That's rose-tinted. I remember specifically switching to KDE because GTK apps of the day segfaulted all the time. Unfortunately KDE then screwed things up massively with Plasma (remember the universally loathed kidney bean?) and it's really only recovered recently.

And to say the desktop experience was more polished than what we have now is laughable. I remember that you couldn't have more than one application playing sound at the same time. At one point you had to manually configure Xfree86 to be aware that your mouse had a middle button. And good luck getting anything vaguely awkward like WiFi or suspend-to-ram working.

The Linux desktop is in a vastly better position now, even taking the Wayland mess into account.