I live in Indonesia and have a very similar experience and situation (99.99% pirated Windows) with you. From Mandrake 8 to Fedora to Ubuntu 6. I remembered the time when I got my Ubuntu and Kubuntu CDs posted. The experience of using apt to download and update packages were a mindblowing experience at that time. That and the simplicity of Ubuntu was the main reason that I managed to persuade the management in the company where i work to migrate from win98 to ubuntu.