I've said the same thing about using Linux.

20 years ago if somebody told you they used Linux it really meant something - they weren't running WSL, they weren't running a VM in EC2, they probably didn't power on and immediately have things working, and they probably learned a ton just getting to a login screen for the first time. Spinning up a VM just doesn't give the same learning experience.

You had to recompile a kernel module to support your dang modem and network card or no networking. X11 was a royal pain cuz there was no it just works desktops.

Package mgmt was a nightmare and dependency based managers like yellow dogs APT and nonexistent redhats rpm didn't exist.

More like than not you had to compile some random a55 tarball from src and hoped ./configure && make && make all would work or spend hours on USENET looking for solutions (or mailing lists!).