I think it was around 2014 and I tried Ubuntu 10 or 11. After using VM for a bit I tried it on my main PC with dual boot.
The problem I had was that steam wasn't ready at the time, let alone other games. Steam kept giving driver errors that required an obscure command to be run every time before booting and for some reason I couldn't get it to fix permanently.
Wine was wine. Sometimes it worked sometimes it didn't
In the end I recall the DE crashing and then I gave up for a few years on it.
Still turned out to be a huge benefit at the time with the advent of USB boots. I remember saving my PC at one point when the Vista endless reboots occurred, because I was able to boot into Linux and reach my drive from there to remove the update.
edit: jeez it had to be way further back than that. I clearly remember the vista incident and using linux, but vista was in 2007.