in 1995 i bought a computer with a plan to install something other than microsoft on it. i bought a book on Linux that had a cd in an envelope glued inside the back cover. it ran off the cd, which made it painfully slow. and when you ejected the cd it went back to Windows 95.
next thing i tried was Slackware. everything is a tarball -- at least it was quicker than the cd. i blew away Win95 for Slackware. and then stumbled on Debian -- it had a package manager woo hoo!
but by about 2002 or so, i was just running whatever came with the computer, since it was evident that everyone was not going to do what desperately needed to be done, and dump mickeysoft.

so this operating system apathy persisted until some time into the 2010s, about the time systemd and codes of conduct were being forced onto every distro.
i knew civilization was crashing but the wreckage of open source software has been a shocking thing to behold.