Interesting story, thanks for sharing! I too started off with Linux back in the day - I'd been on minix-list for a few weeks after just getting a 386 and wanting something decent to run on it, replacing the Desqview configuration I'd been using previously. So I was quite happy to download Linus' little kernel and see what it could do .. one floppy at a time from funet.fi, lol. What a great impression it made - a real unix on a 386! Of course, the fact that it took a week to compile X/Windows wasn't that big a deal. :)

Then I moved on from building everything from scratch - a great learning experience back in the day - to Yggdrasil, which was simply a great distro for the time. Ah, good ol' days .. I really wonder what I'd do different if I had a time machine and could go back and tell myself all the things Linux would be used for in the decades ahead, it would have really blown my mind .. Still does!