+1 to this. Back in the mid-late 2000s, I used to have a modded compiz theme which was heavily inspired by the Matrix, and looked absolutely spectacular. It included things like windows beind "hidden" unless you used a key-combo to "see the matrix", a bunch of animation effects, some sound effects from the movie etc.

I can bet that more folks in school wanted to try out linux (This was around the time when Canonical was sending out free installation CDs to whoever wanted to try out Ubuntu) because they thought it was "cool" rather than because of any of the other philosophical or technical arguments for Linux.