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.
When I was about 11 roughly two decades ago, on the first PC I got to actively use. I think it was OpenSuSe. My father had unix at work back then and saw no reason to use anything but a -ix system.
I liked it a lot, back then so was mainly reading things on the internet, no gaming needed.
Haven’t cycled back yet, since I play a few games that don’t run well on linux at all and use some proprietary software. I do find myself trying to use linux commands on windows from time to time, getting annoyed with it not working before remembering.