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 was around 16 or 17 when my Windows Vista laptop took a dump. Managed to install Ubuntu via WUBI, not because I was interested in Linux, I just really wanted to watch Gundam on Youtube and I didn’t have the money to take my laptop to a repair shop. When I got a new laptop I planned on staying with Windows 7 but 3 days later I nuked and paved Linux Mint over it because I got used to how Linux worked lol. 13 years later I’m running Gentoo on my main desktop, Arch on my laptop, and debian everywhere else.
I want to try gentoo someday but there’s no way I’d want it on my main machine, you are for sure dedicated. I think I might try out debian sometime though, maybe on one of my servers since they’re all running Ubuntu right now.
I use Debian exclusively for my servers. Rock solid experience for me. On my desktops I like having up to date stuff and even though Debian Sid exists it’s not the same as Arch or Gentoo testing.