Heya, don't have first hand experience, but both of my parents lived in Yugoslawia at the time, and they told me quite a bit about it.
From both of them, they reported living in freedom, their childhood was carefree. They grew up in villages, in which nearly all the people living there had their own acre of land that they had to take care of, and the community was very close together, my father told me, that one time during his child-hood where he was sick and alone, an elderly woman from two houses away (who just happened to have a witch reputation) just walked into the unlocked house and appeared quite shocked at seeing him ill and wanted to help him (he was panicking though because of the witch-rumors, so not much happened with that), and in the end it was not even an issue with the parents.
Money problems started adding up, as far as I understand, and it just kept getting worse and worse until the collapse. Which figures, it was still communism.
Ethnic tensions, as my parents reported me, were practically non-existant. Everyone viewed eachother as Yugoslav, and while they recognized their origin from croatia or serbia, it never became an issue. In their schools, they must have been heavily indoctrinated, similiar to how western schools act today, with incessant horror storys about the nationalist ustase, and how fascism and racism is evil. The rebels against them and the german army, called "partisans" were cherished as heroes of freedom and liberation, and countless movies were made in which their deeds were glorified. And they did not hold back in the slightest, my grandfather was quite enraged at the mere sight of one of these drivell filled movies, while the youth, including my father, was totally consumed by it.
Partisans are heroes, that's just how things are.
While not known for great economic advances, or anything like that, yugoslavia was very dominant in sports. It was one of the things that really bonded together all the ethnicities, and they were quite successful, the basketball team in particular was standing up to americas dreamteam composition full of to this day legendary players like I believe michael jordan and so on. Sports was quite a thing, and the state actually did invest quite a bit to build and maintain all sorts of sports-arenas and halls in which people could freely enter and train as they desired. Quite noble, considering this was a commie state, but then again, they still suckerpunched them via economics, so don't get fooled.
My parents eventually settled into (undisclosed location) in europe, where the new income completely changed their life. From being bitter-poor, they suddenly became quite … not "wealthy" but they prospered. For all it's great benefits the yugoslav state had, in the end it drove it's own people out by economical starvation.