I've come to this conclusion too. 1996 was the year of the Linux desktop. But... there's more to the story. In 1996 Linux was a clone of Unix, because there were still Unixes out there (HP-UX, SCO, etc.) that were charging $xx,000/seat. Everything good about Linux was taken from Unix. This put Unix vendors out of business, which is unfortunate because after that, Linux had nothing left to copy from. There were no new ideas from industry. Instead, it became design-by-committee and first-come-first-serve. That's why it's taken so long for X11 to be replaced by Wayland. Many internet flame wars had to happen before Wayland was uncontroversial enough to be included.

NetCraft confirms, *BSD is still dead.

The year of the Linux Desktop was Android.

2005 if i recall correctly.

i downloaded a 200mb iso file over the course of a couple days: a [then] slackware-based distro called slax. i quickly came to understand that its packages were just tarballs overlaid on the filesystem (how simple!) and some of its GUI tools were just bash scripts calling a tool called zenity (amazing!).

i was hooked immediately. the biggest hurdle was my glorified sound card of a modem. booting into win2k to google about compiling a kernel driver, then booting into slax to try what i'd read, was a tedious but manageable task. i believe i sent away for a kubuntu cd soon after and never looked back.

1997, also the year when I got 10Mbit connection at home, which was unheard of at that time. Also, came from Amiga, skipped the msdos and windows almost completely.

A few years ago, 2019 I think was the last I had Windows installed.

2002 SuSE KDE 3