I've been a long time Linux user after first being introduced to it in 1997 when I arrived at college. At that time Linux was pretty primitive. Users usually had to setup their own X windows modelines or they would be greeted with low resolution video. Some of the big distributions at the time were RedHat , SuSE, Caldera , Stampede , Slackware , and Debian . Every couple of months I ended up messing something up and breaking the bootloader, kernel or some important libraries. I was mostly using the computer to learn and experiment with so I would re-install with a new distribution each time. I must have tried a more than a half dozen distributions over a few year period. KDE on Debian/Ubuntu Around 2004 or so I made the switch to Linux, with a virtual machine for Windows. Over the years since the switch I ended up running Debian for several years and most recently Ubuntu for four or five years now. Throughout this time I've preferred and used KDE , the K Desktop Environ