I tried WinLinux 2000 back in 1999. It was my first experience with linux. It was a small distro that booted from a dos based partition. Oh and it sucked pretty badly. KDE 1.x was so primitive, not only this, but I had no sound, no internet, and my cdrom wasnt detected. My first impression of linux was that it was pretty much useless. Fast forward a little bit and I decide to try out my first full linux distribution. Mandrake 7.2 was supposed to be very good for the newbie at linux, and this time my dual booted box actually had working sound and cdrom. However, I was still a windows user and had a winmodem, so I couldnt get on the internet, and Mandrake 7.2 went pretty much unused, unless I wanted to impress a geeky friend. Now lets move ahead to Oct. 2001.
The news was out, Microsoft Windows XP was supposed to be the next great thing. I was a windows user, so I fully intended on upgrading, until something soured my milk. PRODUCT ACTIVATION. I was able to deal with the constant crashing, the viruses, the huge amounts of other problems I had, but I am a computer technician. I love doing things concerning swapping my hardware, and when I found out that you had to have Microsoft permission to change your network interface card, I nearly wanted to kill them. I am not a software pirate, yet I have to suffer. My mind floated back to that Mandrake 7.2 I had installed on my box but never used. I upgraded to Mandrake 8.1 and I went to the local computer store and bought a hardware modem. At this point in time I started doing everything in linux. I took a class called "Linux Webserver" at the local college and I cleared Windows 98SE off of my hard drive forever.
