I'm nearing 31, but I mostly still act 25. :P My first exposure to UNIX-like
systems wasn't until my early teens, but I didn't really get to dive in until
I was 18.
It still took me quite a while to move to Linux. My first adventure into
Slackware was fun, but I eventually broke things beyond what I could fix and
re-installed NT Workstation. We all experiment in college don't we...
Toward the end of 2004, I was emboldened by finding a group of friends that
had more Linux experience and did a Gentoo install (stage1!) on my already
aging PII-450. I never looked back though. I've not licensed MS Windows
since then, even for my laptop. I got a little disenchanted with Gentoo at
some point; I decided I was spending too much time administrating my system
and not enough time using it. (Possibly not Gentoo's fault, but it felt like
a lot of that time was fighting with emerge / paludis.) I started Debian with
Etch.
My laptop has had a number of installs on it. I remember an adventure into
Fedora before it had a two-digit version. I ran openSUSE to some joy for a
little over a year. Ubuntu is what it shipped with. I still keep coming back
to Debian, partially for consistency. What advantages the others have just
never made up for the lack of familiarity.
Ubuntu is definitely a close second; anything without the interactive resolver
from aptitude is a lesser OS. However, I prefer the "It's done when it's
done" attitude around Debian releases, rather than the time-based releases of
Ubuntu. I've familiarized myself enough with APT to be able to get new
software if stable doesn't meant my needs, but that's not often required
except for -dev packages for my own projects.
...and evidently I like talking about myself. :(
Jebus! This sounds like my life. Played with Slackware since ver4 or so... screwed with many versions of Fedora but always stood clear of Debain, even Ubuntu till now .... my laptop is running Debian 6 and honestly, I rather like it and my friends will tell you I am a staunch hater of Binary Distro's.... for the last 5 years now, all I've run is FreeBSD in mixed server/desktop environments ... currently I have a Gentoo box as my primary file/web/dns server, a FreeBSD7.2 box that serves up my music and some other minor stuff and Deb6 on my laptop.
--
Did you know...
If you play a Windows 2000 CD backwards, you hear satanic messages,
but what's worse is when you play it forward....
...it installs Windows 2000