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.
Sounds like my story. I think I started with Ubuntu, but installed mints cinnamon Desktop environment later on.
I suppose this made you work in it later on as well?
I used Mint Cinnamon as well. Full story is that I got a new PC and decided to try out Mint, I way daily driving it for about 2-3 months but than I needed to use some windows software and I did not yet know about the existence of wine so I installed windows 10. But then my windows 10 install blue screened after a few months and it wasn’t fixable. Luckily, i had a backup but windows refused to recognize it so I said fuck it and switched to back to Linux mint. I have been using it for about 6 months but some packages started breaking, I wanted to try out KDE (I was using Cinnamon) and I was lazy to do it all so I switched to Artix a few weeks ago. That’s basically it.