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.
@eric5949 Red Hat 5.1 1998/99, I was aged 40. I attempted dual booting with Win98, but Disk Druid wiped my Win98 partition:-) I was a little upset but stayed with RH. I had actually purchased the RH CD’s and manual from the US (I am in the UK), and incurred import duty, so it was not free as in beer but around £50. I looked at Windows again when 2000 was released. Now I use Linux Mint, Chrome OS and Windows 11.
I had literally the exact same experience with the installer corrupting my Windows partition and me accepting the indication and just switching to Linux-only. 🙂