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.
With all due respect, wasn’t this exact topic posted 17 hours ago and has 200+ comments? It’s still in the top few if you sort by Hot or Active.
“what was your first Linux experience” is quite different than “why did you switch.”
My first Linux experience was with fedora core 4 in 2005 or 6. I switched to Linux in 2019 or so because Microsoft turned windows into full on spyware and my games finally mostly all worked on Linux. Very different answers.