Oh damn, that's a great comment! I'm glad you put it up, if only in summary form.

Someone showing you their watch can be like them telling you their favourite Linux distro, it says a lot about a person

Hahaha. Yeah absolutely. And indeed, that's sort of what I was getting at with my earlier comment. I'm a runner and triathlete. I can geek out about someone's Garmin and relate to that in a way I just don't care about any other timepiece. That's what my watch says about me, and I'm very conscious of it. It doesn't feel like being a "watch person" so much as being an amateur athlete.

I don't know what the Linux equivalent would be

Ubuntu. It's 100% Ubuntu. Which, fwiw, is my Linux distro of choice. I like Linux, but I don't care about it in a meaningful way. I can count on one hand the number of hours I've spent using a non-Debian based Linux distro (Android excluded, of course). Ubuntu, or some closely-related Debian-based distro, gets the job done. It lets me have the low level easy terminal access I don't get on Windows and only kinda-sorta get on Mac, and any problem I have is exceptionally easy to Google because it's what all the tutorials and questions are geared towards.

As for not using Rolex, unfortunately for better or worse, they are the by-word for "fancy watch". It's the one brand everyone will have heard of and understand basically what it means.