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I had been doing AIX admin for about a year (1997), occasionally installing gnu tarballs for various things on AIX when I started Linux.   I remember digging around and deciding slackware mostly because the docs were low-level enough that I really understood what it was doing.  I remember dl'ing (on a 19.2 phone line!) about 20 floppy images.  Basic command line slack installed without a hitch, but it was about a week before I got X working, but I didn't then care much about X anyway.

For about three years after that I installed everything from tarballs.  By then I was X addicted because I could have (literally) a dozen terminals and edit windows open at the same time.

It was gnome which was my downfall.  Everytime a new gnome release came out with something I needed it took more than a week to get all the dependencies straightened out to build it.  Then one sad day I couldn't get gnome to build.  Dependencies on Docbook, jade etc.  I spent almost a month looking through that crap and even setting  --without-doc in all the configure commands couldn't get gnome to build.  That was when I started to looking around and found gentoo. (for what it's worth I had to USE=-doc;emerge gnome-xxx to get gnome to build cleanly in gentoo.  Only recently did that disappear and I finally got all the gnome docs built automagically on my home box!).

Of course along the way I've tried other distro's when I've had boxes free.  At work and for various  clients I've installed and used just about every variant of RedHat -- it's pretty much my default choice for a client or "professional" install, one of the subscriber versions if he wants support, or an FC (or occasionally RH9 with all updates if it's not a critical box) if support is not required.   But on various free boxes I've put in for short periods of time debian, SuSe, and Mandrake.