That's funny, I had the exact opposite experience. Back in 2002-ish I was trying to install Slackware and LILO kept failing for some reason I couldn't understand. That turned me off to Linux distro. So I went looking for an alternative and came upon FreeBSD. For personal computer *NIX installations, I haven't looked back. Though of Linux dominated sever installations in the subsequent years, I think the tides are changing and will be using FreeBSD for my next project. Say hello to dtrace and zfs. Can't wait.