I was taking a Unix programming course in college and had a large enough programming project that it was a burden to try and program on the terminal through SSH

I was taking a Unix programming course in college and had a large enough programming project that it was a burden to try and program on the terminal through SSH or Telnet. Since I wasn't going to get Unix on my PC, I needed to find an alternative and remember hearing about Linux in the past. This was probably right around 2000. I don't remember the reasons why, but I didn't download a distro and instead went to Staples and bought the cheapest flavor they had for sale. I can't remember what it was, but it had a GUI and text editor and all the backend programming stuff I needed to do the project much more efficiently. I ended up keeping that Linux partition around and used it to teach myself Apache, MySQL, and PHP, which is what got me my first job our of college. That company was an Apple shop, so that's when I was first introduced to OSX and the need for a Linux desktop was eliminated for me.