I think this shows the main problem with users' perception of Linux at the time. Most of the people who tried Linux expected things like that to work out of the box, and when they got the bad defaults instead they proclaimed Linux "unusable". They most likely never knew that MS Fonts package existed. I think I was using Linux for over a year before I discovered it.
I think I spent months fiddling with Linux before I got it to great looking, productive, usable OS which was in some regards even better than Windows XP at the time. For example, CD burning on Windows required 3rd party software which took over the CPU and your machine was basically unusable while it was doing that. K3B on Linux was so much better.
I used KDE in the beginning, but then I switched to IceWM, and spent days configuring it until I got it to run really fast, with USB drive icons showing up and stuff like that. And you got free stuff like CPU/hard drive/network monitors in the taskbar which Windows doesn't have to this day.