I had dabbled with Linux over the years, starting with Lubuntu reviving an old Dell 120L during college. When I moved to university they gave us all Macbooks to work with in the IT department. OS X never clicked with me, so I set up a VM with Linux to perform my day to day work. I instantly became the Linux guy because of that... so any tickets that came in for Linux troubleshooting got routed to me.

It just sort of made sense to try a Linux build after that, since I couldn't afford a Windows license after I lost access to MSDN.