According to Wikipedia [1], Debian Woody came out in 2002, Sarge in 2005 and Etch in 2007.

The first Ubuntu lts was 2006.

This timeframe sounds about right to me - that's when things started to get better than windows hw support in some sense.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history