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 compi

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.