Linux

Nope, but gaming was essentially non-existing. We had almost no native title, and wine while great was very hit or miss. I remember having to tweak a lot for each game, from the basic whine version to the DLLs installed, etc, usually going only by what was on WineHQ, or troubleshooting yourself on guesses. Eventually PlayOnLinux was created and we had a repository of a "stable" way to run a game, but it was still bad. Eventually some Indie games started releasing for Linux, and I swore off wine except for some very specific stuff. When Steam was released for Linux, it was a great time, and some native games came our way. And then Proton happen and while lots of us were a bit uncertain about it, it turned out to be great, and thanks to that we're now in a state where the majority of games just work.

But back to your question, the general Linux experience outside of gaming (and other software compatibility) was not much different than today, with the exception of Xorg configurations, which I still to this day remember I don't have to do anymore and immediately all other problems seem insignificant.