Using a computer since I was ~7-8y old (first pc was a 33MHz cpu with that lovely turbo buton -> going to 66MHz ...wohoooo
). Started off with win3.11 all the way to win7. Somewhere along the way of xp, I bought my first pentium4 and it came with REDHELL 7 or something like this (I dnt remember). Somehow I already knew some ppl using linux at that point and I got some magazines about linux (I successfully compiled&installed apache but had no clue how to start it lol). I jumped to Fedora 1,2,3,4,5,6 (I hated it - so many resources going to hell) then I tried Mandrake (and Mandriva too - I liked it - the internet was faster on linux than xp
). I used it around 6 months or something like that, then jumped to Slack (I was totally lost), Debian (couldn't get X to work properly - 640x480 bleah) and god knows what else. Ah, I remember Vector linux (very nice indeed - until u had to pay for it - mtfkrs ). All the forums I asked help fore were quite mean (for some reason).
After 2 days of work (straight work - no sleep) I managed to get a pppoe connexion working on Fedora (I think) and wrote a how to on a forum. Of course I was criticized. Then I got a pm from this guy who I never meat in my life. He called me at one point (or I called him?) and we talked for 4h or something like that over the phone and then he asked me to go talk some more over coffee. 4am and we were drinking coffee and telling stories of Linux, FreeBSD, his military days, chicks, and god knows what else. That was my first contact with FreeBSD. He got my attention and I made a picture of the OS as a good one.
So I tried it (9am - coffee finished - at home again - I cut school that day
). He gave me some pointers how to install it and I went on with it. I managed to delete everything (of course lol ) and after 2 tries I had it running (installed base+kernel). Ended up with a black screen and a prompter (half scared to death). Logden in.... "startx" -> "cmd not found". (hmmm ... wtf ?). "xdm" -> "cmd not found" (hmm ... ok), "kdm/gdm" -> "cmd not found" (wtf ????).
Reboot (wanted to go to windows).... but there was no windows left ("holly shit") <- this is when I realized what I've done (called the guy - reply: "this is how u'r gonna learn" - "jesus f# Christ" I said).
That's when I lost my virginity lol and I became a big boy. I still had the linux ideas "tell me this" and "tell me that". the guy showed me the handbook and it was the first one in my life that made sense and the first one speaking my language (I could understand it - and it was "WOW"). I read it, I did it - it worked.
Current status: learning FreeBSD since 6.2. Never stopes amazing me. You can just rely on it with no problems.
half a year ago a friend of mine wanted to switch to linux (a router machine). No way he wanted something else. So linux it is ... Centos 5, REDHELL 5, Fedora 12 .... unstable, crashing or simply freezing (no idea why - maybe some "feature" lol). So we decided FreeBSD and guess what he is running for half a year already and I get congratulated for the system just about every time I talk to him (no downtime, no application crash, xfce4 running smooth - flash up - dhcp server running - ftp/www public server - 500+ daily IP's - gmirror, samba, nfs, virtualbox (for me), jails - CPU @ 80% all the time - absolutly no problems).
So I would like to say "Thank you FreeBSD and thank you guys" - rocksolid OS, hell-a-va cool guys, unbeatable docs, very impresive OS+ports, very good support (forums, mailing lists - usually I found out the answer before posting anything) and a very logical designe of everything. Thank's guys