I've seen some really good arguments here, with both sides being respectful and explaining their perspective and concluding that they understand each other but just don't agree. It's pretty refreshing. If you don't like that kind of thing you're just stupid and wrong.
I think Puppy or Damn Small Linux, maybe knoppix, i was on dial up at the time. Then I found that I could request a free Ubuntu install disk and the speed and cleanliness and compiz effects blew my mind. 04 or 06, can't remember which. From there I think it was xubuntu, mint, arch, arch nvme died and I needed an os immediately so manjaro, got sick of manjaro and garuda sounded neat so i tried it and that's where I am now on my main. Made a mess toying with wayland and am ready to reinstall, probably back to arch or try out nixos
edit: reading through all these comments is bringing back so many memories of other distros I played with back then.
Finally tried it yesterday! Just the "getting started" "guess the number" game and some multithreading stuff from the guide. Freaking love it already!