The extremely short version is: I started playing with Raspberry Pis and learning a bit about Debian right about the time my old Win 7 laptop died, I got a new laptop with Win 8.1, which A) sucked and B) had major hardware problems for months, during which time I only had a couple Raspberry Pis to do my work on. So by the time I got a reliable Win 8.1 machine, it felt less familiar to me than Debian, so I switched, ended up running Linux Mint 17 on that machine.