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.
Around 2002 when I tried Ubuntu for the first time on an old Dell laptop.
I only tried it initially as I was bored with Windows UI and liked the look of Linux. Used Linux ever since on and off.
It was Ubuntu 8.04 in around 2013. I only did it to get a promotional item for Team Fortress 2 called Tux, a cosmetic item that looks like… Tux. I remember hating the UI/UX and promptly uninstalled it afterwards.
Eventually circled back around to Xubuntu for my low-end hardware and various other distros. Currently daily driving Fedora.
Kernel panic after installing Redhat 6, not RHEL, in the late 90s or early 2000s. Later tried 7 and has been using Linux since.
Slackware 1998. I spent 6 months in a text only freebsd install in 1999. Because of a dram issue I wasn’t able to run windows without blue screens. Text based internet wasn’t that bad in 1999. I could load up xwindows if I wanted to see a picture but rarely did. Talking on irc somebody mentioned memtest and my memory had a very long warranty so I took it back to the store. Then I spent the next several years addicted to quake/quake2
