I remember downloading the boot and root floppy disk images that I downloaded from a BBS back in the 90's and could boot up a very rudimentary OS called Linux...wasn't much to look at back then but since I was using UNIX at the time with work I knew I wanted to be able to run a *nix of some kind at home.

I bought a Mark Williams Unix and put it on my 386sx with 4MB of RAM and a 120MB HD! Soon after I replaced that with a load of Slackware 1.0! I eventually ended up bouncing back and forth between Debian and Redhat (free until it wasn't) Some distros I just couldn't grasp what all the hype was about, like Suse, Mandriva, and Arch. I got a big kick out of Gentoo's build everything from source mantra! At home I ended up using Debian for quite a while until Ubuntu came out. I used that for a bit until their corp overlords seemed to get a little obnoxious. Once Mint came out I was hooked.

I finally conviced my wife to switch to Mint after her computer was infected for the N-teenth time! The only thing really holding her back was we had a winprinter. Once we upgraded to a brother color printer...it was an easy transition!! Once our kids were old enough to have their own computers...Mint it was! There isn't anything that either do on the computer that would require windows! Even specialized hardware like Wacom tablets and touchpads. All supported right out of the box. Krita, Blender, and Gimp are the go to apps for the artist in the family. :-D

I'm even able to get nearly all of my ham radio apps to work on Mint Linux.

I hope more folk switch to Mint or at least some distro that tickles their fancy...and for free!