In 1995 or so, I wanted to play with something not-Windows, but wasn't yet advanced enough in my degree to have access to my school's AIX setup. Bought a Slackware disk set, and a BSD (probably FreeBSD, honestly don't remember), took them both home. Slackware had drivers for my weird non-IDE CD-ROM drive, the other one didn't, and it's been nothing but fun since then.
Without Slackware, I would not have learned how to build a web server, wouldn't have learned about UUCP (which thankfully I haven't needed to use in about 20 years)... basically the entire course of my life would have changed.
(Entirely random aside: I returned the opened BSD disks for a full refund. Remember when you could do that without them assuming you copied the disks?)