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.
Downloaded Slackware at univ lab and split it on endless amount of floppy disks.
This was probably in …-93 or 94? … or thereabouts. I was in my early 20s.
Went home and had to come back 3 times, because one floppy was always corrupted.
Then I tried to compile kernel for 24 hours and it just kept failing. . struggled with it for a week or so and got it running - then formatted the disc and started over. Ah good times.
Started using Linux “for real” after Debian 1.3 was released in -97 (I think?). Haven’t really stopped using it.
Slackware was my first distro too, probably around 95 i think as I got a CDR copy from a friend in high school. It’s certainly not been my daily driver for that whole period, but I think I’ve probably at least had a linux system operational for nearly 30 years.
I’ve been using Windows since maybe 92 and MacOS since 86. I think Solaris is the only other OS I’ve used a significant amount. There days I’ve got a Macbook Pro for work, Windows 10 for photo editing and Kubuntu Jammy for everything else.