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.
I want to try gentoo someday but there’s no way I’d want it on my main machine, you are for sure dedicated. I think I might try out debian sometime though, maybe on one of my servers since they’re all running Ubuntu right now.
I use Debian exclusively for my servers. Rock solid experience for me. On my desktops I like having up to date stuff and even though Debian Sid exists it’s not the same as Arch or Gentoo testing.