Mandrake was my first too, but it was because I was at some tech "flea market" show thing in San Diego in the 90s, and they were selling Mandrake CDs for $5. A

Mandrake was my first too, but it was because I was at some tech "flea market" show thing in San Diego in the 90s, and they were selling Mandrake CDs for $5. At the time, I was frustrated at the cost of WinGate, a socks proxy, and I wanted to be able to play games with others on my local network with remote friends. I had a clever idea, that I could dynamically rewrite IP packets to an internal IP address based on the port assignment (I had essentially re/invented NAT). So I wrote it in pretty low level c, got it mostly working, then a friend told me about this thing called Linux that had a feature called ip masquerading that did everything I was trying to do. Mandrake had an easy way to compile the kernel with IP masquerading support, and I immediately fell in love with all things Linux. I remember showing friends the customizable desktop, with silly things like snow falling. They thought I was a leet hacker :)