At the time, I installed slackware with a lot of floppies.
Now, after trying quite a few, I settled on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. It has one of the best KDE desktops, and basically just works, whatever you do with it. It’s comfortable and boring which I see as great qualities.
Actual Unix users care. Maybe people that just jumped ship from Microsoft don’t, but I think that’s just because they don’t know what’s possible and how convenient it is.
I used to keep a windows drive to run steam. But it honestly sees very little use nowadays.
Mostly I boot it every few months to see what shenanigans Microsoft has pulled with windows. Other than that, it’s just sitting there. Everything I play runs in Linux.
Unix was meant to be much friendlier than the mainframe systems that wer prevalent at the time and which wer horrible to use without a lot of training (or even with it). By contrast, Unix commands were simple, self documenting. Anyone could use it.
I think that the point is to get a much bigger radiator by moving it to a less cramped location. The point is to make the process more efficient, not to change its nature.