Everything got better except for icon themes and the introduction of avahi, pulseaudio and systemd. Icon themes peaked with KDE3 where they had subtle animations and the Tango project which had very recognizable colorful icons.

I still run my boxen with X.org (an upgrade from XFree86) and ALSA. The latter was already a thing in 2001.

I've helped those who just wanted to get online with Debian, SuSE and Ubuntu. In one case PCLinuxOS was best because the hardware was very old.

There's one Ubuntu LTS install at a place I visit which has been running for 7 years now. I've upgraded it twice with no fuzz.