As someone who started in the deep end back in 2001 (My first distro was a Slackware derivative) I actually enjoyed the satisfaction of trying to get XFree86 to work and seeing all the available command line tools. Of course this was back in the Windows 98 days so I was already used to going into MS-DOS mode. My first computer was a Commodore 64 as well so didn't get mollycoddled at all when learning to use a computer.