I got into Linux from a networking background. Windows just didn't have the same network tools available, and they were all expensive. At the time I was mostly doing non-profit sysadmin work.

It took me about 5 years to transition from nano/pico to vi/vim. I'm still learning, but I recently loaded Debian on a VPS I use and was surprised when visudo defaulted to nano. It seems so much less powerful and actually more difficult to use.