I don’t really remember TBH, I got into Linux at a pretty young age, but that was more about hating Microsoft than privacy. Then got into VPNs because of downloading stuff, gradually drifted down the Ubuntu > Manjaro > Arch pipeline, started hanging out on privacy forums and now I’m one of those people who needs a Yubikey to decrypt a chain of LUKS-encrypted drives to boot into a laptop that has nothing of any value on it at all lol.