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 23 and it was the summer of ‘98. I was fed up with how often windows crashed on me. I wanted to finish my semester in college and once I did I nuked Linux and installed Red Hat Linux which I had bought in Costco. Didn’t know how to do anything in Linux. Tackled the command line and loved it. From there I set up all sorts of servers for fun. At one point I ran network cabling between my room and my brother’s room. I had a file server to serve a samba share for our mp3s and had a printer server setup we could use to both print off a single printer. None of this could be done with anything off the shelf. At least not that I knew of. I think of that time and have fond memories of. I still have that server in my parent’s garage somewhere.