A fantastic story. Mine is not that colorful. I live in an Asian metropolis and I'm 67. I started in the days of DOS with an Apple II. I still have XP on dual boot on the two old single-core PCs that I use at home every day (right now too). They're still running speedily and smoothly with an upgrade or two of the ram and cpu.
I use Xubuntu 14.04 to 15.10 on different PCs, notebooks and netbooks. All my work, etc. is 99% on Linux and about the only time I boot into XP is to check and fix the NTFS partitions on internal and external drives to maintain compatibility with other users who use Windows and with my XP OS.
Fantastic story. I am not at the same level but I went through about the same things to learn more about Linux.