Yeah, except 15 years ago it was xf86config with xinerama if you wanted multiple heads, and lcds are a walk in the park compared to CRTs - I actually killed a nice 21” monitor by screwing up the frequencies. I even recall the delightful process of having to modify graphics drivers to work with the bizarre Chips&Technologies integrated graphics I had. At that point, OSX was such a breath of fresh air.

Xorg.conf is a delightful stroll through a meadow compared to the nightmare fuel that came before, and in setting Linux (Kali,Ubuntu) on several machines of various spec over the last weeks, it has Just Worked.

FWIW, X configures itself nowadays and Wayland also just works. But I know where you are coming from. Everything audio related for example is still in very bad shape when you want more than Intel HDA.

Canonical is not of the same opinion, they just gave up on Wayland for the next LTS release.

Wayland may be ready for default in Ubuntu and Fedora, but they clearly didn't consider it ready for LTS. They have already said the next non-LTS version will still have Wayland as default.

Now try hotplugging an external display.