Learned about Linux from a former boss in 2003/2004 on an ancient dual Pentium 2 running Mandrake 9.2 and KDE 3. Coming from Mac and then Windows, this absolutely blew me away and I was sold.

Used it on the side while my main machine was WinXP. Distro-hopped with #mandrake, #suse, #ubuntu, and settled on #debian which became my daily driver in 2006 in grad school and never looked back.