I first fell in love with Linux in general in 2009, when my Windows XP desktop was suffering some system issues that resulted from activation errors that weren't my fault. I bought the installation media for Ubuntu 9.04 at Barnes & Noble, that came with a book called The Official Ubuntu book. I learned for the first time how to boot from a system CD that was not Windows, and once I came to this exact desktop, I fell in love with it, and I installed it permanently on my computer. It might not have had programs like Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop, which I both used on public high school computers, but it still looked a hell of a lot better than the user interface of Mac OS X, which I had also used before briefly. As a matter of fact, VirtualBox was still available for Ubuntu as an official repository program, and I was able to run XP fine on it that way.

Ubuntu, and Linux in general, should really be marketed as a user's operating system and not as a sysadmin/developer/geeky operating system. As a matter of fact, Ubuntu is for user friendly people anyway since it has Firefox built in.