I switched to Linux around the same time as you. Before that I was a Windows user from 1997 until ~2008. In the late 1990s and early 2000s people just accepted that Windows crashing everyday was a normal feature of that software, and they blamed every crash on user error, eg: "your drivers are bad", "you're running buggy software", etc. My Windows 98 install couldn't run for more than ~4 hours without crashing, it was infuriating. Windows 2000 did better, but it would still crash once every couple of days.

Linux was a million times more stable and much more pleasant to use as a programmer (no SDKs to download with complex installation instructions). It also had a package manager which made installs/reinstalls a breeze. You could actually write a bash script to redo your setup automatically, wow! Never looked back.

I recently installed Windows 8 on an older computer I was setting up for my mom (she didn't want Linux, understandably). It was my first time using Windows in two years or so. Windows Update was broken out of the box. It wouldn't run. You had to manually download a patch to get it to work. I don't really understand why desktop Linux gets so much hate when commercial software is this bad.