Iāll go first, I took my momās 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.
Around 2004, maybe 2005, I had to recover some files from an old laptop and landed on a live CD of Knoppix for the job. Dabbled in Linux a bit after, but not seriously, for the better part of the decade after - mostly distro hopping and having fun, especially with old hardware, back when Ubuntu was in better standing with the community.
Ended up using it more seriously in the last ~5 years. Hopped around Mint, Manjaro (actually lasted 2 years before I borked it), and OpenSUSE before finally landing on Fedora, which has been my daily for maybe 2 years now. With the Red Hat stuff, depending on how that pans out, Iām debating on just going to vanilla Debian at this point. But Iāve always had a soft spot for Mint, so weāll just have to see.
As for Windows, I still have my main tower with Win 10 (no Linux) that Iāve upgraded throughout the years from Win 7. But Win 11 isnāt having it, so once Win 10 hits EOL, itāll get Linux as well (assuming it doesnāt kick the bucket first).
Knoppix was my gateway as well. Iād checked out Linux before, but I used Knoppix to help out regularly for a while, which led to dual booting my laptop with Ubuntu 6.06, ending with Linux being my main OS.
11 releasing was the catalyst for me just straight up not using my Windows drive anymore, I installed it to my Thinkpad (itās still there, next to arch) to check it out and holy shit was it bad. Before then Iād boot in to play games with anticheat that didnāt work on Linux. Nowadays if I canāt play it on Linux I just donāt. Want my money? At the very least support proton. Donāt? Ok Iāll keep my money.
