First one I remember was a beige tower and similarly beige CRT my dad brought home from his office since he bought a new tower. It ran Windows XP, but barely. Spent a lot of time on homestarrunner.com, addicting games.com, and other flash game sites since I had no money for actual games and I already beat all the games on my Gameboy.
Hanklight D4K for $50 was my first portable enthusiast flashlight. I’m currently 4 hanklights deep and they’re loads of fun out in the country for spotting wildlife and general use with the open source Anduril 2 firmware (yes, flashlights can get firmware updates).
You’re so right about KDE, I didn’t realize just how much great stuff KDE makes until I was looking for a markdown editor this week at work, and KDE ghostwriter nails everything I ever wanted. Cross platform too so I can use it on my personal Linux machine too