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.
I was starting in similar years, some time in high school (03-07) I set up a dual boot with Ubuntu. I’ve dabbled on and off since. Usually put Ubuntu on old laptops to give em some more life, current work laptop is that way. It’s never been my primary OS. But I’ve had either a dual boot or laptop running it most years since then.