2016 for me. I wanted a music production suite, and was given a new laptop for starting college (uk college, I was 15 at the time). I decided to try out Ububtu Studio, a media/art-centered branch of Ubuntu. I found that the incredibly slow laptop that I used to have just… worked? It was somehow faster at doing day to day tasks than my much newer laptop. I also found the visual aesthetics (Ubuntu Studio was pre-Unity Ubuntu) really appealing.
As I kept using it, I found that more and more my time was being spent on my older laptop rather than the newer one. I started disteo hopping nefore setttling on Manjaro in early 2017. Then I went for i3 and dwm, which led to me using gentoo for a few years. In my last year of uni I found that my time maintaining my set-up was getting impractical on top of all the work so I went back to Windows briefly. Very quickly realised I couldn’t use it anymore and so set myself back up with Manjaro.
Currently giving Ubuntu a go because my current laptop has dual amd/nvidia graphics and out of the box it just works much better on Ubuntu. There’s been some frustrations but I can’t see myself going back to Windows. I use it for work on my work laptop and the little things frustrate me to no end