The closest I have to those is painstakingly trying every single VESA driver on the SimCity 2000 CD until I found one that would work with whatever off-brand video card the 386 happened to have (it was an Oak driver, though I think the card just happened to be compatible with it).

> Oh yes. I absolutely hated editing that file, but when I got lucky and got it right on the first or second try, that rush was something I doubt Windows or Mac users get often. Although now that I'm a bit older, I'm glad I don't need to do that anymore.

> The closest equivalent is probably tweaking memory on DOS to get that new game to run, but I just got to see the tail end of that era.

> Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/963/

Oh the times before it was xorg. And even before that, when for a proper modular accelerated X you had to pay or use X build for your graphic card. I remember buying new graphic card just to use a new modular XFree86(no drivers for my old one).

Now everything is so easy...

Hehe. I like to think I'm not that much of an old timer, but I do remember having to download the driver for my sound card (Aureal Vortex<$something>) and compile an out-of-tree-module to get sound.

For a long, long time I was happy to even get XFree86 and later Xorg to work without 3D acceleration. By the time I started to care, helpful people from the Internet had taken care of most of the revolting details.

And when proper 3D acceleration became important (compiz was just gorgeous), vendors were reasonably happy to supply drivers for their GPUs.

In essence, though, I agree, Linux-on-the-desktop has gotten so much more easy over the past ~20 years.