Where do you guys come from? Or why is this place special?

[Fintan]

I have been on various forums (mepis, mint, debian, suse, mandrake, pclinux, etc.) for quite a while.

And the Kubuntu / *ubuntu forums just beat the... out of all of them.
Friendly, useful, helpful, and fun.

Great to be a part of this party

[aged hippy]

Re: Where do you guys come from? Or why is this place special?

I have been on various forums (mepis, mint, debian, suse, mandrake, pclinux, etc.) for quite a while.

And the Kubuntu / *ubuntu forums just beat the... out of all of them.
Friendly, useful, helpful, and fun.

Great to be a part of this party

Damn Right!

It's the only (OS) Forum i keep on coming to.

[freedom2009]

Re: Where do you guys come from? Or why is this place special?

Except for briefly trying Ubuntu as a virtual disk on windows XP, Kubuntu is the only Linux version I have used.
Without this forum I would be totally lost.
Every "newbie" question is answered with patience and in terms that anyone can understand
I have read that Kubuntu means "towards humanity", and this forum does a great job of fulfilling that philosophy

ps Kubuntu is the only operating system I have installed on this computer and except for a couple of games I don't miss [b]Windoze[/b] a bit

[dibl]

Re: Where do you guys come from? Or why is this place special?

Let's see ...

Commodore 64 OS LOL -- whatever that was
MS DOS 2,3,5 and 6 I think
Win 3, Win 95, Win 98, XP and I've been playing a little with the Win 7 Beta
OS/2 and OS/2 Warp
SCO Unix 386, back in the day, on a 486/33 PC

Linux --
- Kubuntu 6.06 was first, and continues in 9.04
- Ubuntu 7.04 for six months
- Fedora for about 3 weeks
- Mepis for a few months
- slax for about a day
- bt3 for an hour LOL
- sidux for 2+ years now

You'd think I'd learn something along the way .... :P

But, I've never found a friendlier forum, yet with really knowledgeable folks too.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Where do you guys come from? Or why is this place special?

Well, most are from Alpha Centuri, but there are a few Alpha Proxima folks here too. It's just that their FTL ships are not as good as the Alpha's.

They are special here because:
1) They never give you the "RTFM" treatment, and
2) No matter how many times a question is asked they realize that for the one who asks it is his first time.
3) There's hot geekettes on this forum who know their Linux!
4) Dibl

[dibl]

Re: Where do you guys come from? Or why is this place special?

4) Dibl

THANKS, GG!

But the ones who actually know what they are talking about are Rog131, claydoh, kubicle, detonate, arochester, mando_hacker and prolly some more I'm not remembering. Fintan has his good days too, when the meds are working ....

[Qqmike]

Re: Where do you guys come from? Or why is this place special?

I agree with your list, dibl (except Detonate gets an upper case "D" -- not nagging, just that I'm obsessive ), along with many more who have been jumping in with good Linux/Kubuntu know-how to help out:
Imilano, vinnywright, The Liquidator, kevinc, Telengard, and others I'm not hitting on just now (am bad at names, including my own).
Lots of folks becoming active in Linux it seems.



As for Linux, I've tried ten or so, not remembering as such, but Kubuntu, Ubuntu, sidux, Mepis, Mint, and ? (I'd have to check the list at distrowatch), but my vote goes to Kubuntu and sidux so far (for what I need an OS to do these days). This is the only OS forum I've really been regularly active at. Great, friendly place to hang out!

[dibl]

Re: Where do you guys come from? Or why is this place special?

Bahhhhhhhh -- I forgot the maestro of Grub maneuvers and USB stick installations!

Hats off to Qqmike, one of our great resources -- sorry Mike!

[Ole Juul]

Re: Where do you guys come from? Or why is this place special?

Fintan has obviously been around (other places too) for a while so he ought to know. I'm new around here but got a good feeling right away. I tend to make commitments, so I'll probably be around for a long time - hopefully people will be able to put up with my eccentricity and general ignorance. lol I'll certainly make an effort to get along.

- Ole

[lmilano]

Re: Where do you guys come from? Or why is this place special?

