Re: rwe live in a good time of software
"and a bunch of desktops that, while not being to everyone's taste, at least break a lot less."
I'd disagree with that. My current KDE desktop has several misfeatures over the previous version and a couple of failure modes which make it considerably less robust. That previous version had one dropped feature relative to its predecessor which makes for less convenient operation. From 3.x to 5.x it's gone downhill quite badly.
OTOH I agree that early Linux distros weren't that good. It was a long while before I switched from SCO to Linux. I reckon that if SCO had made a bit of an attempt to make a better price/quality offering Linux would never have got off the ground. That, of course, is before it switched tactics to litigation once it had missed the boat.