Very rose tinted glasses there. XFree86 in the early days required you to at least know the refresh rate for your monitor, if not to actually write a modeline

Very rose tinted glasses there. 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.