Nice questions: what makes this places special, I think, is that we treat each other like friends, I love how freedom2009 put it.

Where I come from:

* Circa - 1995/1997: Solaris (yuck) and Slackware. All tgz: make; make install and such. Mostly hell, but a free (libre) Unix, wtf!
* 1998-2001 or so: Red Hat. Wow, a real company behind and a package format! (RPM)
* 2002-2003: Mandriva. Wow, RedHat + a great KDE desktop + Control Centre + URPMI (Like Apt-Get)
* 2004 or so to present: Kubuntu. I switched mostly because of the popularity of Ubuntu and cousins.

I really think Ubuntu has more polish (quite a bit more), but I love KDE, so I put up with the little things and use Kubuntu.

I have also used Knoppix a lot for testing/repair stuff before Live CD's became rightly the norm (few people acknowledge the enormous contribution of Knoppix).

I never used proper Debian, the mother of all

And I must say I have great respect for Red Hat, a huge contributor to Linux in all fronts, and a profitable company which has always been true to the open source spirit.

Another interesting question would be: Why do you volunteer your time helping others? Maybe for another thread

Dibl: you let me out. I'll never forget, LOL.

Cheers!

[Detonate]

Re: Where do you guys come from? Or why is this place special?

I keep coming back to this forum, even though I'm not using KDE much these days, mostly Xubuntu. It's nice to be mentioned, even in lowercase.

I don't get to answer as many questions anymore, because of my lack of experience with KDE4, but I still hang around.

[lmilano]

Re: Where do you guys come from? Or why is this place special?

I should mention (regarding WM) that I used to be a GNOME user during the KDE1.* years. I thought GNOME was nicer at that time, but then KDE2 was a huge leap forward and won me over.

I also, always keep a very light WM around in case something breaks in KDE (or for an ultrafast login). This is icewm for me these days.

[The Liquidator]

Re: Where do you guys come from? Or why is this place special?

Thanks to Mike for the mention

I would call my experience level fairly basic - good enough to keep my system running sweetly but nothing too technical. I work in an environment where, in the main, IT literate means an ability to create a document in MS Word, so I don't know whether in their eyes my limited Linux knowledge makes me a genius, a saddo or a smug ********

My level of expertise means I probably ask as many questions as I answer and those I do answer will be mainly from newcomers. I enjoy the fact I can at least put something back. I came here from Mandriva back in 2006. The trigger point was a KDE upgrade that went wrong where the package authors displayed what could best be described as an elitist attitude. Instead of trying to help, those with problems were treated with derision.

So on a recommendation from the IT guy at the firm at which I was then working, I installed Dapper and I've stayed with kubuntu ever since. Not always been a smooth path but I usually to get an answer here. Whilst I occasionally visit the official ubuntu forum I find it very big and a post can very quickly get lost.

[dibl]

Re: Where do you guys come from? Or why is this place special?

Dibl: you let me out. I'll never forget, LOL.

Man oh man I should have kept my hands off the keyboard!

lmilano, you are a great contributor to this Forum -- thanks for your contributions!


OK, on the subject of "Why?":

I'm a free market advocate and I want to see serious competition once again, for PC operating systems. Technology advancement was rapid during the days of Apple vs. IBM OS/2 vs. Microsoft Windows. It has stagnated since the late-1990s, due to the Microsoft virtual monopoly. I help people on this Forum as my little contribution to the Linux user base, on the hope that it will grow.

[muzicman0]

Re: Where do you guys come from? Or why is this place special?

let's see...I started on Linux because of a promotion at work (data center)...chose a random distro (didn't know anything about linux at the time), and ended up trying Debian. Just couldn't get my nVidia card working, so on the advice of a friend, tried out centOS...for some reason, about 50% of the time, it booted without a GUI...never did figure that one out...then tried Kubuntu (not sure why I chose it, but I loved KDE!)

Have really stayed with Kubuntu since then, except for a brief stint with openSuse.

To be honest, I think it is the forum that has kept me here...nice people, great knowledge.

mm0