I was running LiteStep on Windows at the time, but wanted something more OSX like, ended up coming across Mandrake/Mandriva. Which led me to Slackware, which at the time was considered the ‘IUseArchBTW’ version of Linux.
Since then I’ve tried just about everything, the only real constant has been Debian. Every server I spin up is Debian based and has been since the early 00s.