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.
Ubuntu was my first. I got a copy of 7.04 from the IT instructor at a local tech school during a field trip back in high school. I had no idea what linux was before then. I would boot the live cd on the family computer and mess around with it since I didn’t have one of my own. I was finally able to get a hand-me-down windows 98 PC from my aunt and installed my copy of 7.04 on that right away. Got my dad to run some ethernet up to my room and I was living like royalty after that.
I’ve tried about every distro under the sun since those days, but Ubuntu always feels like home