I have some fond memories of getting into computers around 2000. Building PCs, installing Windows, re-installing Windows ever so often.

At some point Windows just crashed and couldn't be brought back to life, straight up refused to be installed on that disk again.

(Funfact: the crash happened while playing some opensource sci-fi game... Produced by Microsoft)

I had a Gentoo Linux partition back then thanks to a friend from school and used that for everything from that point on.

Interestingly I never really had major issues. Running Warcraft 3 on Gentoo, writing my thesis (theseses actually) on Ubuntu and later switching to Arch Linux just worked.

I still remember switching to Gnome 3 (from KDE) and being impressed by how fast the Shell felt.

...

Fast forward to two years ago and I am forced to use Windows for the first time in 20+ years, in a locked down corporate setting nonetheless.

... what a hot mess :-)