My entry to computers was in the systems programming department of Time Sharing Systems at the Milwaukee School of Engineering a little over 40 years ago. Algol (and its derivatives) was the language and the OS was called MCP (Master Control Program). Burroughs provided source code to its customers and munging with the OS was not only possible, it was at times required.

After Burroughs, I worked on embedded systems on TI hardware, and again, I found myself munging source code writing run time libaries and patching the "executive" (OS). 

At the same time, I built a PDP11-03 from Heathkit and when USCD Pascal became available, I found myself writing drivers and a runtime for an 8086 S100 kit.

Then came the IBM PC and Microsoft.. No more source code for the OS. No more source code for anything.. I amused myself with Borland Pascal and Ryan McFarland Fortran with a brief respite of Xenix on Altos.

When Windows 95 arrived, the handwriting was on the  wall - submit to being a Microserf or find yourself out in the cold. At the same time I found myself with an expensive direct line to the ILEC 110 miles away. The obvious solution was to sell my surplus bandwidth to my neighbours and I became an ISP. To do that, I needed a RAS (Remote Access Server) server. Microsoft had the beginnings of RAS support but my consultant said do BSD Unix. I did my homework and found 14,000 articles on Usenet for Linux and only 2500 for BSD so obviously the Linux community was more vibrant. I opted for Redhat.

Within a couple of years RedHat had become one of the "big kids" and the fences started showing up. Mandrake seemed easier to use and finally edged out Windows on my desktop. Almost parenthetically, I installed a Debian file server for backups and it served quietly for years.  Mandrake was for a time exciting and I loaded it on to my servers. I always upgraded to the latest and greatest and then one release was horrible. Everything crashed including my fledgling collocation business.

I could have gone back, but I said it is time to look around and found the upstart Ubuntu. Debian, while solid, always seemed "moldy" even on the "testing" releases. Ubuntu was promising fresh releases every six months and the community was rallying to its side.

Paraphrasing Bill Clinton, I realized "its the community stupid!". I've been on Ubuntu since Dapper for both desktop and servers. I am a little more conservative on my servers now, most of them are 8.04.2 (Hardy) but my workstation at the office and my laptop are both 9.04 (Jaunty).

If I hadn't had a background with available source code, I might never have escaped being a Microserf.