For me it was:
Windows (for many years) -> Ubuntu (for a year) -> Arch Linux (for half a year) -> Void Linux (literally 2 days) -> Artix Linux with runit (a month) -> Gentoo Linux (another month) -> Debian (finally, I don’t plan on changing it).
Also, when trying to switch from Gentoo to Debian, I fucked up all my data with no backup.
What was your journey?
EDIT: Added Windows
Back when I was a kid, I was using Ubuntu. Ubtunu 14 and 16.
At some point I got really into Elementary OS and Pantheon
Then I rejected clone distros and embraced the mother distro, Debian.
In college, I experimented a bit, like most people. I tried various DEs and WMs on Debian. I tried Arch. I tried Pop_OS!. I tried Gentoo. Man, Gentoo is the WORST. Compiling stuff takes WAY too long and even after using it for 6 months it never got better. Worst distro on the planet. No one should ever use it. Eventually I settled on Arch.
I stayed an Arch i3 guy for 3.5 years, but eventually I got fed up with it.
I then finally gave Fedora a try, and I thought it was great. It was up to date like Arch but unbreakable. At the time I was also looking into BTRFS and immutability and making my own distro, and Fedora is great for that bc of CoreOS and Kinoite and all that stuff.
While on Fedora I did a lot of weird things in search of my goals. Like I figured out how to install Pacman and get AUR applications working on Fedora, notably archiso which I was using to build my own immutable, declarative OS that would be AppImage-based and utilizing an AppImage package manager and store front I wrote myself.
But then, about a year in, I discovered NixOS. It’s the best thing ever. It solves all the problems I had with other distros that I thought I’d solve on Fedora or Arch with programming. It’s everything I could want in a distro and then some. I’ve now been on it longer than I was on Fedora, and there’s no sign of switching to anything else.
Parallel to all this is various tool hopping. For instance, trying GNOME/KDE/Xfce/i3/Sway/Hyprland/etc at various times with various setups as well. Or bash vs zsh. Etc
Currently, I’m on NixOS with Hyprland, and it’s great. I’ve also used it with i3 and with GNOME + Pop Shell 2 for tiling which are both solid as well.
Now, that’s my daily driver and gaming machine. I use other OSs on other computers.
I have a computer for music production that got Fedoraized when I was a Fedora fanboy for a year. I don’t change it bc it doesn’t need to change. It just needs to run Ardour, yabridge, etc and maintain my system audio configurations that I don’t remember how to set up now. If it ever gets messed up, I’ll switch to a fork of my NixOS configuration and refigure out my audio settings and put them in a configuration.
I have a home nextcloud server as well. It also was once Fedoraized, but I gave up on that and went to Ubuntu bc that’s the only thing that should ever run a Nextcloud server. It just does not work correctly if it’s not on Ubuntu, at least that’s my experience. I’ve tried hosting on Arch, Fedora, Debian, Pop_OS! and more, but only Ubuntu works well for Nextcloud, so Ubuntu it stays.