chevdev
I only have one laptop, and it's running something a bit more Redmond oriented.
I am guessing that in the 80s you weren't writing Infrastructure as Code to define exactly what resources you needed for your software, having it all set up automatically, and so on.
Not only that but for a long time their default gnome configuration worked very well (back when they had the top and bottom panel thing). Debian very much threw you into it and said "Here's Gnome, have fun!" and you had to spend hours on a second computer learning how to install a browser and configure it (and go through multiple iterations of startx failing because your config was not right, because you were learning stuff).
I don't use either any more - most of my linux use is on Raspberry Pi OS, WSL, or in some container or something.