Why circling the drain edition? Because my first exposure to trying to run linux as a daily driver was in the late '90s or early 2000s. Dell had announced some new PCs for sale using this thing I’d never heard of called Red Hat. An OS for free? Not having to spend all day tweaking and tuning the registry trying to eke another few FPS out for Counter-Strike (or so I’d hoped) on my Pentium 2 box? Worth a try.
Like many, I suspect, I’d fallen into the trap of following the Windows paradigm of installing the OS first and then using the system. What I could do with a live CD (read: testing if hardware worked, before install) wasn’t explained well, or at all. As result, I bounced off when the WiFi didn’t work, and went back to Win98/WinXP and fell into the LiteStep rabbit hole instead.
The next dip into it was, coincidentally, around about the same time Dell’s XPS laptops came out with an Ubuntu edition. So I gave that a try, and things were mostly better… 'til the embedded Amazon search results in the app menu. Not too terribly long after, classwork introduced me to OpenSUSE, CentOS (pre-absorption), Kali, and others. By that time, if not for the gaming ‘requirement’, it was perfectly serviceable as an email and docs OS for my uses. But every time I put it on ‘real’ hardware, it wasn’t ‘real’ hardware – always some e-waste laptop that couldn’t game even if you wanted it to, so why fuss with trying to set things up for gaming? But also, since it couldn’t game, it mostly sat on the shelf unused, unless I actually needed to go somewhere. But even then, compatibility with mobile devices demanded I drop Windows on the box, if I did.
The first real shot I gave Linux as a replacement for my daily driver started last summer when I built my AM5 machine - it has never seen a Windows install. Started with Pop!_OS, and that install lasted 11 months until I started hitting some very bizarre issues with USB input being dropped when using multiple monitors. The change was a new monitor, though, not like an update broke something. The bizarre part is that it stopped doing it if I shut the monitors off in the display manager, but it’d come back if I re-enabled them. 
Never did figure that out, and still not even sure what I should’ve been looking at or for to do so. 
But despite that, the massive improvement from Linux of Yore vs. ‘install distro, install steam, change 2 settings in steam, and go’ where it’s 15 minutes to get set up is hugely impressive!
So I hopped a little bit, first to Nobara (out of my apt happy place, and first exposure to modern KDE), which was nice. A lot of the fuss already handled in the initial setup (btrfs with compression enabled by default, kernel rollback option enabled by default, and so on). Also doesn’t have the USB input drop problems, which made me wonder if it’s something about the DE change. 
But it doesn’t use APT, and the only Synology packages that work on it are 3rd party repacks, so I hopped over to Tuxedo OS. Ubuntu based, still KDE, and things were … almost okay. Their updater didn’t work correctly for me, though, and the USB input drops had returned. So not the DE, but some esoterica in the configuration, somewhere. Hmm.
I’m back on Nobara at the moment, but it has had a few rough edges with updates lately that make me miss the ‘just works’ that Pop was giving me, up til I added more screens. I don’t know that the problems I’m having are bad enough to make me hop again just yet, but I am playing with NixOS on the side on an old Thinkpad. At least in that distro / package manager’s case, it is valid to learn to suffer through the setup even if the hardware isn’t all that – grabbing the config file and throwing it at another machine, to have it rebuild exactly the same is the entire point 
My first full Linux install for daily use was in 2005 after Win98SE gave me one too many BSOD’s. I’ve since build several PC’s and only one has a Win7 install on it for games that cannot run under Linux. Ancient hardware and it’s hardly used. Still, the games I do play on them run smoothly as they’re from the WinXP days, basically.
But maybe this is worth celebrating like that 
And credit where it’s due, I suppose, that I haven’t had to run into it more than once or twice.