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.
My first Linux experience was Ubuntu Jaunty Jackelope on an ancient IBM ThinkPad when I was like 13. I didn’t know anything about the command line and this was a time when it wasn’t really possible to use Linux without knowing some CLI stuff so I gave up on it. I tried it again a bit in university, but the thing that really transformed me into a Linux guy was when I got my first uni co-op working as a programmer in a bioinformatics shop. Science people generally are very Linuxy, so it was a given that I would need to use Linux on my work device. After a week of being a bit confused (both by Linux and by being at a new job) I started to get it. Shoutout as well to the UnixPorn community as they definitely made me appreciate the power and customization of Linux compared to Windows.