Idk if this counts but I found my home in a less popular distro, kind of.

I'd tried a few back in the early '00s. While my friends were experimenting with drugs and shit, I was experimenting with Linux distros and virtual machines lmao.

I started with Suse. I'm not too sure what made me switch or where I heard about this one from, but I eventually moved on to Mepis. It was originally rooted in Debian, then moved to Ubuntu before being discontinued.

My good friend at the time was big into Debian. I felt like pure Debian was too much for me to take on as a noob, but I wanted to be able to reach out to him for help now and again when I needed it. Switching to Mepis was pretty much a no-brainer. It was easy enough to get accustomed with. I was still mostly a Windows user, so the transition to KDE was simple. I'm old enough to remember the days of DOS so bumping around a CLI was also not that big of a deal.

The hardest parts were understanding how to install software (the concept of the repository was new to me), and the basic terminal commands. From there I was mostly good.

I remember when Mepis moved to Ubuntu, there were a lot of groans - myself included. But ironically, I've been a pretty much dedicated to Ubuntu for my linux stuff for ages. These days I'm running it with i3wm and I have no major complaints.

To be completely honest, though, I still don't really fully understand the standard file layout... I get it conceptually, but then stuff gets so fragmented - binary files in usr instead of bin, how to track where installed stuff ends up, etc.

I'll figure it out one day, when I really need to... But that time hasn't come yet. A quick find in the terminal always gets me what I need.