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.
Linux FT. From a magazine cover disk in around 1996. I was a teenage oik working at a company where I suggested setting up the Internet for email and support use. The manager at the time subscribed to bill Gates’ belief that the Internet was a fad. I was granted an old 486 desktop pc, and modem and a basic modem account.
I setup a squid proxy and email server with dial on demand. It was slow but it worked.
I moved onto redhat 5 after (before it became the enterprise thing), we went to isdn and leased line and I even had a stack of usr courier modems under my desk by the end with dial in for both Internet and collecting mail (for sales mostly).
It only got replaced when the company actually paid for a full time IT manager (I was primarily a software developer, doing IT on the side) and they switched everything to windows.