What was your path to Kubuntu?

[SteveRiley]

When Microsoft decided in May 2009 that it no longer needed me, I decided that I no longer needed them. For the first time in my life I had to purchase my own computer; when it arrived I immediately wiped the drive and installed Ubuntu, suspecting it to be the "beginner's Linux." I was able to use it as my primary OS at work when I joined Amazon Web Services. I actually stayed away from KDE-based distros because I didn't want a Windows-like experience. GNOME 2 was really a decent UI. But when Unity appeared, I knew I'd have to find something else. UIs designed for two-dimensional surfaces such as tablets utterly fail when used in three-dimensional settings with vertical display devices and horizontal input devices.

I tried various non-Debianish distros but didn't relish the (re)learning curve. With time having softened most of my anti-Redmond rage, I decided to give Kubuntu another look. It had matured quite a lot during the two years since I last dabbled with it. I had also come to realize that KDE is the graphical equivalent of a command prompt: you can do everything with it and, yes, sometimes you have to embark on a small expedition to find out how. I consider that to be a feature

Amazon turned out not to be the best fit for me and when I was recruited by Riverbed Technology, I jumped in January 2011. Little did I know, then, that my investment in learning Linux would be useful: all our products are Linux-based; my experience has allowed me to contribute at work in ways that would otherwise have not been possible.

Figuring that online communities are great places to learn, I joined the forum here in July 2011. In October I was invited to be part of the administrator team. In June 2012 I joined the Kubuntu team, and in October 2012 received a scholarship to attend what turned out to be the last in-person Ubuntu Developer Summit, in Copenhagen.

[GerardV]

I am a bit of a late starter, i suppose. My first computer was an Amiga 500, bought secondhand in '91 with a whole 1Mb of ram!
I later expanded the system by adding an external floppy drive and i had myself one hell of a PC!
My second one was a 386 DX put together from odds and ends, one of which was, at the time, an enormous 500 Mb SCSI Seagate HDD running trough an Adaptec SCSI card the size of your nowadays average tablet. One of the PC magazines i was reading at the time always had a Linux section in it and it peaked my interest. I cannot exactly remember how it happened, but i ended with Mandrake on that pc and remember being very impressed. At the time it was difficult to get all the hardware to work, such as printers, modems etc.
So i dabbled backwards and forwards between MS, Mandrake, and Suze as i recall, untill i stumbled upon Kubuntu, i cannot remember exactly which version but it had KDE 3.5 and i absolutely loved it. I then ditched MS and just run with Linux. But when Kubuntu switched to KDE 4, with less than spectacular results, i found myself drifting back to MS as i just didn't (and still don,t) like Gnome, no matter how productive it is. About 4 years ago i decided to give Kubuntu another go and was really impressed the way KDE had matured.
Tried Opensuze and PClinux for a while, but i much prefer the Debian package management so went back to Kubuntu, and since about 12 months, just single booting and have no intention or reason to move.

[phonic-otg]

My path to Kubuntu is long.

I'd started with school pc's with floppy drive though at home we had an Amstrad pc with tape drive when I was 14/15 in '85 and was learning to write basic goto stuff when my step father took away the pc (because I got in trouble with the law and he was a prick to me all my life delighting in making me miserable) this made me mad enough to leave school/home in 86 and had not touched another till I had set myself up elsewhere.

My next exposure to the computing world was on a 386 with win 3.0 at TAFE, when I decided to return to school in 1990; No longer up with programming I was taught desktop publishing Software and very early word plus a little bit of excel.

From 1990-94, not being able to afford my own pc, a friend allowed me to rummage through the file structure of his, occasionally. With the opening of each folder came the delight of discovering file types etc which he would elaborate on what they did. I soon was working in '94 for a very small finance office on the phones and convinced the owner to move to pc and printer as he was still typing with a manual typewriter. We set it up and he bought win 3.11 with word and the Ventura Desktop Publishing software. This is when I started to also work in nightclubs assisting the lighting tech and learning how to programme effects on lighting consoles.

I finally bought a Pentium Mmx with win '95 in the summer of '96/7 (Aussie summers are at the end/beggining of the year) second hand from a friend on a payment plan and began learning how to set up email and started surfing the web.

Landing a Job at local council (city hall for US friends) in the summer of '97/8 in the Records department. IT were in the process of upgrading their pc's to Pentium2 and software to Win '98 as soon as it was released. I had to leave in 2000 after state restructure of local gov, as well being disgusted at how council operated the recycling programme ie: still burning it (they finally caught up with the times in 2006.).

In 2002 finding myself poor again I decided to volunteer at "computer bank" in Melbourne for a short time. THAT'S where I was first introduced to Linux (KDE- with Debian bits) and told in no uncertain terms that its not dee bian but deb ian as in deborah and ian mashed together. They generously gave me a pentium2 for my time there. I had put the KDE software on my pc from their servers at computerbank. That PC got stolen not long after. Finding myself back to purchasing second hand computers from a friend again, this one a Pentium3 with ME. I then decided to build my own PC a P4 AMD and try loading the kde version I got from computerbank. Being a real greeeeeen noob I screwed it up at home and went to one of the few local pc stores that dealt in Linux where I was convinced to purchase Xandros for $60 (it did come with a manual) which I dual booted with xp.

A childhood friend came back into my life and gave me an Ubuntu Hardy Heron install disk which I tried, it was gnome. I then discovered Kubuntu Karmic Koala which I preferred and have not looked back.