I just didn’t like the look or smell of Windows 95, which is why I had resisted upgrading for 5 years. I was poor, and always ran slightly out of date computers, for money reasons. So I was particularly turned off by a new “improved” operating system that took 3 times longer to do 1/3 of the work. I had seen references to GNU/Linux for a few years, and knew that there was free operating system out there. But I figured it was mostly a “hobby” thing. Like most people, I didn’t see how “free software” could work (beautiful ideal, but how could programmers sustainably produce such a thing?). I’d read Stallman’s Gnu Manifesto and other sources on the subject. But it took me a while to warm up to the idea (I hadn’t really been that impressed by “shareware”). Still, ever an idealist, I wanted to try the proof of principle—that’s why I picked the Debian distribution: it embodied the same ideals that went into Linux and the GNU project.