Chris Trottier i mostly agree with your final point, but the first two paragraphs are absolutely unnecessary gatekeeping.
Sit down. My first distro was Slackware on a 200Mhz Pentium MMX. And back then, window managers were the hotness, not desktop environments. Back in my day, we fiddled with Xeyes in IceWM—and we liked it.
and there are people who have used linux longer than you! with twm, fvwm and so on. This argument holds absolutely no water unless you’re Torvalds himself. It reads like you’re conflating a bunch of concepts into one, and this doesn’t work.
and I don’t think there’s any shame in saying that I’ve been using $software since $year and that’s why I’m feeling more knowledgeable about it than someone who started yesterday. 2000s ended 15 years ago, this is already a SIGNIFICANT amount of time