I had a similar start, probably similar era, maybe a '98ish. My mom grabbed me one day and said I had to meet the new neighbors.
So, I went round and they had a front room full of a whole crazy mix of stuff. Some Next machines, Macs, AUX, Sun, BeOS, everything, on all sorts of crazy hardware.
We got chatting, he handed me a Yellow Dog CD and told me to install it and see what it's like. That led to SuSE 6.4 then 7, some BeOS, Gentoo, Ubuntu, etc. Had to purchase the SuSE CDs early on because on 56k couldn't download the ISO and didn't own a CD burner anyway.
So, I went round and they had a front room full of a whole crazy mix of stuff. Some Next machines, Macs, AUX, Sun, BeOS, everything, on all sorts of crazy hardware.
We got chatting, he handed me a Yellow Dog CD and told me to install it and see what it's like. That led to SuSE 6.4 then 7, some BeOS, Gentoo, Ubuntu, etc. Had to purchase the SuSE CDs early on because on 56k couldn't download the ISO and didn't own a CD burner anyway.