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 dad installed Linux on the family computer at some point in the 90s, but it was a bit overwhelming for me and I gave up on it for quite some time. I took an ethical hacking class in college that had us using Kali Linux and that wasn’t too bad, so I finally gave dual booting another try around 2017 with Manjaro which didn’t play well with my computer and Mint which did work better, but I couldn’t get wine working right for my non-Linux games. Right now I have KDE Neon and mostly use that, but I still have Windows for some non-Linux games. I hear Steam has improved the cross platform compatibility, but I don’t play games much any more and haven’t felt like bracing myself for more frustration and disappointment fighting to get things to work on the wrong OS. I don’t like to tinker at this point, I just want things to work.
I am considering switching fully to Linux on my laptop soon because Windows 11 is getting too invasive with the ads. I can live without the games and I do have several that have Linux versions which is good enough.