My first contact was in late '95 during my
HTL education, where we had a few PCs running Linux (got me started with Perl and C, too, and sparked my interest in security). Went through a few distributions 'till I tried Debian (Woody), and got stuck there. Tried a few of it's descendants, as well as *BSD and Solaris, and was forced to get up to speed on HP-UX for work (couldn't say that I like it), but none of those held my interest quite as much.