Close 2nd for me. Freshman year down at the student union after getting totally sick of working with Codeblocks and MSVC++ on Windows for trying to make someth

Close 2nd for me. Freshman year down at the student union after getting totally sick of working with Codeblocks and MSVC++ on Windows for trying to make something meaningful in OGRE, installed Debian, got it working but wasn't making a lot of progress and blamed it on the distro, decided to go more hardcore and do Gentoo. There was a Linux gap somewhere when I wad going to install OpenBSD on a new machine before I got Ubuntu and was totally blow away by how fast the hardware support had come in such a short time. Nowadays I preach towards the "harder" distros like Arch because Ubuntu did tend to water down the whole configuration hacking experience and seemed to get in the way.