Oh, it seems like yesterday when I held my Internship Training at PKI as a Programmer Trainee during my college years. The company is eyeing on Linux to migrate their server because of frequent network problems. The flavor of their choice? Red Hat. I became curious about what this Operating System has to offer. They say RHCE is the hottest IT certification where certifieds get high salary. That was 2002, the year of Windows XP.
A year after, I graduated and worked as a Software Developer. Suprisingly, the company's network server is Red Hat 8. To satisfy my curiosity, I bought a newer version (Red Hat 9) and installed it on my workstation. During my idle time, I play with it and even print some manuals straight right there in the office!
I haven't had the time to examine the nitty-gritty of Red Hat, so I was stuck on the basics- the GUI and some essential console commands. I haven't installed or configure any server softwares yet, nor have compiled a kernel. In short, I'm still a newbie. The same applies from Fedora Core 3 to 5, the successors of the free version of Red Hat. I have not tried 1 & 2.
As you can see, Red Hat greatly affects my choice of distribution. Partly because of its name and stability. And this is the distro I am used to, just like as you find it hard to abandon your religion since birth. I also met Ubuntu but felt overwhelmed with the "default" packages of the same functionality installed. You may ask, why Gnome for the desktop environment? Many surveys and forums said KDE is more popular, but it never hit my mind to try it. You guess it right… I like the default, I always try first the default, and easily get used to the default! (An evidence is the theme of this blog) You maybe know that the default desktop of Red Hat since version 8 or so, is Gnome.
So enter to my Linux world! All newbies are welcome. And I, personally, will always be a newbie. 
FYI, I use Linux to post this.
