When I first started messing with computers, I had a very limited budget, so wherever possible I looked for the cheapest solution to whatever issue I was facing. The commercial packages tended to be pretty pricey, so I spent a lot of time investigating shareware and freeware options to save money. I couldn't even begin to count how many different software packages I've looked at over the years. Most of them were DOS-based and were designed to run on the low-end machines of the day. Some of them were pretty robust, some were not, but that was the premise behind shareware - you got to try it out on your machine first before investing any money in it.
In those days, I was pretty committed to running Windows as an OS, though my job at the time required my supporting Macs as well. It wasn't until about 10 years ago that I really started to look at alternate operating systems - not counting some early experiments with OS2 and NT. Since my first web project was running on a Linux box of some variant, I had learned some real basic commands, but hadn't given any real thought to the idea of Linux on the desktop until about 2001.
Linux as it existed for the desktop back then was a much more difficult beast to tame than it is now. There were an awful lots of areas that had to be configured by editing files rather than using a graphical interface, so it was a daunting proposition at best back then. Frankly, since most of my work involved Windows applications aback then, it wasn't really helpful to me, so after awhile, I didn't mess with it and went back to doing things in Windows.
About three years ago, I decided it was time to take another look at Linux. I had stopped working for the big corporate place which provided me with most of my Windows-based software for free, so it was time to consider the options again.
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