnome was the disjointed crap I remembered from other distro's so I went with Kubuntu.

Since about 2005 I hardly ever boot up Windows, only my TomTom navigator needs it for updates, I have tried to do it from a VM but found the USB connection troublesome.
On my primary laptop I always keep two installs of Kubuntu, the last 'stable' and the present (13.10) because I like tinkering.

After a disastrous experience with a first generation iMAC (OS-8&9) the GF has always had Linux on her computers, since the advent of Kubuntu that's what she is using, presently on an HP all-in-one with a touch screen.
I have an old PIII Packard Bell Le Diva in use as a fancy picture frame, it's running Kubuntu in 192 MB of RAM!
It even runs Thunderbird.

[tek_heretik]

@Teunis...I get a kick out of your profile pic, I'm never sure if it's your av or one of the tiny red ants this apartment building is plagued with crawling on my monitor screen, lol.

[Teunis]

Don't remind me of the bug, last week I was in Italy and shared a hotel room with a family of fleas, I have the scars to show...

[Simon]

I was raised in a "Windows" house, meaning that my father played a pivotal role in selecting the OS. I recall Windows 95/98 and then we jumped directly into XP as soon as it came out. I never cared for Vista and at the time I was into other things. By the time I started college, I began looking at Linux for special projects and needed a cheap effective OS. I dual booted XP/Kubuntu for almost 2 years before I completely dropped the XP. Mainly my XP took a dump one day and I lost data, then I couldn't get the XP to register something went wrong with my OEM key. Enough was enough so I saved as much as I could using Linux Kubuntu CD and went with the full install instead of the dual boot.

Everyone kept saying that Linux is something for geeks with neck beards. I might be a geek, I am no programmer. I am a medical college intern majoring in genetics. When I tell all my friends at college and the hospital they think I am some computer guru. But far from it, I have told them it is less painless to run any Linux distro over Windows any day of the week.

[charles052]

I used to be a power user. My computers worked like dogs and Windows was not up for the challenge. Tired of constantly having to reinstall and fixing Winblows, I decided to try Linux. Went with Ubuntu for a while, starting at 7.10. I liked it well enough, but it wasn't as functional as windows (or at least I didn't think it was, I was still a newb and didn't know all the programs Linux had available).

I tried a few other distros before finally settling with Kubuntu. Don't remember what gave me the urge to try it out, but I love it. It just works! Yeah, I have to do a little more than Windows to get some things the way I want them, but when it's done, it's usually done and I never have to worry about it again. The only exception is flash. I have to reinstall it manually after each update, but that's no biggie.

The last thing on my bug list is finding a way to convert .264 and matroska (mkv) video files to dvd without hassle. So far, I get nothing but disaster from screwy aspect ratios, choppy playback (leading to freeze ups), to unsynchronized audio. I'm using avidemux and it seems to do okay, but audio sync is the biggest issue with it.

Oh, and I'm still a Windows user. My laptop runs 7, but I only use it when I'm on the road. When I'm home, it's usually sitting collecting dust.

[MoonRise]

DOS 3.0 - yada, yada, yada, - Kubuntu!

Well said!