Yes, im doing le funy Meme. And yes, I am an autist, with some signs towards something adhd adjacent
I first tried Linux Mint when I was 12, eventually changed to Ubuntu when I was 13 or 14 because I saw the Windows 11 copilot button, installed arch at late 14, and got to gentoo when I was 15.
Can anyone beat me to it?
Around '99 or '00. A friend of mine was gifted a Linux Magazine subscription and made me a copy of the CD. It was noteworthy at the time because it didn’t have any copy protection and we were neck deep in piracy, keeping our friend group supplied with copies of games that we pulled off of IRC.
Getting a CD full of software that made no effort to prevent copying was intriguing enough that we sacrificed a spare machine one weekend (giving up the ability to play LAN StarCraft!) to see what another operating system looked like.
We tinkered on and off for a year, once we could get dual boot working (thanks to the IRC crowd) we used it a bit more often. Mostly ricing, though that wasn’t a term at the time, and playing with the hacking tools (for educational purposes only, of course).
I think there was some copy protection mode that was annoying to write on Windows but trivially easy on Linux, which was the first time that I can remember where it was just better than Windows. That, and ARP poisoning our LAN parties to packet capture and read people’s AIM and ICQ conversations because we were little shits.