[stopthe]

Deploying my pet project on a Linux virtual server.

At that time I worked with some enterprise software on Windows, and any particular setup was so fragile, that it caused anxiety to touch anything and learned helplessness preventing experimentation. It didn't help that built-in diagnostic tools on Windows in the XP era were virtually non-existent.

Linux VMs in contrast were (and are) disposable, have all their guts exposed, and CLI is your only way of doing things. You're welcome to experiment, and basically forced to automate.