The freedom is great, and the fact that things don’t change out from under me is awesome — I can use a basic or tiling window manager while still running a modern system. Updating Windows or macOS = new “improved” GUI, generally speaking. KDE and Gnome also change, but it’s your choice to use/not use them, as it should be!

Started with Red Hat in the kernel 2.0 or 2.2 days, because I picked up a book+install CD at a garage sale.

Slackware on an old laptop got me through undergrad (desktop ran Gentoo, but I didn’t use it much).

Switched to Debian after that, with a little Arch in grad school btw (not a huge fan — to each their own).

Running Debian now (desktop, laptop, and SBCs), but my heart belongs to Slackware.