Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Taking advantage of your call for personal stories, I'm sending you mine. It was back in December 1997, when I was on my mandatory 18-month tour in the Army (I'm Greek and still to this day there is a mandatory tour for all Greek males, although it's 9 months now). During a training break, I was talking with another guy who had, prior to his tour, finished his master’s in Computer Science from a university in the USA (don't recall which). We were talking about the impact the then new Windows 95 had on PCs, and I was whining because I still owned a 486DX/33MHz PC which couldn't run Windows 95.
So he said “try Linux”. “What's that?” I asked (intrigued by the very name). He started to talk about it, mentioning how it is a Unix-like OS (I had previous experience with Unix on a VAX machine back in my university years), very light, and that my humble hardware would be perfect for it.
On my next leave, I went to a friend who was still in the university (back on those days only universities had good internet access in Greece, dial-up connections were still at 14400 bps), and downloaded a distro in about 8 or 9 floppies. I think it was Slackware or Debian, not sure. Got home, did the installation, and a couple of hours later—through an agonizing 2nd install because of mistaken configurations—I saw a login screen! It took me all three days of my leave to read just the essential texts to get some idea but that was it: I was hooked for life.
Although because of work (I'm a computer technician), I was forced to have a Windows machine at home, I always used a GNU/Linux OS on my old hardware; at the start an Athlon XP 2000, later a P4/3.0GHz; but since I got laid off (damn Greek Crisis) three years ago, I use a GNU/Linux OS on my main PC too. I have used Slackware, Debian, Suse, openSuse, Mint, Redhat, Fedora, Mandrake, Mageia. and, of course, Ubuntu. Usually I had two or three distros at a time on different hdds for comparison. Although Debian is still my favorite flavor, I really love Ubuntu's LTS versions and I think they are the best distro a beginner can use because of the fact that you will use roughly the same version for two, maybe three, years—enough time for a beginner to become an advanced user. I think that the features of Ubuntu that beginners really like are the easy update process, the fact that the root account is locked—leading to fewer mistakes for an inexperienced user—and the vast number of applications available.