I ran Linux because I had a college roommate who helped me setup on an old computer. Because of the age of the computer, I mostly just operated out of terminal. We were able to get into Gmail and almost any other site with elinks. I used VI to write and save papers. I’d go to the library to print. It was great. When I needed to run anything graphical, I ran IceWM. It really slowed the system down, so I tried not to do that often. My only problem was that the internet had a lot less help threads on it back then and when my roommate moved out, I no longer had him there to help when I had questions or issues, so I gave-up Linux until a bad Windows update about two years ago. I am back and very glad to be back.

Mandrake, Slackware and then Gentoo. KDE was the best! Also compiling my own kernels :D Running 2 CRT and one LCD screen with 3 VGA cards was fun. IMs were actually in better shape as you had plugins for every network and could use one native client (Kopete or Pidgin were a thing) to communicate with everyone. Konqueror was totally usable as a browser as sites did not relay on JS, and well integrated in KDE. Plenty of media content shared between friends on disk caddies.