Knoppix in like 2006! The first one I installed was Fedora Core 4 though, my mom got disks for it and rhel in her school textbooks.

Now I use Arch on most things.

Come to the dark side, we have cute penguins.

I always wanted to use Linux, so it wasn’t really anything that Windows did that drove me away, it was more I could finally play the games I wanted to when Windows 11 came out and needing to change my bios settings to upgrade was enough of a nudge for me to say fuck it.

Windows 11 made it so you can’t move the taskbar to the side anymore either.

I installed it a while ago, I hated it so much I stopped using my windows partition. It’s still there, sometimes it tries to take over my pc and force itself to boot instead of refind. 11 is almost 8 levels of stupid.

Warframe, some emulated games.

Bog standard arch is absolutely not what I’d recommend to a new user, maybe endeavor if they’re really asking for it, but you really should have some idea what you’re doing before using arch. Try Linux Mint or Pop OS. I’m surprised you had an issue with Ubuntu, though I haven’t used it since like 16.04 so maybe it just is a pain now.