That's roughly how I started, around 1999. I loved the all text console, multiple screens, and how the shell was essentially the same as my beloved Amiga OS. I went through countless distros - Corel, Suse, Mandrake, Debian, Red Hat, Caldera, Yellow Dog, Mandriva, and leagues of desktops and WMs... KDE, Gnome, IceWM, Xfce, xmonad, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, BlackBox, OpenBox, LXDE, Fluxbox. I'm not sure what effect this total lack of interface consistency has on my psyche. Every time I upgraded the kernel or distro there was a significant chance the audio or video would stop working and require 15 minutes through 2 days to restore. It turned out frequently the easiest way to get it to work again was reinstall. The positive aspect of this masochistic computing experience is that when I launched a startup 8 years later I was quite comfortable filling the sysadmin role.
