I've used Linux since '93. It was easier in the early days because the hardware was simpler. I lived in Emacs, so the desktop was irrelevant. The turning point was laptops. It was a nightmare to get any distribution going without hours of research and random driver tweaking. I ended up using Windows 98 on my laptop and rsh into desktop Linux. VMware was a godsend. I could finally use Linux for development and Windows for everything else. Nowadays Win7 (or OSX) + VMware's Unity makes the Linux desktop superfluous.
