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.
so linus made his first linux post when i was in highschool. (freshman). i didnt know of it but thats what wikipedia says. windows 95 came out when i was in college and by my junior year i knew about linux. in our networking class most everything was unix, one sun machine and the instructor got linux on one or two. students would rush to get the linux machines. it was seen as a better unix. at that point it wasnt seen as a desktop alternative just a better server experience. right before windows xp came out, i built a new computer for xp and used a disc from a magazine with redhat. installed it on their ma hi e and it didnt work because the hardware was to new. i soon got XP and learned about boot loaders.had to call microsoft since xp wouldnt install. tbe guy just recently i stalled linux on a few machines and helped me out.
didnt try linux again till broadband and the web was more of a thing.