Only until very recently LibreOffice is almost on par with Microsoft Office. 10 years ago OpenOffice was horrible, I tried my best to use it but unless you were using it only to write letters to your city hall, it was unusable.
They probably mean that young people now is drinking less that previous generations. Sure, we have known for a while that alcohol is bad, but only recently it has been seen as "why would you drink it?", And it's falling out as social engager.
Saying that, I still drink, I know it's not great for my health, but I usually have a good time with it, and it helps with my introvert Ness.
But that's the thing, it's not dumb it down, it's better design for average user. Linux is not going get to mass adoption if fresh from install you have to run several commands to make your audio/game/camera work. Sure, it might be fixable with a single command, but your average user won't know which, and won't know how to search for it on Google.
Linux based OS like android got mass adopted because you don't even need to open a shell once and your whole hardware works out of the shelf. That's not the experience with Linux.
Mine was also mandrake in the early 2000's. There was no Ubuntu back then, and Mandrake was the "home desktop" for Linux, specially if you didn't need servers running. I think it worked fine, not sure why it got so much hate.
Only until very recently LibreOffice is almost on par with Microsoft Office. 10 years ago OpenOffice was horrible, I tried my best to use it but unless you were using it only to write letters to your city hall, it was unusable.