Oh, yeah. I did not see it with early Linux, and like you, thought it was a fun toy. It was specifically the 64 bit x86 thing that caught my attention. The memory ceiling for 32 bit x86 made it easy to ignore Linux. If I remember right, Linux was also still crashing pretty regularly under load just before that time frame too.
Before that time frame, PC hardware vendors had little incentive to make stable hardware. It was easy to blame crashes on Windows. If the hardware itself made a few crashes per week, that wasn't going to be enough to be noticed.
The early 64-bit PC hardware was server grade, intended for NT and Linux. That set a standard, and then gradually people moved away from junk like Windows 98SE and Windows ME. Hardware bugs no longer had such an easy time hiding in a flood of software crashes.
