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
Windows (~6 years) -> Mandriva (Mandrake? For I think 2-3 years) -> Ubuntu (1 day) -> Suse (2 days) -> Slackware (2-3 years) -> Gentoo unstable (2-3 years) -> Gentoo stable (2-3 years) -> Arch (9 years and counting)
The only span I’m sure about is the last one. When I started a job I decided I don’t have the time to compile the world anymore. But the values after Windows sum up to 21, should be 20, so it’s all more or less correct
I’ve never had gentoo before, but what I’ve heard from other people might explain that part of your journey. You went from unstable to stable to Arch, which says something.
Gentoo unstable was a little bit tiring in the long run. The bleeding edge, but often I needed to downgrade because the rest of the libraries were not ready
Gentoo stable was really great. Back then pulseaudio was quite buggy. Having a system where I could tell all applications and libraries to not even link to it (so no need to have it installed at all) made avoiding its problems really easy
But when my hardware got older and compilation of libreoffice started to take 4h, I remembered how nice it was on Slackware where you just install package you broke and you’re done
Arch looked like a nice middle-ground. Most of the things in packages, big focus on pure Linux configurability (pure /etc files, no Ubuntu(or SUSE?) “you need working X.org to open distro-specific graphics card settings”) and AUR for things there are no official packages for. Turned out it was a match :)