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.
My experience was Slackware in 1993. Some kid in another dorm was running it on his computer and he gave me an account on it. I’d dial into the University network and telnet to his server to mess around. I believe the kernel was 0.9x something.
Over the years I’d used Linux in various forms: built a router using Linux at a job, installed Slackware on my desktop at home using floppy disks, ran Redhat on most of our infrastructure (web, samba, ftp, sendmail, openvpn, …) at another job, run Arch Linux on my desktop at home along with Debian in my home lab.