Yes, you had to edit your XF86Config to make your graphics work right, maybe even write your own modeline and be nervous that you screwed up your timings and blew up your CRT permanently. Maybe you had to recompile the kernel to set the proper settings for your Soundblaster. Less fragmentation? Desktop consistency? FORGET IT. A million window managers to choose from. Whichever you go with, your apps will be in a mixture of Motif, Tk, GTK, Qt and/or plain Athena widgets and there are no theme engines that will save you. Just deal with it or write your own.

For those without memory of how it was, search up some screenshots of RedHat 5.2 and its stock FVWM95 window manager. That was the easy to use, business-oriented distro of the day. That was considered acceptable look and feel to ship to an end user.

But all this? Fun. FWIW I still think a kid could have fun tinkering with modern Linux, it's probably just that they would tinker with different things. (Because contrary to popular belief, video and audio almost always "just work" these days)

Rose tinted glasses. Each distro had its own scripts and layout.

SysV sucked.

It was XFree86 -- with separate server binary for each chipset. Then came XFree86 4.0 with a new, hot thing: modularity. You could load drivers as modules, but that presented an entirely new way to make things more complicated. XFree86 became an OS in itself, including dynamic linker, PCI handling, vm86 emulator...

With Wayland, things are much simpler.

> , sysv init (no systemd)

There was bsdinit at the time. Sysvinit was considered bloated by the same types, who cannot consider systemd today.

> you had sane/not insanely bloated desktops like KDE2 or XFCE.

There were other topics, like switching from libc5 to glibc2. Again, unicode, localization, nss services, so much "unnecessary bloat".

Yes, you could map ISO... to ASCII to avoid 'cosas horribles de ver cæmo ⌷stas'. Most words can be read fine without the stress mark in Spanish, except for some verb conjugations where they look odd without them. But, reading n instead of 'ñ' gets tiring after a while.

Thank Plan9's gods for UTF-8.

On the rest, a separate comment it's better.

Also:

I use Hyperbola GNU/Linux. UTF-8. IceWM. Rox if bored, or for photo galleries with thumbnails, here a file manager makes sense. Metal2 theme with CDE icons. I liked the aesthetics from late 90's/early 2000's. I still use

    gv -smartan 

    mplayer2

XFree86 in the early days required you to at least know the refresh rate for your monitor, if not to actually write a modeline which is damn near black magic for most people. This stuff also came with a warning that theoretically you could break your monitor. When you're 12 that stuff is terrifying.

SysV was extremely flaky and system specific. Every distro out there, especially the friendly looking ones like Mandrake bolted on a top of fancy stuff on top that added a whole new layer of complication. Stuff that worked with Debian didn't work on Red Hat.

OSS and ALSA were pure hell unless you had a fancy soundcard with hardware mixing. Dmix required magical incantations to get working, and wasn't reliable because a lot of stuff back then still tried to go through /dev/dsp -- which would break audio for everything else if you had the wrong hardware.

ASCII was probably an okay thing in America, but if you were anywhere else, internationalization was a very un-fun thing to deal with. And if you by chance needed to deal with two non-English languages, that was a constant annoyance.

Bloat is kinda relative. You can still use IceWM if you want to, pretty much every distro has every desktop imaginable.

X11: it sucked. Modelines.

ALSA: DMIX worked, fine.

XFCE: XFCE with XForms and the GPL'ed with GTK was fast as hell. XFFM was delightful to use.

ASCII: Wake up from the coma, please.

America is the whole world? ASCII doesn't even have the £ sign for fucks sake, so it wasn't even adequate for Anglosphere countries, let alone two billion Chinese and Indians.