First tried Linux two years back.  All the buntus plus some extra.  Never Arch or compile based linux's.  Couldn't move because my core work application didn't work well with Wine.  Also didn't find a good substitute for Autohotkey or Notepad++.

Background as an engineer who wrote a lot of assembler.  Now a trader with C, C++, and recently Python and R experience.  So techie enough for the move to Linux.

Shifted again 1 week after Windows 8 was released (yech ... pay for this by crud ???).  Moved to Mint 13 as don't like Unity but liked the Ubuntu/Deb packaging and breadth of applications.  Irritated with U12.x Samba problems but overcame them sufficiently.  Sierra Chart now works well with Wine.  Autokey replaces AutoHotkey and my recent Python knowledge makes it easy.  Had moved from NP++ to Sublime Text 2 (the worlds best text editor).

Discovered I'm not using Mint apps much:  Terminator instead of Terminal, Spacefm instead of Nemo, Sublime instead of Gedit, Chrome instead of Firefox, Clementine and Audacious instead of Banshee, K3B instead of ... etc.  So wondered if I should start with a thinner distro and my choice of apps.  Tried Bodhi and then tried Crunchbang after a few months with Mint.  I like them but Mint is better (up to date, faster to load, just works nicely).

The good thing was I learned a lot more CLI and am now a happy Conki user and have added Synapse to (largely) replace the standard Run command functionality (try Synapse --- it is really brilliant as a search/launch tool, brilliant).