nat
"Editor, compiler, and debugger" well, that's GNU!
On second and third paragraph of your post you say:
...when I discovered Linux. I was blown away to discover a free operating system that came with an editor, compiler, and debugger—all of the tools you need to be a developer, and all of the...
If you loved a "free operating system that came with an editor, compiler, and debugger", well than you are talking exactly about the GNU Project, including the Emacs, GCC and GDB - with the Linux kernel.
As said at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-history.en.html:
By 1990 we had either found or written all the major components except one—the kernel. Then Linux, a Unix-like kernel, was developed by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and made free software in 1992. Combining Linux with the almost-complete GNU system resulted in a complete operating system: the GNU/Linux system. Estimates are that tens of millions of people now use GNU/Linux systems, typically via GNU/Linux distributions. The principal version of Linux now contains non-free firmware “blobs”; free software activists now maintain a modified free version of Linux, called Linux-libre.
