Discovered windows and computers in 1995, linux around 1997.
Switched definitely to linux for my personal needs in 1999.
Decided to never trust professionally again a MS product during an internship in summer 2001.
Only coherent path was to be a professional linuxian.
Never regretted it!
I was introduced to Unix early in the 90's, after using Dos in the 80's after getting to play with an early Mac at uni. Unix was 'forced' on me because of a piece of revolutionary 3-D software that was designed for a Silicon Graphics workstation. You learn quick when it's your job
The piece of software was rewritten for Windows around the NT era, and has been consistently plagued by annoying little bugs ever since (to be fair though, the early SG machines were prone to crashing semi regularly), but I've never seen a better speed for processing files than on a Unix system.
Sadly I'm too indoctrinated in Windows now to be much chop at anything else, but I can still surprise some of my younger colleagues with a "I know a quick way of doing this" whilst pulling up a t-shell window and typing 'awk'