I live in Indonesia and have a very similar experience and situation (99.99% pirated Windows) with you. From Mandrake 8 to Fedora to Ubuntu 6. I remembered the time when I got my Ubuntu and Kubuntu CDs posted. The experience of using apt to download and update packages were a mindblowing experience at that time. That and the simplicity of Ubuntu was the main reason that I managed to persuade the management in the company where i work to migrate from win98 to ubuntu.

Good to know, it was enlightening to have the opportunity to see, think and experience different than the majority (others). I didn't realise back then it would have such an impact on me and the journey forward.

I wrote this at Linux's 30th birthday: Building a skill tree around Linux has been the best investment I've ever made for the past 18 years. I believe it is likewise for you ;-)

I got Mandrake 8 from InfoLinux magazine during their roadshows among universities in early 2000s, along with Rusmanto and Onno Purbo. Good old days.

I dug out the 3 CDs and box Mandrake Linux 8.1 came with (2 are Mandrake 8.1 and 1 for fonts + input method framework) in the attic last time I visited my parents house ;-)

For those who are interested to see how properly copyrighted Linux were sold in the 2000s in China -> [https://twitter.com/terrywang/status/1108847424498331648]

My experience on ubuntu and arch, while memory usage is almost similar, KDE startup time is significantly slower. Turning off balloo helped, but not much.

What do you mean by "startup time"? Booting into Linux? Opening a window?