I have worked in the microcomputer field since 1978. It has been a mix of hardware, software and firmware design since then. My exposure to unix back then was mostly related to building device drivers for the products I designed. I couldn't afford to have a nix platform of my own in those days. In 1996, I spent some of my hard-earned money on a 486 cpu and motherboard, CDROM drive, win95 license, etc.. It will suffice to say that the OS did not meet my expectations, especially so because MS engineers had promised me in 1994 that it would "fix" the showstopper bugs I had encountered with their 3.1 OS. This is what drove me to try linux. In less than 2 weeks, I had my older 386SX machine running linux and acting as the dialup network gateway for my home office. By early 1997 I had settled on debian as my distro of choice. It was January of 2011 when I finally decided to try Ubuntu. I'm very pleased with it.