I was born in 1968. I definitely remember the duck and cover drills. Our school was a fallout shelter & they would rotate out the supplies every now and then. All the way up to high school. This is in the northeast.

Similar for me. I went with PopOS this time, and it all just works. I'm thinking of switching to KDE Neon, just because I'm a KDE fan. One piece of advice I have is to have your home directory on it's own so that if you do switch distros, you just install to the system drive and you don't affect your data.

In my mid 50's. I use a steam deck and my PC running Linux.