In about 2005, I installed Debian on an old PC I had lying around at the behest of one of my friends who assured me that installing GNU/Linux would change my life. Since I was busy with other things, I didn't bother learning how to use my Debian box or anything about Unix-likes until I had to fix a laptop which wouldn't boot, which is when I learnt about live CDs. Naturally, having used a tool to do something useful (rather than just being walked through an installation), I wanted to learn more. Over the years, I discovered more and more about BSD, GNU, Linux and so on.

During my distro-hopping phase a year or two ago, I went from my trusty Debian to Fedora, then to Arch, then Gentoo, then Arch again, then I realised that I had it right the very first time and went back to Debian. I don't know why I still have them around, but I have a few PCs with Slackware on them, but that wasn't because of nostalgia, it was because I wanted to see what all the nostalgia was about. I ended up learning how to use pkgsrc, which was great fun, if a little annoying to set up for the first time on something which isn't NetBSD.