Technology

The story there is fairly simple. Basically:

1. Ubuntu - got an install disk on campus or from a friend, don't recall; my sound and wifi broke when upgrading major releases, so:
2. Fedora - it's what my university used in the CS labs, so I figured I'd try it out; release upgrades took forever (>1 hr), so:
3. Arch - coworker at my internship recommended I try it out, so I gave it a shot and loved it; stayed there for about 5 years
4. openSUSE Leap - FreeBSD didn't support Docker properly and I didn't trust Arch on a server, so I went looking; holy grail was something stable for servers and rolling for desktop, and Debian Testing (we used Debian stable at work) wasn't quite new enough and Sid scared me, so I tried out Leap on a VPS; Leap worked out well and I actually liked Yast, so I figured I'd try out Leap on my laptop; I liked it, but decided I wanted fresher packages, so:
5. Tumbleweed - I upgraded to Tumbleweed and didn't have issues for over a year (broke less than Arch), so I converted my desktop Arch install to Tumbleweed, and I've been happy for >5 years now (longest I've been on any distro, I think)

I wanted the same system on my desktop and server, and I really like rolling releases on my desktop. openSUSE was pretty much the only one that actually offered both. They were ballsy enough to officially support btrfs in production, so I figured switching my NAS over to it wouldn't be a terrible idea, especially since I only needed RAID mirror so the write hole on raid 5/6 wouldn't be an issue. The first time an update went south on my desktop (Nvidia, go figure), snapper rollback saved me a bunch of time, and that's what sold me on it. I since replaced my GPU w/ AMD and I haven't had a single issue w/ updates since, whereas on Arch I'd have 3-4 manual interventions/year unrelated to Nvidia.

And yeah, my kids haven't used my computers for anything other than Steam, YouTube, and some random web games. But they're technically on Linux and have successfully navigated both GNOME (used for a bit before KDE had proper Wayland support) and KDE, so they're more seasoned than some new Linux users.