In 2004 grandpa gave me an old laptop from 1995 to play around with. I wanted it to be faster so I tried using g.ho.st. That was a terrible experience, too slow of internet, cloud computing was never gonna work. After that I tried suse. They had this fancy iso builder at the time that let me pick all the packages I want from the repo and have them present on my ISO.

That's started my journey, outside of school I've had Linux exclusively since.