@tomxcd I finished German high-/grammar-school 1995, and I think started dabbling into Linux in the last year or so, afterwards working with friends at an ISP which was already Linux only.

First distribution I really used was Slackware, if I remember correctly, but there was a lot of self-compiling these days …

Initially networking was rather poor, so we had some (I forgot) net/free/openbsd boxes for their superior networking, especially filtering/firewalling.

Oh, happy days!