I'm an old timer.

Linux 20 years ago from the days of XFree86 when you absolutely had to put your X config together by hand or only live in a console session. If you chose the wrong frequencies for your display you could actually fry it (something they warned about, but I never heard of it happening to anyone I knew). The window managers we had were different back then, although there were early versions of gnome and kde by '98-'99 or so.

id software was releasing quake ports for all kinds of unix/linux operating systems, Epic Megagames got on board and it was the first era of linux gaming. I remember back in the late '90's going to quake tournaments with a Linux box and just bellying up to the bar with a horde of windows players to join tournaments. The second era of linux gaming is upon us and its been doing great the last 5 years or so.

Back then we had Perl 5. Yesterday we got Perl 6. :)

What changed: ease of use is much improved but still needing work (you kids and your bulletproof X don't know how good you got it), and hardware support is excellent. The kernel has grown well with all kinds of fantastic features (comparing 2.0 kernel back then to 4.0 today is pretty nuts when you see the change) and the gap between linux and windows performance has generally been narrowing.

There is probably a lot of change under the hood you aren't aware of, or you are only thinking of costmetic changes. There was a time when we didn't have journaled filesystems and fsck took forever, but filesystems are much improved and vastly more numerous. Virtualization has improved a great deal and Android taking on the mobile world. Xorg is about to be replaced with Wayland.

But yeah, in terms of the command line, having a windowing server, window managers, and so forth its not radically different from what it once was. Its just more polished and having many more features.