Awesome stories there!
I started with computers very early, when my dad brought back home an Amstrad PCW (although I’m French, the Amstrad computers crossed the Channel and had their moment of success here, especially the CPC!). It was CP/M with Locoscript on it (pretty badass, right?). Later on, I discovered Amiga at a friend’s, and finally in 1993 my dad bought a PC with MS DOS and Windows 3.1.
A few years later (in 1998 I guess), I was reading a kind of satirical newspaper about hacking, alternative systems and other stuff like that (Le virus informatique), and discovered there was something other than MS Windows on PCs. So I found myself buying a magazine with a CD of Redhat 5.2. The magazine was like 16 pages long, just to explain how to install the barebone system, and then… I didn’t get anything. I mean, I would put a floppy disk, but there was no A:/ anywhere?! Or when I put a CD-Rom nothing would pop up either?!
So I went on IRC to seek for help, and got copiously insulted by people on #linuxfr because I was “a noob” who didn’t “know how to mount a disk ahaha go fuck off, moron!”. Yep, that was my first contact with the Linux community. So as you can imagine I promptly got back to Windows.
But I was still disappointed by that OS, and little by little I found Open Source alternatives to the softwares I was using daily as a student: Phoenix (ex Firebird, ex Firefox), OpenOffice.org, Gimp. I really hated Microsoft Word, and OpenOffice.org was awesome to edit styles in the document, and to move pictures around (to write reports, it was awesome!).
And finally, I heard about Fedora in 2004, so I decided to give it a try on an old laptop. It was pretty amazing, I was very impressed by the graphical installer (“Anaconda” I believe?), but shortly after I fell in love with Ubuntu, when the very first version was out. It was pretty, had a lot of options, and was quite easy to use even for someone with no Linux experience and the community behind quickly got big, with a forum in French where you could get any help no matter how “noob” you were.
I’m currently stuck on a Macbook Pro that I bought a couple years ago thinking it would be easy to switch to Linux (what a fool I am!), but I use Ubuntu LTS at work and enjoy it every single day 
If I had to thank someone, it would certainly not be the people of #linuxfr, but more the people on the French forums of ubuntu-fr.org who did an amazing job back when AskUbuntu didn’t exist to set up a wiki and a forum so that everyone could discuss and share their knowledge.
I also remember an amazing blog in French held by a guy called Gilles Fabio who introduced a lot of Linux concepts for Ubuntu and Fedora, explaining how to achieve this, how that was working exactly, comparing the distros and the softwares…