This is the same story that I lived in the late 90's. My buddies and I would install every different distro, run through LFS build and that has turned into a very niche embedded systems expertise that is exactly where the industry is now. Every system has linux, qnx, or android. The university was so small that when we went to the IT department to "register" our computers for the network that the IT guys were excited that we were running linux.