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 can’t remember how old I was, but it was during my youth when I bought a computer magazine that came with a “rescue CD” with Knoppix on it. I thought it was really cool, but never did more than looking around in the OS and playing around with it. It had KDE 3.5, which I really liked though. It felt comfy, and that would manifest in the back of my mind. Months or years later, I bought a magazine with a SUSE Linux… I believe 9.2 and supposedly modified for Linux gaming. That got me curious. Same thing, I took a closer look at it, found it really cool and comfy, played around with it, but ultimately it could never replace Windows for me at the time. But the seed was planted, and curiosity remained. Years later, I learned more about Linux during some training for an IT job, and I got the LPIC-1 certification. My journey with magazine DVDs continued, this time with Ubuntu. I got more and more comfortable with the applications and desktop environments, but still, it would not replace Windows for me. I tested Ubuntu and Linux Mint on a cheap notebook for a while, and later, as Linux got better and better on the desktop, I gave Linux Mint a shot on my PC in dual boot. Years of distro hopping, testing, coming back to Windows for gaming and music production software, Windows frustration and the urge to switch to Linux… Then, in 2018, I had enough. I really wanted to get rid of Windows. I bought a 27" iMac as a studio machine for my music production. Of course I evaluated it for a while as a Windows replacement, but where it shines for creative applications, it is useless for a gamer. The durations I spent with Linux on my main PC increased. Still often would come back to Windows. I was changing my OS like pants basically, just because of fucking gaming. FINALLY, as Valve pushed Proton and Steam on Linux, I was able to make the final jump to Linux in 2022. It was now supporting so many great games that I could live with the few that won’t run. Since 2022, I am exclusively on Linux on my PC and notebook(s) and I won’t look back. It keeps getting better, where Windows falls apart in quality, privacy invasion and user experience. I’m still distro hopping, but I actually enjoy that. It has become almost a hobby. And I’m about to discover the BSD world, I think. Cute little detail: That SUSE Linux from the magazine DVD in my youth had some nice wallpapers that I liked and that I associate with that “comfy” feeling I had while exploring it. I still keep those wallpapers in my wallpaper folder like a treasure, even if I don’t actually use them. Except for one, that I still use from time to time: https://wallhere.com/id/wallpaper/163038 That in combination with KDE 3.5 was really lovely, and I still enjoy this one from time to time on my desktop.