Well, at one point my daily driver phone was a Nokia n900 that I think I briefly had successfully dual-booting the default Maemo 5 Linux and some version of Android, and then under Maemo I had the plain Debian user environment, which I think was a chroot rather than a VM, but I'm not sure...
But that is beside the point.
Back when I was still in high school, I think, I got hold of the disks and tried and failed to set up the custom distro that the university I planned to attend had for making your computer as similar as possible to working in a computer lab. Didn't mess with it for a while after that.
Later on in university, tried Ubuntu (Gnome 2 days, I think). Hated the UI, didn't last a week. Back to Windows 98 with Litestep.
A while later, found out about Xubuntu. Tried that, liked it. I might still have a laptop running an ancient version.
Found out most of the active regulars in the #xubuntu IRC channel actually seemed to be running Fluxbuntu. Tried that. Not a fan.
Found out most of the active regulars in the #fluxbuntu IRC channel actually seemed to be running Arch Linux. Tried that. Been running it ever since, currently on a LUKS-encrypted NVME using UEFI-boot. Seems like I've got to have been on Arch for...16 years? I even use Arch for my WSL distribution.
Thinking of trying Sculpt, Subgraph, or Qubes, though, and probably Nix at least in a VM.
Edit: I left out the why part.
I did what I did with my n900 because I could.
I didn't like Gnome because of how it looked.
I liked Xubuntu because of how XFCE looked.
I like Arch because of how much control it taught me to have.
I like Nix because of how its package management works.
I like the ideas behind Sculpt, Subgraph, and Qubes because of the compartmentalization.
I have also messed with RancherOS because I thought it was interesting.