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.
A friend of mine suggested muLinux for an old 486DX I had lying at home, muLinux was a very basic distro that run off a floppy disk (1.44MB). Obviously not the most comfortable of the experiences. I toyed a little bit with that and switched to Slackware at some point but the package manager for Slackware is minimal so I just didn’t do much work on that computer. I ended up installing DOS 6 and windows 3.11 back. It was around 2003. I had another newer computer with XP, the 486 was a remnant from olden times.
Fast forward a couple of years and in Uni I tried dual booting Suse. didn’t really liked it and went back to windows. our Operating system course lab was no Linux, though. I finally switched a couple of years later when I went to work and the whole IT department was Linux enthusiasts and all the PCs were running on Linux. Debian did it for me, now I am begrudgingly on Ubuntu, but will soon hop on Void.