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.
Back in college my CS 201 class was on C programing and needed to use the Linux machines in the lab for the class. They were running CentOS. That was my first time using Linux. After that I starting playing around with different distros (Ubuntu and Debian mostly). Then I took a “system administration” class that was really “Linux 101” that was taught by the departments sys-admin who is a Linux Evangelist and they showed me the light. Havent owned a windows or Mac machine since (about 20 years ago now)
Similar story here, my first encounter was my previous semester of Uni, a Systems Administration and Maintenance class, where we used Rocky Linux. Queue two semesters later, and I’m in love with it, hell I’m even typing this on my Thinkpad’s Ubuntu (ofc I had to get a thinkpad lmao), biding my time until I switch to Arch, since several of my highschool classmates use it, and in general I like the concept behind it.