I don't remember my exact first experiences, it was ages ago, like probably almost a couple decades, and I think with something like OpenSUSE. My first real experience came a bit later with Linux Mint, which I used on a Laptop, while continuing with Windows on my desktop, specifically for my gaming needs. Back then we just had Wine, and it was still a hot mess, but I was able to play some Guild Wars for example and other games fairly decently already. A few years ago, after the Windows 10 "freebie" nuked itself and my entire C partition, with all its data on it (especially the hidden user folders), I continued a little with 7 but shortly after my gpu died. I didn't knew which component at the time, as it started to hang during the boot process, so I assumed other components. Anyway, I didn't had a desktop for well over a year after, and used above laptop to at least browse the web and watch videos, and test some Linux distros. I eventually landed at Manjaro, which also later became my system OS on my newly built desktop a couple years ago. From there I went to EOS after I wanted to switch to btrfs for the system partition anyway, which nuked itself recently. Since the community rather wanted to troll and gaslight instead of helping me I left EOS behind and am currently experiencing the horrors of Gnome in Nobara, which I didn't used since the Unity rework, and am probably trying the KDE version soonish, because there's just too many issues and lack of baseline functions that I need and miss from KDE, and it's also just way too buggy.