In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"

Did Linux distros actually offer support at some point? (By what I assume would be some project contributor ssh-ing into your machine)

My impression was always the arguments were more like "Well yes, but we have this literal building full of technical manuals that describe every bolt and screw of your tank - and we can give you a copy of all of them for free! And think about it - after you have taken some modest effort to read and learn all of them by heart, you'll be able to fix and even modify your tank all on your own! No more dependence on crooked car dealers! And if you need help, we have monthly community meetups you can attend and talk with people just as tank-crazy as you are! (please only attend if you're sufficiently tank-crazy, and PLEASE only after you read the manuals)"

(This was decades ago, the situation has gotten significantly better today)

Who would want that?

"Stay away from my house, you freak!" would be the normal reaction. Unless some serious trust is developed, I would not let people into my house while I sleep.

Also the actual usual reaction would have been more like: "hey it is open source, you can fix anything on your tank yourself"

You need a new module to connect with your other devices, just build it yourself, no big deal!

The tank people offer to send someone to look into the car (rsp. tank) but the buyer rejects them from entering their house.

That's significant, because a car is much less private than a house. In the real world, if my car had an issue, it would be perfectly reasonable to give it into the hands of a mechanic, even if I don't know them personally. (And evidently the reputation of the dealership isn't the deciding factor either, otherwise all the independent repair shops wouldn't exist)

On the other hand, I'd be much more wary to let strangers into my house without supervision, because I have far more private and valuable possessions there than in my car.

So the question is whether computers are more like cars or like houses. I'd argue, they sort of blur the line and have definitely moved closer to "house" in the last decades. But it might have been different back then.