When I was in college (1987) my roomate let me borrow his account to run rn to read net news on a Gould running unix. I kept trying to use DOS to run vi, C, awk, gnuplot, LaTeX, emacs, shell, etc but it just didn't quite do it. I tried minix, but that wasn't much better then the DOS utilities I had. The DOS editors didn't have the 64k file limit either.
Around '92 I got a 486. I tried OS/2 2.0. I ended up running unix tools ported to OS/2. Better then DOS because they didn't have the memory limits, but...
I tried BSD386 0.1 and it wouldn't boot. Linux SLS w/ kernel 0.95pl5 did. I had LaTeX, real emacs, vi, awk, shell, and XFree86 2.x. Now, I could run all the tools w/o the limits of DOS etc. i don't think linux had networking at this point. I certainly didn't. Not even a SLIP connection.
I like Unix because you can combine and build tools to get the job done. Linux brought it off the expensive computers to a box I could have at home.
At this time, I started sysadmin at a unix shop. They used emacs and LaTeX for memos. I could do that on Linux. They had the Island suite for a few users. And macintoshes running Office 4.2 w/ Word and Excel. Pine for email. mosaic was just coming out. Windows was at 3.1. NT at 3.1.
Today, I can build a better office environment for free w/ Linux, the GIMP, evolution, gnumeric, abiword, and OpenOffice. It's so far ahead of what we had in 1993.
I can build an office server. This summer I built a mailhub with imap and an imap to web server with SSL for security. On a P200 someone gave me with downloaded RH 8. All the packages were on the CDs. I didn't have to chase different FTP sites to find the pieces. The whole thing took about a day because I had never setup sendmail for incoming email before. It serves my wife and I very well. And it's faster then the old sparc 1s I used to admin.
That's what excites me about Linux.
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