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.
@eric5949 Late nineties. Joined a computer club at uni and got to play with aix, hp-ux, vms, linux, netbsd, freebsd, nextstep, amiga… Installed FreeBSD on my own box and experienced the, eh, joy of “make world”, though making X Windows took longer. I kept Windows around for games but stopped even that around… Nintendo 3DS. Used windowmaker for at least a decade, now on KDE Neon.
Oh wow, I’d never heard of window maker. Were you a fan of nextstep then?