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 what I did when I got back into Linux after years lol. Didn’t want one of the easy ones because I wanted to actually learn how to use Linux so I spent all night installing arch. Maybe the next day it wasn’t, but it’s one of the best computing decisions I’ve ever made. Really forced me to get comfortable using a command line since dos was before my time.