I’ll go first, I took my mom’s college textbooks which came with discs for a couple distros and failed to install RHEL before managing to get Fedora Core 4 working. The first desktop environment I used was KDE and despite trying out a few others over the years I always come back to plasma. Due to being like 12, I wanted to run my games on it, and man wine was not nearly as easy to use (or as good) as it is nowadays. So I switched back to windows until around 2015 or so when I spent the next few years trying to replace windows as much as I could. Once valve released proton, I switched fully and have t looked back, unless my still there windows partition tries to take over my computer when I restart it at least.
i know it was some time in 2002. idk what my first linux distro was tbh, but i quckly returned to windows. Then Shortly after i took a dive off the deep end to try to really learn linux some and spent days installing gentoo on some probably 400-600 mhz single core box (was in college at the time). That while being pretty painful overall, was a good learning experience. I was in school for computer aided drafting, got my assiciates, and here i am 20 years later as a devops engineer. I am comfortable with the big 3 os’s, tho mac would be my weakest. Gaming keepa bringing me back to a home windows desktop tho. Actuallt just set up a usb stick with nix plasma to check out this weekend as i think im missing the train on nix