Time Line
1996 PC, 1997 TI Calc, 2003 VAX, 2006 Debian, 2007 Ubuntu till now. Still Trying some other distributions from time to time.
Long Story
I heard about PC's but couldn't have access to one till 1996, when cybercafes appear to the public which were using only 56Kbps phone modem.
I'm still remember the fun when we lost connection, and everyone lift their heads up and look at the admin waiting for the reconnecting tone like this one. If it fails we look at each other, who has patient to wait next trial! Few people leave for the best to get better bandwidth share.
I was 9 and my country was in a civil war, empty pocket and 1 hour was very expensive. I didn't care much about system, all i do is 15-30min per week downloading electronics related stuff.
My head was still in a box regarding OS's, only when I join university on 2nd year, 2003. For Pascal lab sessions, I face that octopus machine called VAX with that 80x25 orange text terminal, wow... so there exist some other systems other than Windows. Then I met a teacher who was a Free Software enthusiastic, teaching C++ and Data Structures for 4th year class, 2006. He setup all lab machines himself, Dual boot with Debian, one machine was including a local repository. I was impressed, Debian was around 9 or 10 CD's. He were able also to convince manager of central library to install Debian on ~40 PC's, they were facing Windows viruses and couldn't afford anti-virus license.
My teacher advice me with Ubuntu because it was easier to install, configure and get basic things working on vanilla install with 1st boot. Or LiveCD try to check Hardware compatibility, because it was really a down point for GNU and Linux.
2006, my sister got a PC home as prize for high school achievement. From that time I received Ubuntu 7.04 CD and started making dual boot on every machine I have some control on it. Single boot on my own.
2008, Back to dual boot due to limited software support related to work and weak support of 3D graphic adapters.
I kept installing Ubuntu even on the company machine till VirtualBox and CPU's get enough power ~2014.
What interest me much
FLOSS philosophy because it does agree with my religious POV (knowledge should be free & gratis for everyone with a good will) as I was also interested in OpenHW, Tools on the click from repository, Quick development environment setup, Scripting routine tasks, Quick Server Setup, KDE also was away far beautiful than Windows XP, Live CD and PXE Boot were too powerful, It was and still an environment that force you to learn new things.