Over the years I've gone through a variety of personal computers. The first one was a plug-in cartridge-based Dick Smith Wizzard gaming console, in the 1980s, that had a hideous membrane keyboard, an optional (still hideous) rubber-button keyboard, and you could plug a BASIC cartridge into it. I remember it having a bug in it that if you did enough GOTOs, or GOSUBs and RETURNs, it would crash (*). Unusually for an (optional) audio-cassette-based storage system, it had a docked deck with a stereo head. One track was used for data, and the other piped the audio through the TV, so you could listen to something while you waited for your program to slowly load.
* A program like 10 GOSUB 30, 20 GOTO 10, 30 RETURN, would crash it. Even though the GOSUBs had returned and didn't need to be kept track of on the stack, it would crash shortly after starting to run.
Later I got a Z80-based Dick Smith VZ300. It was really aimed at hobbyists, it wasn't a particularly practical computer, and certainly not aimed at gaming. You could learn the basics of programming (it had BASIC built in, and expansion slots for memory and a printer interface, amongst other things, though I only ever bought those two options).
Like most home computers of the time you were very limited in what you could connect to them, so you couldn't do much useful with the computer beyond hand-entering data into it, and printing something. You had to mess around with building hardware to use the printer port in an unusual way to be able to interface the computer with things in the outside world. Some had serial ports, but you usually faced a similar position of having to build your own hardware to do that kind of thing. For a very long time, word processing and book-keeping were about the only really useful things a personal computer could do.
Then I went to technical college (TAFE) learning about electronics, and some computing, where we dabbled about with BASIC on a Data General mainframe a bit, but mostly did programming in machine code on a SDK-85 (a software developer kit for an 8085 CPU on a breadboard). To do that you had to figure out what your program needed to do (it's function in human words), some parameters you'd use to achieve it, then wrote mnemonics for the functions you were going to use (essentially pseudocode), look up the op-codes for those functions and type them into the developer kit. Essentially you were the compiler. These days you'd do that in an IDE on a PC, and emulate it before it programmed a microcontroller board to do the task, or compiled it into code to run on a PC.
While at TAFE I bought an old Vic20 to experiment with, but I'd say it was about as useless as the VZ300.
Next I bought an Amiga 500, then a Amiga 1200, that I used for graphics and title generation working in video production. They were superior to the Macs and PCs competing with them at the time, but Amiga grew complacent and were left behind about halfway through the era of Windows 98. Because those Amiga models are an everything in the keyboard device there's not much options for expansion. One board can be slotted into them, something can be plugged in the side, and a plethora of things hanging off the sockets on the back. It becomes an immobile rat's nest after a while, so I ended up building a wooden box to fit all the bits attached to my 1200, and extended the ribbon cable going to the keyboard. So, naturally, I called it Woody.
Still, these home computers were a computer in isolation, and it was quite a few years before the internet and home networking became available to the home user. Eventually I caved and bought an IBM compatible, running Windows 98SE. Mostly for doing things on the internet. I'd used my Amiga 1200 on the net, but it wasn't long before it wasn't up to the task of what the internet was evolving into. It was only around then that Windows was starting to get reasonably useful, but still crashy and buggy as hell. It got named Pandora, after Pandora's box (which released evil unto the world). Some years later Linux finally because a practical operating system, and Windows was cheerfully abandoned. It also showed that my hardware was quite decent, and it was just the Windows software that was as crap as hell. And it got used well past the time it ought to get replaced.
I bought a cheap (or over-priced) nasty second PC and dabbled with networking, acquired some damaged PCs from a business and cobbled together some working ones out of the lot, and experimented with them for a number of years. Eventually all those older PCs got junked, just keeping the chassis screws as the only parts that were still useful.
I'd dabbled about a bit with Windows ME, and 2000 while I was using Window 98SE, a friend's Windows XP, and had a laptop that came with Windows Vista (that was just awful), and debugged friend's Windows 10 PCs, but had always found them all to be a complete pain. I was never willing to put up with their crapness for the sake of something that I wanted to do, and when I moved to using Linux it was a major improvement. I'm not a gamer, my computing needs were a machine that does actual work. Going from a barely operating system (Windows) that's cobbled together like a house of cards to one (Linux) that was copying the philosophies of UNIX used in serious computing has suited me well, and I've used Linux ever since.
I'd tried a few different Linux distros from discs attached to magazines, but Red Hat was the first one that I got to run in a proper fashion. Then moved onto Fedora when Red Hat Linux dropped the free versions and only did the paid RHEL. I've tried Ubuntu (a Debian spin-off), but didn't care for it. And used Linux Mint on some low-spec machines, but also didn't care for it much, only really using it because those machines couldn't run anything better. I'd used CentOS on servers for many years, but have stayed with Fedora for my main use, though I don't like its short lifespan between releases. Yearly reinstalls is not my thing, having to learn new quirks and fixes is a pain, some new releases can end up being downgrades, and another headache is safely managing moving data from one install to another.
I was never one of those people continually re-installing Windows. I think mine got re-installed only twice. Once shortly after getting it to have a clean installation after I bought the PC, and another when I get a much bigger hard drive. I just didn't go around buggering it up like many Windows users did (installing crap and pirated software, and not having any clue about about using computers). I expect reliability out of my hardware and software, and a long lifespan.
Those Amigas got used for many years, well into the 2010s as title generators in video productions, even occasionally into the 2020s in sports recording. It wasn't until the death throws of standard definition television that their usefulness ended. Although they still got used for creating ident screens in sports recording. It didn't matter that they were (crudely) upscaled standard definition video, we only used those recordings for judging events. The ability to simply type something on-screen on top of live video was all we needed.